Marriage as a Marker of Secular Inclusion? Oral History and Lesbian and Gay Narratives on Marriage in Contemporary Australia

Same‐sex marriage has been one of the most widely discussed social issues in contemporary Australia for some time. In late 2017, after holding a contentious national postal survey that year, the Australia government introduced legislation allowing same‐sex couples to marry. This article draws on a major national lesbian and gay oral history project conducted in partnership with the National Library of Australia between 2012 and 2015, when discussions of same‐sex marriage were becoming increasingly widespread. It investigates the way interview subjects incorporated marriage into their narratives. In doing so, it highlights how understandings of marriage — both amongst lesbian and gay people and heterosexual people — have shifted and evolved over time. While some subjects saw marriage as a somewhat outdated, religious, and patriarchal concept, many others invested personal significance in the institution, arguing that allowing gay men and lesbians access to marriage would be a strong symbol of social progress and equality in a secular society. We conclude with one young interviewee who had managed to reconcile his faith with his sexuality and desire for marriage equality.     

FOCUS: on the use of the petrous bone for estimating cranial abundance in fossil assemblages

Low representation of braincase bones in zooarchaeological assemblages suggests that skulls have been intensively processed by Levantine Epipalaeolithic foragers; most cranial elements are often unidentifiable and are considered poor candidates for quantifying crania. In contrast, the petrous bone is usually found complete, and was found to be easily identifiable to body size category. Use of the petrous bone in fossil assemblages analyses leads to better estimation of the occurrence of cranial elements, and thus of skeletal part representation. We therefore suggest use of the petrous bone for detecting bone destruction and selective transport in faunal assemblages.     

International labour migration of Asian women

Chris Beyrer. War in the Blood: sex, Politics and AIDS in Southeast Asia. Bangkok: White Lotus Books; London and New York: Zed Books, 1998. £42.50, hardcover; £14.95, paper.

Christine B. N. Chin. In Service and Servitude: foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian “Modernity” Project. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. xxiv, 299 pp. US$20.50, paper.

Siriporn Skrobanek, Nataya Boonpakdee and Chutima Jantateero. The Traffic in Women: human Realities of the International Sex Trade. London and New York: Zed Books, 1997. vii, 124 pp. £32.95, hardcover.     

What is Geography? Perceptions of first year undergraduates in South Africa

Disciplines such as Geography are well placed to respond to the changing needs of society and the effective application of geographical knowledge to real-world problems. This project surveyed first year Geography undergraduates’ understanding of “What is Geography?”, both before and after an exercise in which geographic topics were identified within recent newspapers. The survey instrument employed was an anonymous, self-administered questionnaire, and was undertaken with first-year undergraduate Geography students at a university in South Africa. Results show that the exercise enabled students (n = 158) to more readily see the application of geographical knowledge to both environmental and social problems that they identified in the newspaper stories. Students also identified that studying Geography may be able to help them increase their skills, employment prospects and earning potential. These findings can help locate the disciplinary concerns and applicability of Geography in post-apartheid South Africa within the wider context of the twenty-first Century world.     

“Nobody’s children?”: the Ministry of Pensions and the treatment of disabled Great War veterans in the Irish Free State, 1921–1939

This article analyses the treatment and rehabilitation of disabled Irish Great War veterans who lived in the Irish Free State. To do so, it utilises the records of the Ministry of Pensions, the British governmental department, that was charged with assisting these men. This research argues that the Irish Free State was a particularly challenging society for disabled ex-servicemen to reside. Yet, whilst the social and governmental reception on offer to disabled Great War veterans was less favourable in the Free State than their similarly afflicted former comrades in Britain, they were better able to benefit from substantial assistance from the Ministry of Pensions. The department lived up to its billing as an “imperial obligation” in the newly formed state.     

The Past under the Shadow of the Present: The Case of the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History

The National Museum of Korean Contemporary History, which opened in 2012, has been the focus of a heated controversy between the progressive and conservative camps over the “proper” ways to represent South Korea’s turbulent history. I build on the relationship between heritage, collective memory and national identity, and argue that the division that typifies South Korean society has implications that extend beyond socio-political issues. Anchored within a broader discursive context, the museum became an important memory carrier involved in the process of debating the issue of national identity. Although no agreement has been reached regarding the “proper” historical narrative the site should exhibit, the museum has nevertheless offered an opportunity to shape a form of national identity that can embrace a more complex perspective on the country’s contemporary history. At present, though, this contentious site has demonstrated the extent to which the legacy of the conservative–progressive divide remains deep. I offer a discursive context that is useful for the study of current debates over heritage sites in South Korea, while the overall analysis illuminates the idea that the “present-centred” management of heritage in national museums can, potentially, play a part in the process of forming more intricate notions of national identity.     

Accounts of early Christian history in the thought of François Guizot,Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël 1800–c.1833

This article compares different historical accounts of early Christianity written by François Guizot, Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël and shows that they played a significant role in the construction of their ideas about religious tolerance and political liberty in ancient and modern states. In his 1812 translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Guizot used his editorial footnotes to oppose Gibbon’s sceptical representation of the early Church and to assert that the development of Christianity had been crucial in condemning slavery, establishing religious toleration and fostering individual liberty. Benjamin Constant also opposed Gibbon’s representation of early Church history but he argued in his posthumously published Du polythéisme romain (1833) that the key achievement of the early Christians had been to revive the idea of individual religious sentiment against the anti-individualist Roman state. As Guizot developed his historical research in the 1820s he rejected this view and came to see the early Christians as demonstrating the inherently social nature of all religious practice. Some of these ideas were anticipated by Madame de Staël in De la littérature (1800), but all three thinkers sought to reintegrate religion into their ideas of modern liberty in ways that merit greater attention.