Australian Humanities Review
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AUSTRALIAN HUMANITIES REVIEW issue 45 2008 Edited by Monique Rooney and Russell Smith Australian Humanities Review Editors: Monique Rooney, The Australian National University Russell Smith, The Australian National University Consulting Editors: Lucy Frost, University of Tasmania Elizabeth McMahon, University of New South Wales Cassandra Pybus, University of Tasmania Editorial Advisors: Stuart Cunningham, Queensland University of Technology Guy Davidson, University of Wollongong Ken Gelder, University of Melbourne Andrew Hassam, Monash University Marilyn Lake, La Trobe University Sue Martin, La Trobe University Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, University of Sydney Libby Robin, The Australian National University Deborah Rose, The Australian National University Susan Sheridan, Flinders University Rosalind Smith, University of Newcastle Terry Threadgold, Cardiff University, Wales McKenzie Wark, Eugene Lang College, New York Terri-Ann White, University of Western Australia Adi Wimmer, University of Klagenfurt, Austria Australian Humanities Review is published by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, with the support of the School of Humanities at The Australian National University. Mailing address: Editors, Australian Humanities Review, School of Humanities, AD Hope Building #14, The Australian National University, ACT 0200, Australia. Email: [email protected] Website: www.australianhumanitiesreview.org Published by ANU E Press Email: [email protected] Website: http://epress.anu.edu.au © The Australian National University. This Publication is protected by copyright and may be used as permitted by the Copyright Act 1968 provided appropriate acknowledgment of the source is published. The illustrations and certain identified inclusions in the text are held under separate copyrights and may not be reproduced in any form without the permission of the respective copyright holders. Copyright in the individual contributions contained in this publication rests with the author of each contribution. Any requests for permission to copy this material should be directed to the publishers. The text has been supplied by the authors as attributed. The views expressed are not necessarily those of the publisher. Printed in Australia AHR Issue 45 (2008) ISSN 1835-8063 (PRINT), ISSN 1325-8338 (ONLINE) Table of Contents Editors’ Introduction 1 Monique Rooney and Russell Smith Essays From RAE to ERA: research evaluation at work in the corporate university 7 Guy Redden Special Section: Rural Cultural Studies Introduction 27 David Carter, Kate Darian-Smith and Andrew Gorman-Murray Scaling the Rural: Reflections on Rural Cultural Studies 37 Andrew Gorman-Murray, Kate Darian-Smith and Chris Gibson Country Week: Bringing the City to the Country? 53 Phil McManus and John Connell Drought, Endurance and ‘The Way Things Were’: The Lived Experience 67 of Climate and Climate Change in the Mallee Deb Anderson Rural Cultural Research: Notes from a Small Country Town 83 Kate Bowles Special Section: Marketing Asian-Australianness Introduction 97 Olivia Khoo ‘No One Puts Baby in a Corner’: Inserting My Self into the Text 101 Tom Cho Not Just Another Migrant Story 109 Simone Lazaroo ‘Voice-Niche-Brand’: Marketing Asian-Australianness 119 Merlinda Bobis Book Reviews Aidan Davison reviews Patriots: Defending Australia’s Natural Heritage 129 by William Lines Caroline Hamilton reviews This Crazy Thing a Life: Australian Jewish 133 Autobiography by Richard Freadman iii Australian Humanities Review - Issue 45 Melissa Harper reviews Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity 137 by Catriona Elder Fiona Jenkins reviews Judith Butler: Live Theory by Vicki Kirby 141 The Ecological Humanities Introduction 151 Deborah Rose Connectivity 153 Jessica Weir Talking with Ghosts: A Meeting with Old Man Crocodile on Cape 165 York Peninsula Jinki Trevillian Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal 181 Worldviews Mary Graham iv Editors’ Introduction Monique Rooney and Russell Smith Welcome to the new-look Australian Humanities Review now co-published with ANU E Press in PDF and Print-on-Demand formats: please visit the ANU E Press website if you wish to order an attractive bound copy of AHR at the unbeatable price of $14.95. Also, with the move to the new web address, the online version of AHR is now published under the auspices of ASAL, the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and we wish here to thank the ASAL Board for their support. AHR Issue 45 leads with Guy Redden's essay `From RAE to ERA: research evaluation at work in the corporate university' which takes a comparative look at performance-based assessment of research in Australian and British universities. We are keen to publish short responses (500-1000 