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jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
Journal of Australian Studies
@jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
700 followers 400 following 73 posts
Scholarship and reviews on Australian culture, society, politics, history, and literature. Published on behalf of the International Australian Studies Association (InASA).
https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rjau20
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jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
Delyse Ryan reviews Kenny's Staging a Revolution: When Betty Rocked the Pram

tinyurl.com/yvf7t5uj

🧵5/5
A colourful book cover titled, Staging a Revolution: When Betty Rocked the Pram. In the top left corner, the image is purple, depicting a man and woman dancing together. On the top right, the image is maroon, depicting a man standing on a stage, looking out, while on a lower part of the stage, a woman is taking a knee while holding an object. On the bottom left, the image is green, with one person standing behind another person wearing a costume. On the bottom right, the image is pink, depicting two women pointing both pointer fingers forward.
September 10, 2025 at 1:24 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
Matthew Ryan reviews @hannahforsyth.bsky.social 's Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870–2008 @universitypress.cambridge.org

tinyurl.com/2pyxhch5

🧵4/5
A pale yellow book cover, titled Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870–2008. On the right hand side of the cover, a man in a suit is on the first few rungs of a ladder.
September 10, 2025 at 1:24 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
Urwin reviews Wright's Näku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions: How the People of Yirrkala Changed the Course of Australian Democracy @textpublishing.bsky.social

tinyurl.com/47f8768u

🧵3/5
Book cover titled Näku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions: How the People of Yirrkala Changed the Course of Australian Democracy. Indigenous Australian art borders the book's title.
September 10, 2025 at 1:24 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
Levidis reviews Dusinberre's Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and Its Migrant Histories @universitypress.cambridge.org

tinyurl.com/ycxhb7ur

🧵2/5
A black and white book cover, titled Mooring the Archive: A Japanese Ship and its Migrant Histories. Six men cross docks carrying their baggage.
September 10, 2025 at 1:24 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
And in the final paper of the deserts special section for 49.3, guest editor Reger explores Australian deserts as a setting for Australian science fiction.

#SciFi #deserts #OzStudies #AusLit #ecocriticism

tinyurl.com/3yb5u3pv
Screenshot of journal article. Title: Desert Depictions in Australian Science Fiction. Author: Gary Reger (Trinity College, US). Abstract: The great interior deserts of Australia provide the setting for two important genres of Australian literature: exploration narratives and science fiction (SF). Both borrow heavily from, but also revise and challenge, the tropes about deserts European settler colonists brought with them. More recent Indigenous SF, however, has pushed back against these settler-colonist tropes, and thus introduced new approaches to the rich field of Australian SF.
September 8, 2025 at 11:18 PM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
In the second article in the Australian desert special, @ruthamorgan.bsky.social examines Australia's response to the UNESCO agenda on research in "arid zones".

#deserts #CSIRO #UNESCO #science #OpenAccess #OzStudies #OzHist

tinyurl.com/m4wcn734
Screenshot of journal article. Title: Entering the Arid Zone: Australian Development Diplomacy and UNESCO, 1945–1960. Author: Ruth A. Morgan (Australian National University). Abstract: This article examines the response of Australian governments to UNESCO’s agenda of conducting scientific research in “arid zones” to explore the role of the nation in the liberal internationalism of the postwar world order. UNESCO’s first director-general, Julian Huxley, and its first head of the Natural Sciences Section, Joseph Needham, both positioned science as critical to an internationalist agenda. Australian botanist Bertram Thomas Dickson and his contemporaries shared this belief in the necessary role of science in postwar reconstruction and the betterment of humanity. However, as Dickson’s hitherto unexamined correspondence with Canberra and UNESCO shows, national interests still mattered, as did empire, to the movement of scientific ideas during the first decades after the war. The interwar rise of applied science and its contributions to rural Australia, as historical geographer J. M. Powell argues, had “won” scientists like Dickson and the CSIR official support, which sustained their importance to postwar reconstruction and development efforts. Australia’s contribution to the UNESCO initiative therefore followed Canberra’s assessment of the strategic value of the organisation to its regional ambitions and development diplomacy.
September 7, 2025 at 11:34 PM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
In 49.3's desert special section, Morton explores the various meanings that have been inscribed across the desert by settler Australians, then changed by a new appreciation of Aboriginal art.

