Becoming the State in Northern Australia: Urbanisation,Intra‐Indigenous Relatedness,and the State Effect

In Australia's Northern Territory, the Larrakia have been involved in a decades‐long effort to gain recognition as traditional owners through Land Rights and Native Title legislation. From one perspective, their claims have failed to achieve the entitlement and recognition grounded in these governmental regimes (Scambary 2007; Povinelli 2002). However, over the past decade the Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation (LNAC) and the Larrakia Development Corporation (LDC) have emerged as locally powerful corporate bodies that pursue programs and exercise forms of power on behalf of the Larrakia that can be understood in terms of state and governmental practice. Through suburban development, a night patrol, educational and vocational training, a radio station, and through forms of policy research and statistical enumeration, the Larrakia nation have emerged in the eyes of many as a de facto Aboriginal ‘state’ in the Darwin region. This paper explores the intra‐Indigenous relations through which these practices have emerged, and analyses the extent to which the LNAC might be understood as a kind of ‘state’ within a state, responsible for world‐shaping activities of knowledge production, housing and health outreach, vocational training and education, and policing. Focussing on the forms of ‘stateness’ that accrue to the Larrakia Nation in Darwin through its policing, knowledge production, and outreach programs for Aboriginal campers, the article explores the differential articulation of Aboriginal groups with the state. It concludes by asking how such differences matter in contexts of planned urbanisation in the Northern Territory.     

Spinning Yarns: The Archaeological Evidence for Hand Spinning and its Social Implications,c ad 1200–1500

THIS PAPER EXAMINES the archaeological evidence for hand spinning in medieval Britain from c 1200 to c 1500. Ceramic, stone and baked clay spindle whorls have dominated the excavated finds, but a new corpus of lead-alloy spindle whorls, recorded through the Portable Antiquities Scheme and Scottish Treasure Trove, is presented here. Analysis of the metal whorls’ distribution, manufacture, dating and decoration is provided, illuminating the wide social and economic contexts in which they were used. From memento mori of pious spinners to sexually potent objects representative of lubricious gossips, the ubiquitous spindle whorl was a universal tool that had a powerful agency. The artefacts are small finds embodying daily life but also tie into the wider national economy of the High and Late Middle Ages.     

‘How to do things with books’: Quentin Skinner and the dissemination of ideas

This is one of a number of talks given on 23 May 2008 in the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, on the occasion of Quentin Skinner's retirement from the Regius Professorship of Modern History. No attempt has been made to disguise the origins of this piece, or its festal tone, and any statistics quoted reflect the position as of 1 May 2008.     

The social selectivity of migration flows affecting Britain's larger conurbations: An analysis of the 1991 census regional migration tables

Little is known about the social composition of migration affecting British cities, despite the currently high political salience of this issue. This is principally because of the very limited availability of reliable city‐scale data on such migrant characteristics as occupation and income. This paper uses the Regional Migration Tables from the 1991 Census to document the migration of labour force members to and from Britain's larger conurbations, distinguishing six main Social Groups defined on the basis of occupation. It is found that all eight areas were net losers of economically active people, that all six Social Groups were generally contributing to these net losses and that, in every case except London, there was a strong positive relationship between social status and the rate of net out‐migration to the rest of Britain. This latter case suggests the need for further work, which would benefit from the more detailed migration datasets that are promised from the 2001 Census.     

Enacting parenting policy? The hybrid spaces of Sure Start Children's Centres

This article draws on research in three UK Sure Start Children's Centres which explored them as particular kinds of spaces, with the intention of understanding how policy imperatives and discourses interact with other dynamics. The role of the material spaces of the buildings, of ambivalent interactions of users with staff, and friendship groups among users are seen as key to understanding the centre as a ‘hybrid’ space in which policy intentions were exceeded by other aspects of everyday life. This has implications not only for understanding policy programmes in action, but also for how academic analysis and theory positions itself in relation to these spaces.     

Stumbling Towards Union: Policymaking in the EU

Desmond Dinan (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the European Union .
Pierre-Henri Lament and Marc Maresceau (Eds.), The State of the European Union
John McCormick, The European Union: Politics and Policies .
Stelios Stavridis, Elias Mossialos, Roger Morgan, and Howard Machin (Eds.), New Challenges to the European Union: Policies and Policy-Making .
Helen Wallace and William Wallace (Eds.), Policy-Making in the European Union .     

Reviews Australian

Francis G. Castles, The Working Class and Welfare: Reflections on the Political Development of the Welfare State in Australia and New Zealand, 1890–1980, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1985, pp.128. $11.95 (paper)

B. Costar and D. Woodward (eds), Country to National: Australian Rural Politics, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1985, pp.150. $24.95 (cloth), $12.95 (paper)

Jim Moss, Sound of Trumpets: History of the Labour Movement in South Australia, Adelaide, Wakefield Press, 1985, pp.454. $20.00 (paper).

