‘Piddington's Indiscretion’:1 Ralph Piddington,The Australian National Research Council and Academic Freedom

The primary aim of this paper is to investigate the question why, particularly in the first half of this century, Australian academics were so supine when it came to public criticism of the treatment, conditions and welfare of Australian Aborigines. Its focus is Ralph Piddington and how he was treated by the Australian academic establishment for his public criticism of the treatment of Aborigines at La Grange Bay, North-west Australia. It shows how the Executive Committee of the Australian National Research Council (ANRC), A.P. Elkin, Professor of Anthropology at Sydney University from 1933 to 1956 and chairman, from 1933 to 1955, of the Australian National Research Council's Committee for Anthropological Research, and A.O. Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, combined to silence and punish Piddington. The ANRC's criticisms of Piddington were fuelled, above all else, by their concern that his action would create a ‘very uncomfortable atmosphere regarding this Council and anthropological research generally.’ 5 2 Sir George Julius to Raymond Firth, 21 October 1932. 155/4/1/10.
In contrast the Rockefeller Foundation which provided the funding for the ANRC research grants and fellowships took a more lenient view of Piddington's action. It believed from the evidence presented by the ANRC that Piddington had made satisfactory progress toward carrying out the program for which he was given his fellowship and did not believe the charges made against him should impede his fellowship status.     

Bringing Memory Home: Historical (Post)Memory and Patricio Pron's El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (2011)

Published in 2011, Patricio Pron's semi-autobiographical novel details the return of a young Argentine academic to visit his dying father in Buenos Aires, and points precisely to the problematic generational inheritance that characterises the work of Argentina's second generation of dictatorship victims. Negotiating both personal and appropriated memories of his father's militancy during Argentina's last dictatorship (1976–1983), the protagonist gestures to memory not as a source of any objective or official history, but to its inherent quality as a subjective, postponed and mediated construct. Playing with the distinction between history and memory, the novel problematises the potential of postmemory's insistence on creative investment and highlights the difficulties inherent in the re-writing of history as an attempt to understand the past. By building on critical debates surrounding the application of post-Holocaust theory in Argentina, this article will place theories of postmemory firmly within an Argentine context and call for the need to reassess the political nature of the legacy inherited by this second generation. While advancing the discussion of these political elements of Argentine postmemory, attention will thus be drawn to the mechanisms of mnemonic transfer both between and within generations, highlighting how the subjective modification of what is being remembered allows Pron to move beyond an objectively unknowable past and look toward a future that is both open to, and shaped by, his contemporaries.     

Productive Relations in the Northeast and the Rest‐of‐Brazil Regions in 1995: Decomposition and Synergy in Input‐Output Systems

Using a set of interregional input‐output tables built by Guilhoto (1998) for 1995 for two Brazilian regions (Northeast and rest of the economy), the methodology developed by Sonis, Hewings, and Miyazawa (1997) is applied in the construction of a series of linkages such that it is possible to examine, through the nature of the internal and external interdependencies, the structure of trading relationships between the two regions. The methodology uses a partitioned input‐output system and exploits techniques that produce left and right matrix multipliers of the Leontief Inverse. This procedure facilitates the classification of the types of synergetic interactions within a preset pairwise hierarchy of economic linkages subsystems. In general, the results show that the Northeast region has a greater dependence on the rest of the economy region than the rest of the economy has on the Northeast region, and at the same time the rest of the economy region seems to be more developed as it presents a more complex productive structure than the Northeast region.     

Why the General said No

Based upon recently published volumes of French diplomatic documents, this review article examines the course of the negotiations for British entry into the European Economic Community from 1961 to 1963 and the reasons why France vetoed Britains application. It is clear that even before the British government launched its application, the French government was aware of the threat it posed to the cohesion of the Community and to French interests. It therefore pursued tactics of delay. The British, who were in a hurry to join, vainly sought to convince the French of their conversion to the Gaullist conception of a con–federal Europe that would be independent of both the Soviet Union and the United States, even dangling the prospect of nuclear cooperation before President de Gaulle. The latter's position inside France was relatively weak until he won a referendum on the direct election of the president in October 1962 and his party triumphed in the legislative elections the following month. De Gaulle then felt secure enough to tell Prime Minister Macmillan quite bluntly at their Rambouillet meeting on 15–16 December 1962 that he did not believe that Britain was ready for EEC membership. He had thus already made up his mind to exclude Britain before the Nassau agreement between President Kennedy and Mr Macmillan in which the former agreed to supply Britain with Polaris nuclear missiles, although this agreement confirmed his belief that Britain was excessively dependent upon the United States. Although economic questions—particularly those relating to the system of agricultural support and to Britain's request for special concessions to Australia, Canada and New Zealand—did play an important part in de Gaulle's decision, it is clear that political factors were uppermost in his mind. He did not want either a diluted Community or one in which there was a possible rival to French leadership.