#OzStudies #OpenAccess #desert #Australia #AboriginalArt

tinyurl.com/388x8xcn
Screenshot of journal article. Title: The Symbolic Australian Desert. Author: Steve Morton. Abstract: Arid Australia is lightly peopled, and so in past eras its representation in art and literature has often been based on fleeting visits. The paucity of personally lived experience has encouraged commentators to use it as a blank canvas for a contradictory range of imputed meanings, from emptiness to plenitude. The country is occasionally benign yet is mostly hot and dry: the resulting attitude of deficit is exemplified by Sidney Nolan’s “Desert and Drought” paintings of the 1950s. Yet a subsequent explosion of Aboriginal art, and of written accounts revealing the appetite of Aboriginal people for connection with Country, has helped swing the pendulum towards mystique, and settler Australians have begun to interpret the deserts sympathetically. Even so, settler Australians struggle to see this tough country as habitable. Western ideals have run up against a landscape unusually inimical to industrial and agricultural purposes, such that now the inland may best be interpreted as a symbol of the limits to human endeavour.
September 4, 2025 at 11:40 PM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
Introducing the special section in 49.3 on "Humanities in the Australian Desert" guest edited by Andrea Gaynor and Gary Reger.

#OzDeserts #deserts #OzStudies #OpenAccess #humanities

tinyurl.com/8t52xxz9
Screenshot of journal article. Title: The Humanities in the Australian Desert: An Introduction to a Special Section of the Journal of Australian Studies. Authors: Andrea Gaynor (University of Western Australia) and Gary Reger (Trinity College, USA)
September 4, 2025 at 4:44 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
In the last of our general articles in 49.3, MacNeill et al draw upon a survey of 702 artists and arts workers to explore the impact of gender on their economic status as artists.

#OzArts #OzStudies #VisualArts #GenderGap #OpenAccess #CreativeIndustries

tinyurl.com/23c7sp37
Screenshot of journal article. Title: The Impact of Gender on Incomes in the Visual Arts in Australia. Authors: Kate MacNeill, Jenny Lye, Edwina Bartlem (University of Melbourne), Grace McQuilten, Chloe Powell, Marnie Badham (RMIT). Abstract: The gendered discrepancy in income across the visual and craft arts is widely recognised. Female artists on average receive less for their sales of art than do male artists, and at auction in the resale market, work by female artists on average sells for less than that of male artists. These outcomes are compounded by lower earnings from waged employment in the visual arts and craft sector. This article draws on the results from a 2022 survey of the incomes and working conditions of 702 visual and craft artists and arts workers in Australia to explore how gender impacts the economic status of artists. The authors analyse the survey findings in conjunction with art-market outcomes for visual artists in Australia to assess the key moments in artists’ careers where their career progression is impacted by gender and how policymakers might respond to these challenges.
September 2, 2025 at 11:00 PM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
49.3 cont'd...

Beattie examines the popularity and scepticism surrounding quacks visiting New England in the late 19th century revealing a familiar tension between profit and information in the media.

#OpenAccess #quackery #OzHist #OzStudies

tinyurl.com/yda83dhp
Screenshot of journal article. Title: The Golden Chariot: Quacks, Quackery and New England Newspapers, 1889–1893. Author: Belinda Beattie, University of New England. Abstract: Quack advertising was widespread in pre-Federation newspapers including those in rural New England (northern New South Wales). Between 1891 and 1892, Madame and Dr Paul Duflot and their Golden Chariot visited the New England area and attracted large crowds. At the same time, the practice of medical science was striving to establish its credibility and set itself apart from alternative health providers. They did this by pejoratively labelling alternative medicine providers as “quacks”. This article contributes to the New England media-history and news-framing literature on quack reporting. It draws on the framing theories of Robert Entman and Paul D’Angelo, alongside Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of the “stranger” and “strangerhood”. The analysis reveals a striking hypocrisy among local newspapers: while they prominently advertised the quacks and their cures—including the Duflots’ public appearances and private consultations—they simultaneously ran anti-quack news stories. Notably, the popularity of the Duflots suggests that New Englanders were not entirely won over by medical science. Instead, they prioritised personal autonomy, human agency and control over their healthcare decisions.
September 1, 2025 at 11:36 PM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
Number 3 in 49.3 - in a time of international student debates, Song and Spencer take us back to the first Korean international student in the 1920s, illustrating the importance of student mobility for people-to-people #diplomacy.

