Human security in Australia: public interest and political consequences

The new human security paradigm has reconceptualised security beyond traditional physical threats to encompass ‘lifestyle’ concerns, such as health and environmental security. This article uses national survey data collected in Australia in 2007 to examine how public opinion views this new paradigm and to evaluate its political consequences. The results show that the public makes a clear distinction between all four types of human security—health, the environment, national security and the economy. Longitudinal analysis shows that health and the environment have gained greater prominence with the public since 1990. Each dimension of human security has only limited roots in the social structure. However, each has important consequences for the ideological orientation of the public, and for party support. The authors conclude that as ‘lifestyle’ concerns become more prominent for the public, parties of the right will have to adapt to the new paradigm in order to ensure that they are not electorally disadvantaged.     

Of Human Bondage: The Breaking In of Stockmen in Northern Australia

This article examines the cultural forms through which the young European‐Australian stockmen who work on the cattle stations of north Queensland are socialised. Exploring their interactions with a social and physical landscape and their rites of passage, as manifested in everyday actions, performance and material culture, it reveals how – and why – they are given little choice in acquiring values which are intensely adversarial to the land and to the indigenous people of Australia. It also explores the relationship between the transmission of particular values to these young men and the wider political and hegemonic role of the pastoral sub‐culture in defining Australian national identity. 1 1 It has take me a while to lasso and subdue this ethnographic beast, and in the course of the struggle I have benefited greatly from the advice of colleagues at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Oxford, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the University of Wales, Lampeter and fellow Australianists at the Centre for Australian Studies in Wales and at the Menzies Centre in London. I am also most grateful to Neil Maclean and his anonymous referees for their many helpful suggestions and comments. I would like to pay an affectionate tribute to the young stockmen on the cattle properties of Cape York's western coast: at Rutland Plains, Koolatah, Highbury, Drumduff, Sefton and the other stations where I was invited to ‘sling my swag’. Behind the sabre‐rattling that I have quoted, most of these young men were good folk: they were largely tolerant of have a female (and a bloody pom too!) in their midst, generously sharing stories, explaining their lives, making hat‐catchers and belts for me, and showing me how to break horses and the occasional bone. I have had a little feminist fun in considering their performances of Masculinity, but I haven't forgotten that what they do often requires real courage and determination. Though I have tried here to point to the political hegemony of their role and its potentially bleak consequences, I hope that an understanding of their sub‐culture and its pressures will assist the resolution of some of the conflicts in which they find themselves entangled.
     

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 70: protection of human rights in Australia*

This commentary reflects on the legacy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on its 70th anniversary, in terms of the protection of human rights within Australia. I reflect on Australia’s failure to implement domestically the terms of the two founding Covenants, and the resulting piecemeal protections that exist for human rights. I finish by considering the growing complexities in understanding human rights, responsibilities, and limits.     

A comparison between the Mediterranean climates of Eurasia and the Americas

On the 19th and 20th September 1981 heavy rain fell throughout Scotland. Almost 140mm was recorded for the 24 hours up to 9.00 am on the 20th at Dundonnell in Wester Ross, an event with a recurrence interval of approximately 120 years. The storm generated a peak discharge of c.60m³ s‐¹ on the Ardessie Burn which drains a 13.3km² catchment on the northwestern slopes of An Teallach. The resulting flood caused severe localised bank erosion and partially destroyed a fish farm. The total volume of measured flood deposits exceeded 1800 tonnes, approximately equal to 14 years normal average annual non‐dissolved sediment output. The identification of specific sediment source areas and deposition sites allows an assessment of geomorphic work in terms of direct landscape adjustment in response to extreme rainfall. The flood stresses the importance of rare events in the landscape evolution of upland environments and the influence of antecedent catchment conditions.     

Change and variability in Plio-Pleistocene climates: modelling the hominin response

Research into the links between climatic change and hominin evolution has generated numerous hypotheses. In recent years, methodological refinement of, and increased research effort directed towards, reliable proxies for palaeoclimatic change have provided a growing body of data with which to test such hypotheses. Whilst many archaeologists are aware of these data, few are cognizant of the wealth of techniques developed by theoretical biologists over the last half-century to explicitly address the evolutionary consequences of adaptation to temporally heterogeneous environments. The current paper expands and adapts one such technique for use with empirical data, and applies it to a global palaeoclimatic record spanning the last five million years, in order to discern the potential impact of environmental heterogeneity on hominin evolution during this period. Of particular interest are the contributions of climatic change, associated with directional selection, and climatic variability, associated with selection for phenotypic plasticity. At this macro-scale, results suggest an early peak in selection for plasticity at approximately 2–2.7 mya, combined with three major shifts in directional selection at approximately 3.3–3.4, 1.4–1.5, and 0.5–0.6 mya. These results are employed to relate the fossil and archaeological records to a number of environmental hypotheses of human evolution. In particular, it is argued that the origins of the genus Homo and the spread of Oldowan technology are associated not with a major turnover pulse, but with a period of selection for phenotypic plasticity.     