words) to this or other essays in the `emuse' section of AHR. Please email your response to [email protected]. This issue also includes two themed sections, the first on the theme of `Rural Cultural Studies'. David Carter, Kate Darian-Smith and Andrew Gorman-Murray's Introduction contextualises these four essays in terms of the `cultural turn' in rural studies and the `rural turn' in cultural studies. Andrew Gorman-Murray, Kate Darian-Smith and Chris Gibson's `Scaling the Rural: Reflections on Rural Cultural Studies' discusses the use of ideas of scale in developing a cultural studies approach to rural studies; Kate Bowles's `Rural Cultural Research: Notes from a Small Country Town' engages with the pitfalls and rewards of conducting research in small-town NSW; in `Country Week: Bringing the City to the Country?', Phil McManus and John Connell identify some of the factors stimulating new migration flows from the city to rural areas; and in `Drought, Endurance and ªThe Way Things Wereº: The Lived Experience of Climate and Climate Change in the Mallee', Deb Anderson draws on oral history to look at changing attitudes to drought and climate change in rural Australia. Olivia Khoo introduces our second themed section on `Marketing Asian-Australianness'. This section includes three individual reflections on the experience of writing and publishing Asian-Australian literature: Tom Cho's `ªNo One Puts Baby In A Cornerº: Inserting My Self Into The Text', Simone Lazaroo's `Not Just Another Migrant Story' and Merlinda Bobis's `ªVoice-Niche-Brandº: Marketing Asian-Australianness'. 1 Australian Humanities Review - Issue 45 In our book reviews section, Aidan Davison assesses the polemical environmentalism of William Lines' Patriots, Caroline Hamilton reflects on Richard Freadman's This Crazy Thing A Life: Australian Jewish Autobiography, Melissa Harper reviews Catriona Elder's Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity, while Fiona Jenkins presents a detailed assessment of Vicky Kirby's book on Judith Butler in Continuum's Live Theory series. From this year on AHR will appear twice-yearly, in May and November. We are always keen to receive proposals for papers, initially in the form of a 250-word abstract, and we also welcome readers' responses to any of our published articles: please email the editors at [email protected]. 2 ESSAYS From RAE to ERA: research evaluation at work in the corporate university Guy Redden Recently, while reading Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader, I was struck by just how long neoliberalism has been considered a defining feature of our times. Frow and Morris open their introduction with a meditation on a few words uttered by Rupert Murdoch in 1990. In response to a journalist's question about how to `save the Australian economy', Murdoch replied, `Oh, you know, change the culture' (vii). Frow and Morris take this sentiment to be indicative of a neo-liberal rhetoric `now broadly shared' among the governing classes, one that seeks to modify behaviour across social fields so as to realise the imperative that `fewer workers must produce more for less' (viii). This paper concerns one manifestation of neoliberal reformism: the pseudomarketization of state-managed higher education through technologies of performance evaluation: those used to measure and fund research quality. In particular, the focus is the publication-related components of such schemes. With regard to the British and Australian sectors, it appears we have arrived at a point where existing research quality mechanisms are under review, with new systems virtually certain but still under construction. In the UK, the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise)Ðwhich determines levels of research capacity funding mainly through peer review of the quality of research publicationsÐis in its last round. In Australia the existing `quantum' of research activity (the Institutional Grants Scheme, or IGS) allocates research funding to universities in proportion to the numbers of recognised publications they produce, research student numbers and the value of grants they win. It is likewise on borrowed time, being originally due for replacement this year by the RQF (Research Quality Framework, modelled on the British RAE). However, the new government has postponed the change. It is pursuing instead several concurrent reviews of higher education and the development of a new quality framework, the ERA (Australian Research Council, Excellence), which will put more weight on ranking of publication outlets by `quality'. The results of these processes of review in Australia may define the nature of the academic enterprise for many years to come. It remains to be seen whether they will overturn the legacy of the Dawkins reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s, which created a competitive