#InternationalStudents #Korea #OpenAccess

tinyurl.com/3je6ty9v
Screenshot of journal article. Title: From Colonial Korea to White Australia: Hoyul Kim, Australia’sFirst Korean International Student, 1921–1925. Authors: Jay Song, ANU, and Louise Spencer, University of Melbourne. Abstract: This article uncovers the life of Hoyul Kim, the first Korean international student who lived in Australia from 1921 to 1925. It sheds light on the role of the Presbyterian Church in both colonial Korean and White Australian contexts. The article draws on archival research from the National Archives of Australia, the Presbyterian Church of Victoria, the Scotch College in Melbourne and the University of Melbourne to document Kim’s activities in Australia. The bilingual team uses both Korean- and English-language materials on Kim. We argue that, in spite of the colonial and racially motivated state barriers to international student mobility in the 1920s, Kim managed to travel to Australia and gain an overseas education. Kim’s story contributes to a little-known history of Korea–Australia relations that runs much deeper than formal state relations. Kim’s story illustrates that bilateral relations are shaped by people-to-people encounters that encompass shared values of religion and education via transnational migration.
September 1, 2025 at 4:30 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
Next up in 49.3, O'Brien examines patterns of environmental protest in Sydney over a decade, finding key differences in inner and outer urban/metro areas.

#environment #protest #GlobalCity #urban #Sydney #ProtestEventAnalysis #OzStudies

tinyurl.com/7537amzs
Screenshot of journal article. Title: A Study of Patterns of Environmental Protest in Sydney, Australia. Author: Thomas O'Brien, University of York. Abstract: As a global city and commercial capital of Australia, Sydney occupies an important place in the national imagination. Attention is naturally drawn to the city, making it a valuable target for those seeking to present claims and challenge those in power. This article draws on a unique protest-event catalogue to examine patterns of environmental activism in Sydney over the 1997–2018 period. The article draws out the key issues, actors and actions, and shows how these have changed over time across the Sydney metropolitan region. The findings suggest that the affordances of the urban environment play an important role in shaping the patterns of protest. A central division is between actions in the City of Sydney and those in surrounding local government areas. The greater availability of targets in the City of Sydney facilitates larger-scale actions, whereas those in the wider metropolitan region are more closely tied to sites impacted by perceived threats.
August 29, 2025 at 12:28 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
Let the 49.3 games begin!

First up, @kristindemetrious.bsky.social and Lowe examines the historical influence of US public relations on Australian practice and its ongoing legacies in Australian political communication.