纵贯澳大利亚——百万海景动物园

<正>要问澳大利亚最大的旅游资源是什么,就要看看这片土地上什么事物最出名,我想很多人都会得出这样的结论,独特呆萌的澳洲动物无疑是澳大利亚真正的主角。因此澳大利亚各地动物园都表现出极高水准,其中最著名也吸引最多人造访的是悉尼的"塔龙加动物园"(Taronga Zoo)。     

Mean airstreams of Australia

Streamline analyses of mean monthly resultant surface winds over Australia are presented. Mean confluences represent either cyclone trajectories, or modal fronts. These analyses suggest that Australia's annual airstream climate is of two regimes: that of September to March inclusive, and April to August inclusive. The winter half-year is exemplified by a continental airstream source in southern Australia which diverges over virtually the entire continent. It continues into September and October, although dominating only the southern third to half of Australia, and is absent from November to March. During the summer half-year a new pattern emerges, with three maritime air stream sources represented over the continent: first, air from the Southern Ocean penetrates the south coast reaching its furthest northward extension from December to March inclusive; a second source originating over the Pacific Ocean dominates eastern and northern Australia; and a monsoon source originating over the Indian Ocean which flows overland affecting northern Western Australia. Two modal confluences are noted, one over northwestern Australia from November-February separating monsoon flow from that emanating from the east, and another extending from the west central coast east-southeastward to the southeast coast from November-March separating Southern Ocean air from that originating over the Pacific Ocean.     

A survey of Australia

Venturino G. Venturini (ed.), Australia—a survey (Schriften des Instituts für Asienkunde in Hamburg, Vol. 27), Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1970, pp. xi + 397.     

Swedish wage policy and Australia three years after Australia reconstructed

During the 1980s, and with increasing speed, there have been major changes in the determination of wages in Sweden; changes which involve the substantial breakdown of the ‘Swedish model’ of social and economic policy which had developed since the 1930s. These changes are of much interest in themselves but have a special relevance to Australia because of admiration for the Swedish system within the Australian labour movement, exemplified by the major report Australia Reconstructed, published in 1987. Some of the complexities and difficulties involved in the Swedish system were not fully dealt with in this report, while others have become clear since its publication. Australians, as well as others, need to appreciate what has occurred. Centralised wage negotiation, essential to the Swedish model, has in fact survived better in Australia than in Sweden; though in Australia too it is potentially vulnerable to tendencies towards decentralisation. Those interested in the concept of ‘corporatism’ should also note these developments, Sweden having been thought of as a highly ‘corporatist’ polity.     

Australia in Asia

Anthony Milner (ed). Australia in Asia. Comparing Cultures. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Anthony Milner and Mary Quilty (eds). Australia in Asia. Communities of Thought. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Anthony Milner and Mary Quilty (eds). Australia in Asia. Episodes. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998.     

野生动物的乐园 澳大利亚

<正>大洋洲是地球上人类文明进入比较晚的地方,现如今也是高度发达的地区之一,自然环境却保存得相对完好,人们对动物的爱心充分体现了社会的文明。在这里,各种动物自由自在地生存着,可称为真正意义上的动物乐园。     

柴尔德在澳大利亚

著名考古学家柴尔德为考古学所作出的巨大贡献,今天到底意味着什么?为了寻求这个问题的答案,英国考古协会和史前学会1992年5月在伦敦大学的考古研究所联合召开了纪念柴尔德诞辰100周年讨论会。100多名国际知名学者出席了会议,他们从多个角度对柴尔德的思想进行了深入的研究,并取得了丰硕的成果。会议主持人大卫·哈维斯把会议上发表的论文整理成集,定名为《柴尔德的考古学》(The archaeology of V.Gordon Childe)。马尔瓦尼这篇被收录其中的文章对柴尔德1892～1922年在澳大利亚的经历以及此对他以后的思想的影响进行了深入研究。