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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
We loved working with you too - looking forward to seeing more of your work in our pages! 😉
September 1, 2025 at 4:30 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