#AusUSrelations #OpenAccess #auspol #PublicRelations

tinyurl.com/3tjps2b2
Screenshot of journal article. Title: “What Australia Thinks”: Richard Casey, Earl Newsom and Australia’s Early Embrace of US Public Relations. Authors: Kristin Demetrious, Deakin University, and David Lowe, Deakin University. Abstract: In 1940, wartime Prime Minister Robert Menzies established Australia’s first foreign legation to Washington DC, appointing his political rival, Richard Gardiner Casey, a move that marked a turning point in the importation of US public relations. This article examines formative exchanges between Casey, one of the Liberal Party’s most senior and capable members, and US public relations figure Earl Newsom, who authored a confidential report for Casey into overcoming American uninterest in, and ignorance of, Australia. Drawing on the Earl Newsom papers, we argue that Casey’s alliance with Newsom increased the visibility of Australian news in the United States; activated a bevy of cultural and travel relationships; and was conducted in a way to avoid the unpalatable taint of propaganda. Casey’s mission was contextualised by a political battle between US media industry players and democratic reformists and had ongoing implications for Australian political communication, separate from the histories of advertising, magazine and film connections. This interdisciplinary case study sheds new light on the cultural, social, economic and political flows stemming from Australia’s embrace of United States public relations at a moment when other roads might have been taken.
August 28, 2025 at 4:28 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
🚨New issue 49.3 out now!🚨
Featuring: a special section on Australian deserts guest edited by Andrea Gaynor and Gary Reger as well as articles on Aus-US public relations, environmental protest, and gender in Australian visual arts.
Stay tuned for feature posts!
www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjau20/c...
Teal book cover with title Journal of Australian Studies. Features an image of a red desert scene with scattered low green bushes and a blue sky with a trail of white clouds.
August 27, 2025 at 1:36 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
Postgraduate highly commended: Rebecca Houlihan, “ʻComplete Strangers Can Get through Your Front Door’: The Carly Ryan Murder, Teen Girls and the Internet in 2000s Australia”, Journal of Australian Studies, 48:4 (2024), 466-81.

@rebihoulihan.bsky.social

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Screenshot of journal article. Title: “Complete Strangers Can Get through Your Front Door”: The Carly Ryan Murder, Teen Girls and the Internet in 2000s Australia. Author: Rebecca Houlihan. Abstract: On 21 February 2007, 15-year-old Carly Ryan’s body was found in the waters at Port Elliot in South Australia. A highly public investigation and trial followed, during which it was revealed that 48-year-old Melburnian man Garry Francis Newman had used a false online identity to seduce and lure Ryan to her death. In its coverage, the Australian media scrutinised Ryan’s online profiles and dramatised the dangers that cyberspace posed to young women. Examining these reports reveals wider anxieties over the internet blurring the boundary between public and private—a boundary historically assumed to keep young women safe. Journalists presented the online world as being both entirely public and inappropriately hidden from adult view. Cyberspace was framed as a place where young women could “act out” (self-sexualise) outside parents’ control and invite the “wrong” kind of attention. In this article, I contextualise this coverage within historic fears about stranger danger. I demonstrate how journalists drew from the contemporary debate in Australia surrounding the sexualisation of children in media—and its gendered nature. Further, I argue that the Australian media framed the internet as disrupting the idea of the family home as a safe haven and upsetting traditional parent–child relationships.
July 22, 2025 at 1:02 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
Postgraduate category winner: Lurong Liu, “ʻFeelings are strong here’: A Proximate Reading of Solastalgia in The Last Pulse”, JAS, 48:1 (2024), 121-34.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Screenshot of journal article. Title: “Feelings are strong here”: A Proximate Reading of Solastalgia in The Last Pulse. Author: Lurong Liu. Abstract: In Anson Cameron’s The Last Pulse, the monkeywrenching protagonist blasts a dam in Queensland, rides on the resulting flood southwards and spreads his solastalgia around, an affect Glenn Albrecht defines as homesickness at home induced by local ecological loss. From water disputes overseas to those between the eastern Australian states, from the character’s drought-stricken home town in South Australia to the Murray–Darling Basin, the novel allows readers to experience solastalgia as a multiscalar affect capable of mobilising environmental activism, as well as mooring in and playing with the “arts of flow” informed by Indigenous water ethics. The scale and distance-conscious method of “proximate reading” can be applied to read the dynamic of the affect in such an expanded and sentient water ecology; in this way, it can provide crucial insights into how readers’ environmental feelings and thinking are constantly reconfigured alongside shifting borders within and beyond the watershed in the novel.
July 22, 2025 at 1:02 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
Open category, highly commended: Melissa Bellanta and Lorinda Cramer, “A ‘Bacchanalian Mardi Gras’: The Melbourne Cup and the Popular Culture of Satirical Dress in 1970s Australia”, JAS, 48:3 (2024), 314-34.

