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'The Great Australian Loneliness (1937) is a famous book of travel reportage by Ernestine Hill (1899–1972), a key figure in the mid-twentieth century shaping of popular media culture in Australia. Through her journalism she disseminated debate about the great public issues of her day: the status of Aboriginal peoples, immigration from Asia and the state’s role in national development. In this paper, I take the White Australian ‘loneliness’ her title invokes as a methodological challenge to situate both her life and the ethnically diverse sociability she actually described in an inter-Asian framework of analysis capable of unsettling those bonds between ethnicity and nationality that many twentieth-century writers worked so hard to secure. In the process, I argue for an ‘Australian Asian’ approach to cultural history.' (Publication abstract)
'This article describes developments in Vietnamese Australian community arts in the context of recent reforms to Community Cultural Development (CCD) funding. While a discussion of two case studies suggests these reforms have encouraged a shift towards post-welfarist and enterprising modes of project development, the article argues that conspicuously ‘cosmo-multiculturalist’ and ‘sentimental aesthetics’ cannot be explained entirely in terms of post-1980s cultural policies of the Australian Labour government. The article concludes that recent attempts to link CCD work to professional arts networks were in fact anticipated by the explicit agendas of Vietnamese Australian CCD workers themselves, although for quite different purposes.' (Publication abstract)
