Heritage Noire: truth,history, and colonial anxiety in The Blair Witch Project

When watching the film The Blair Witch Project we seem to be witnessing through its clumsy, apparently uncrafted footage the unmediated documentation of 'reality' as it occurs. This article argues that the carefully crafted deceit of The Blair Witch Project may be understood as part of a subversive 'public history' project that uses modern history's own scientific motifs and methodologies against itself and challenges its basic tenets. If positive myths of the past are structured into what we tend to call heritage, i.e. shared narratives affirming a positive sense of self and region or nation, then this paper argues that The Blair Witch Project takes the same notion and subverts it, giving its chosen audience a dark and unsettling sense of its own history.     

The prefects and party‐state relations in Fascist Italy

Abstract

This is a study of the prefects, the arm of central government in the provinces, under the Fascist regime. Using the author's own survey of those appointed prefects after the decision to establish the ‘totalitarian’ state, it considers the phenomenon of the ‘Fascist prefects’ in relation to the progress of career officials, methods of recruitment and the prevailing bureaucratic culture, in order to assess the extent of the ‘Fascistization’ of the Interior Ministry. It then looks at how both career and ‘Fascist prefects’ actually operated on the ground and their relations with the Fascist Party in the provinces. The article concludes, on the evidence of continuing party‐state conflict throughout the 1930s, that there was a ‘totalitarian’ regime in the making.     

State Support for Higher Education: A Political Economy Approach

This research examines state support for higher education by first ascertaining the amount supplied and demanded of this service. The approach assumes that supply and demand occur simultaneously, and that each is affected by higher education spending policies among the states. We argue that enrollment is the most satisfactory proxy for both supply and demand. State policy is measured as expenditure effort. We estimate three time-series equations using two-stage least squares regression with data for the years 1986–95. In the final equation, supply/demand (enrollment) emerges as the strongest predictor of state spending effort. Commitment to higher education (effort) is also especially sensitive to variations in the number of employees (per student). Employee costs clearly are a major factor in fueling increases in state higher education spending effort. State per capita income exerts a negative effect on the final dependent variable. Poor states exert greater financial effort in support of their colleges and universities than do more affluent states.     

The Impossible Aesthetic: the Abelam,the Moa Bird and Me

This paper explores the ramifications of encounters which two Abelam men and the author had in the Australian Museum and Taronga Zoo in Sydney, 1982. Rather than place a ready-made analytic framework on the men's experiences and rather than removing myself from the frame, as is usual in much anthropological analysis, I have chosen to explore the effects of these experiences on my own imagination. In the latter part of the paper I explore the way in which the imaginative entanglement of the Zoo and Museum experiences with my own memories has acted as a path of clues. This path has led to the development of the notion of sign which includes the idea of efficaciousness and transformation.     

Literary and social criticism

John Docker, Australian Cultural Elites: Intellectual Traditions in Sydney and Melbourne, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1974, pp. xii + 182. $5.95, paper.     

ACADEMIA AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

In recent years a revolutionary shift has occurred in the federal goovernment—-higher education relationship. Why didn't higher education resist more vigorously federal encroachment in its autonomy? First, academia focused its attention on the wrong kind of threat. Second, federal involvement was useful for solving problems on campus and often was in keeping with objectives and values supported in academia institutions. Third, the rise of public institutions altered the receptivity of higher education to accepting federal funds and pursuing direct solutions to society's problems, i.e. to being “involved” at the expense of autonomy. Finally, higher education's traditional strategy of being aloof from partisan politics kept it from vigorously defending its interests. Alternatives for the future appear to be: 1) a reorganisation of higher education to make it a clear, systematic agent of national policy, or 2) a successful effort by higher education to convert itself into an effective national interest group.     

The failure of the Yanchep international campus: A case study in the politics of marketing education

Private universities and colleges have traditionally played no part on the Australian higher education scene. This paper, however, argues that the concept has become plausible since the implementation of a new overseas student policy in 1985 which has allowed education to be exported as a commodity. This policy has, in large degree, been moulded by the perceived process of decay in higher education as a result of funding constraints, and by the general environment of economic decline in Australia. A case study of the evolution and early demise of the proposed Yanchep International Campus is the main focus of the paper. It attempts to illustrate the problematic and politically divisive nature of the formation of private institutions and the degree to which institutions such as Yanchep might not be viable profit making enterprises without heavy state subsidisation.