‪@melissabellanta.bsky.social‬

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Screenshot of journal article. Title: A “Bacchanalian Mardi Gras”: The Melbourne Cup and the Popular Culture of Satirical Dress in 1970s Australia. Authors: Melissa Bellanta and Lorinda Cramer. Abstract: In the 1970s, a shift took place in the dress practices of attendees at the Melbourne Cup, marking out the period from the conservative formality of the decade before. Evident in the public areas of Flemington Racecourse, this new trend saw boisterous young racegoers dress in satiric, comedic or raunchy attire. Commenting on this trend in the late seventies, the journalist Keith Dunstan decided that unruly young people engaging in these madcap dress practices had turned the Cup into a “Bacchanalian Mardi Gras”. In this article, we use Dunstan’s commentary and an extensive archive of images taken at Flemington by the photographer Rennie Ellis to argue that the culture of mocking and ludicrous dress emerging at the Cup in the 1970s was a form of carnivalesque disorder that appealed not only to boorish, beer-swilling ocker men, but also young female revellers determined to contest convention and members of countercultures who creatively pushed sartorial boundaries. We also argue that the best way to understand the rise of carnivalesque dress at the Cup is to see it as part of a wider suite of practices that had the cumulative effect of changing approaches to sexual, gender and social decorum across the seventies.
July 22, 2025 at 1:02 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
Open category winner: Aaron Humphrey and Simon Walsh, “Lost Precursor to Autobiographical Comics, Kangarooland (ca. 1918–1919), Illuminates Transnational Creativity in Australia’s WWI Internment Camps,” JAS, 48:2 (2024), 209-29.

@aaronhumphrey.bsky.social

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Screenshot of journal article. Title: Lost Precursor to Autobiographical Comics, Kangarooland (ca. 1918–1919), Illuminates Transnational Creativity in Australia’s WWI Internment Camps. Authors: Aaron Humphrey and Simon Walsh. Abstract: Autobiographical graphic novels have become crucial texts for understanding displacement and transnational identities. This article discusses a long-lost early example of the genre, The Voyage and Adventures of a Well-Behaved German in Kangarooland (Reise-Abenteuer eines Braven Deutschen im Lande der Kangaroo), a series of proto-comic books created circa 1918–1919 by the cartoonist C. Friedrich. A German immigrant to Australia imprisoned in an Australian internment camp during World War I, Friedrich used his self-published comics to document the routines, passions and frustrations of camp life. Drawing on recent scholarship on “POW creativity” as a conceptual lens, we argue that the transnational displacement at the heart of Friedrich’s work affirms Kangarooland as a pioneering work that provides a conceptual link with later autobiographical graphic novels and which should lead scholars to question claims that autobiographical comics are an American-born genre. Its origins in displacement and transnationalism, themes that animate so many of the most renowned graphic novels of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, suggest the genre instead developed out of the ability of comics to depict transnationalism and the precarity of displacement.
July 22, 2025 at 1:02 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
And finally, Pierse reviews Tuley's Nolan's Africa.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

5/5
Book cover of Nolan's Africa by Andrew Turley. Cover features a surreal image that looks like a mountainous landscape while also appearing to be a man crying out and holding out a hand as he falls.
June 24, 2025 at 5:03 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
@drbenjaminjones.bsky.social reviews Williams & Hume's People Power: How Australian Referendums are Lost and Won

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

4/
Book cover of People Power by Williams and Hume. A speckled tan background with the title and a checkbox with a question mark in it.
June 24, 2025 at 5:03 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
@hannahforsyth.bsky.social reviews Davidson's Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

3/
Book cover of Blood & Dirt by Jared Davidson. Cover depicts the torso of a man holding his hands against his chest. Image is in blue and sepia tones.
June 24, 2025 at 5:03 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
Dowsett reviews Mathews' Race Mathews: A Life in Politics

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

2/
Book cover of Race Mathews: A Life in Politics by Iola Mathews. A black and white image of Race Mathews (a middle aged man with grey hair, glasses, and a suit) smiling at the camera.
June 24, 2025 at 5:03 AM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
In our last article from 49.2, Ricketson examines Rupert Murdoch as an elite paradox - he is hostile to "the Establishment" and elites yet he is one of them...