Julianne Schultz, Steel City Blues: the human cost of industrial crisis, Ringwood, Penguin, 1985, pp.282. $7.95 (paper)

Jane Ross, The Myth of the Digger, Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, 1985, pp.251. $14.95 (paper)

Pat O'Malley, Law, Capitalism and Democracy: A Sociology of the Australian Legal Order, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1983, pp.204. $12.95 (paper)

A. Patience and J. Scott (eds), Australian Federalism: Future Tense, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1983, pp.217. $14.99 (paper)

Trevor Barr, The Electronic Estate: New Communications Media in Australia, Ringwood, Penguin, 1985, pp.271. $8.95 (paper)

Michael Roe, Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought 1890–1960, St Lucia. University of Queensland Press, 1984, pp.328. $40.00 (cloth)

Strobe Talbott, Deadly Gambits, London, Pan Books, 1985, pp.380. £3.95 (paper)

Ian Clark, Limited Nuclear War, Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1982, pp.266 £9.95 (paper)

Peter Pringle and William Arkin, SIOP: Nuclear War from the Inside, London, Sphere Books, 1983, pp.225. £2.95 (paper)

R.F. Miller and F. Feher (eds), Khruschev and the Communist World, London, Croom Helm, 1984, pp.237. $31.95 (cloth)

N. Nugent and D. Lowe, The Left in France, London, Macmillan, 1982, pp.275. $18.95 (paper)

C. O'Faircheallaigh, Mining and Development: Foreign‐financed Mines in Australia, Ireland, Papua New Guinea and Zambia, Sydney and London, Croom Helm, 1984, pp.302. $33.95 (cloth)

D. C. Pitt and B. C. Smith (eds), The Computer Revolution in Public Administration, Brighton, Wheatsheaf Books, 1984, pp.214. £6.95 (paper)

R. L. Wettenhall, Architects of Departmental Systems: Five Profiles, Canberra, CCAE, Canberra Series in Administrative Studies, Occasional Paper 3, 1984, pp.60 (no price given).

Ian McAllister & Richard Rose, The Nationwide Competition for Votes: The 1983 British Election, London and Dover, Francis Pinter, 1984, pp.257. £12.00 (cloth)

F. Feher, A. Heller, G. Markus, Dictatorship Over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies, Oxford, Blackwell, 1984, pp.299. $14.95 (paper)

Lea Campos Boralevi, Bentham and the Oppressed, European University Institute — Series C:I, Berlin and New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1984, pp.xii + 248. DM88.00 (cloth)

Conal Condren, The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts: An Essay on Political Theory, Its Inheritance, and the History of Ideas, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1985, pp.xiii + 303. US$36.00 (cloth)

J. M. Barbalet, Marx's Construction of Social Theory, London, Routledge & Regan Paul, 1983, pp. 228. $25.95 (cloth)

Dag Anckar and Erkki Berndtson (eds), Essays on Democratic Theory, Helsinki, Finnish Political Science Association, 1984, pp.166, US$10 (paper); and Ilkka Heiskanen and Sakari Hanninen (eds), Exploring the Basis of Politics, Helsinki, Finnish Political Science Association, 1983, pp.132, US$10 (paper).

Brian W. Head, Ideology and Social Science: Destutt de Tracy and French Liberalism (International Archives of the History of Ideas: 112), Boston & Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985, pp.229. US$45.00 (cloth)

Z.A. Pelczynski (ed.), The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel's Political Philosophy, London, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 300. £8.95 (paper)

Michael J. Shapiro (ed.), Language and Politics, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1984, pp.261. $17.95 (paper)

James M. Enelow & Melvin J. Hinich, The Spatial Theory of Voting : An Introduction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 238. $59.50 (cloth), $21.00 (paper)

Jocelyn Clarke and Kate White, Women in Australian Politics, Sydney, Fontana Books, 1983, pp.216. $8.95 (paper)

Marian Sawer and Marian Simms, A Woman's Place: Women and Politics in Australia, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1984, pp.235. $11.95 (paper)

Marian Simms (ed.), Australian Women and the Political System, Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1984, pp.222. $11.95 (paper)

Race Mathews, David Bennett — a Memoir, Melbourne, Australian Fabian Society (Pamphlet 44), 1985, pp. v + 59. $3.00 (paper)     

To Watch or Restrain: Female Convict Prisons in 19th-Century Tasmania

As institutions established to manage exiled British felons, the Tasmanian female factories consisted of four women's prisons located throughout the island colony. The material world of these institutions mediated internal power relations. Superintendents, Convict Department Officials, and the female prisoners themselves manipulated site landscapes. Today, one of these institutions remains as a managed historic site. Tourists experience a tidy and unthreatening landscape of Australia's heroic convict heritage. By juxtaposing excavated archaeological remains with public presentations of convict sites, I explore the position of female convicts from the original penal landscape to the shadows of Australian history.