#OzStudies #Murdoch #elites #OpenAccess

tinyurl.com/26ahd9vv
Screenshot of journal article. Title: "Rupert Murdoch: Elite Outsider". Author: Matthew Ricketson, Deakin University. Abstract: Rupert Murdoch stepped down from heading his company News Corporation in 2023 after a 71-year career as a media proprietor that has been as controversial as it has been financially successful. The life and career of Rupert Murdoch has been examined through many different lenses yielding insights into his ceaseless media deal making and his influence on politics and on other media, among other topics. This study draws on the eight biographies of Murdoch and the 34 books about his company’s activities to examine three questions: why is Murdoch so hostile to the Establishment and “elites”, however variously they are defined by him when he has been a member of both his entire life? How does his antipathy show up in his media outlets, especially in his populist rhetoric where simple “us and them” binaries are posited for complex issues, and do the biographical sources about him help explain his apparently contradictory behaviour?
June 18, 2025 at 11:06 PM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
More excellent 49.2 content:
@phoebehayman.bsky.social examines political participation in teal independents' campaigns - are they outsiders challenging established power, or are they replicating elite dynamics?

#OzStudies #auspol #WomenInPolitics #teals

tinyurl.com/4aacnp7a
Screenshot of journal article. Title: Political Outsiders? A Study of “Teal” Independent Campaign Demographics in the 2022 Australian Federal Election. Author: Phoebe Hayman, La Trobe University. Abstract: The 2022 “teal” independents’ campaigns were a movement of political outsiders challenging the power of the established parties. Their campaigns mobilised candidates, campaigners and volunteers in the thousands across Australia, but little is known of who these participants were. Analysing the gender, class and ethnicity of campaign participants, this article considers whether the independent campaigns should be understood as a departure from or replication of the elite demographics of political parties. This study employs mixed methodologies, drawing on interview data from candidates, campaigners and volunteers (N = 55) and a survey of highly engaged volunteers (N = 270) to explore who joined independent campaigns and how recruitment processes influenced the gender, class and ethnicity of participants. This article argues that, despite efforts to attract participants from diverse backgrounds, the independent campaigns largely mirrored the demographics of political participants within party campaigns—except for their achievements in recruiting women across participant types. Recruitment via the social networks of existing participants was a contributing factor, reinforcing demographic disparities. This study contributes new knowledge of the teal independents movement and highlights the role of informal and social processes in shaping the gender, class and ethnicity of political participants and representatives, inside and outside of party campaigns.
June 17, 2025 at 11:46 PM
jas-jozstudies.bsky.social
Next in 49.2, guest co-editor @chriswallace.bsky.social explores the role John Hewson played in constructing consent for neoliberalism - 🔥"a cautionary tale concerning upward mobility in the neoliberal era"🔥

#OzStudies #neoliberalism #elites #auspol #OpenAccess

tinyurl.com/mw6j7fjs
Screenshot of journal article. Title: "Elite Economists and the Neoliberal Ascendancy in Australia: The Case of Dr John Hewson". Author: Chris Wallace, University of Canberra. Abstract: Worsening inequality worldwide has stimulated a renewal of scholarly work on the dynamics of elite recruitment, notably Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman’s large-scale UK study (2024), which found only modest change in the make-up of Britain’s elite between the 1890s and today. Cumulative advantage is shown to accrue to those who pass through more than one of Britain’s “precise channels of elite recruitment”. Reeves and Friedman’s underlying motivation is to identify how these channels “might be remade so the elites we get are the ones we need”—implicitly, elites interested in reversing current trends in inequality. Australia presents an opportunity to consider their findings in a situation where, compared with Britain, elite recruitment is more nebulous. Drawing on the life and transnational career of Australian economist John Hewson, this article responds to Reeves and Friedman’s invocation to evaluate “how elites think, and what elites do, rather than simply who they are”. The dynamics of Hewson’s elite recruitment and its relationship to his role in constructing consent for neoliberalism in Australia in the late 20th century—in the academy, the media and politics—is contextualised in the national and global history of neoliberalism.
June 16, 2025 at 11:25 PM