Book reviews

Australian Politics

J.M. Baxter, M. Emmison and J. Western, Class Analysis and Contemporary Australia (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1991) pp.xiii + 394. $29.95 ISBN 0 7329 0335 1.

Clive Bean, Ian McAllister and John Warhurst (eds.), The Greening of Australian Politics: The 1990 Federal Election (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1990) pp.xvi + 229. $22.99. ISBN 0 582 87031 3.

Peter Cullen, with an introduction by Clem Lloyd, No is Not an Answer: Lobbying for Success (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991) pp.vii + 166. $19.95 ISBN 0 04 442294 6.

Peter Sekuless, Lobbying Canberra in the Nineties: The Government Relations Game (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991) pp.vii + 165. $19.95 ISBN 0 04 442303 9.

Hugh V. Emy and Owen E. Hughes, Australian Politics: Realities in Conflict, Second Edition, (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1991) pp.ix + 577. $34.95 ISBN 0 7329 0392 0.

Brian Galligan, J.R. Nethercote and Cliff Walsh (eds.), The Cabinet and Budget Processes (Canberra: ANU, 1990) pp.141. $n.p. ISBN 0 7315 08815.

Adam Jamrozik, Class, Inequality and the State (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1991) pp.xx + 348. $29.95 ISBN 0 7329 0245 2.

Bruce Muirden, The Diggers Who Signed on For More: Australia's Part in the Russian Wars of Intervention, 1918–1919 (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1990) pp.115. $14.95 ISBN 1 86254 260 0.

Hugh Smith (ed.), Australia and Peacekeeping (Canberra: Australian Defence Studies Centre, 1990) pp.viii + 137.$10.00 ISBN 0 7317 0129 1.

David Wells, In Defence of the Common Wealth: Reflections on Australian Politics (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1990) pp.126. $14.99. ISBN 0 582 86913 7.

Kenneth Wiltshire, Tenterfield Revisited: Reforming Australia's System of Government for 2001 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1991) pp.47. $9.95 ISBN 0 7022 2349 2.

Comparative and International Politics

Adam Ashforth, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth‐Century South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) pp.xiv + 296. $120.00 ISBN 019 827702 4.

Stefano Bartolini and Peter Mair, Identity, Competition and Electoral Availability: The Stabilization of European Electorates, 1885–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) pp.xix + 363. £45.00/$US59.50 ISBN 0 521 38292 0.

Gerard Braunthal, Political Loyalty and Public Service in West Germany (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990) pp.xvi + 249. $27.50 ISBN 0 87023 707 1.

Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley, Red Brotherhood At War (revised edition) (London: Verso, 1990) pp.xxii + 322. $29.95 ISBN 0 86091 501 8.

Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991) pp.184. $29.95 ISBN 0 7456 08671.

Brian Head and Elaine McCoy (eds.), Deregulation or Better Regulation? (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1991) pp.vii + 183. $24.95 ISBN 0 7329 0563 X.

Ewan Jamieson, Friend or Ally (Sydney: Permagon Press, 1990) pp.x + 139. $19.95 ISBN 0 08 040081 7.

Boris Kagarlitsky (Translator, Rick Simon), The Dialectic of Change (London and New York: Verso, 1990) pp.xi + 393. $29.95 ISBN 0 86091 973 0.

Samuel Kernell (ed.) Parallel Politics: Economic Policymaking in Japan and the United States (Tokyo: Japan Center for International Exchange, and Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1991) pp.xiii + 390. $US36.95 ISBN 0 8157 4892 2.

Chandran Kukathas, David W. Lovell and William Maley (eds.), The Transition From Socialism: State and Civil Society in the USSR (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1991) pp.viii + 227. $24.99 ISBN 0 582 87046 1.

James Minchin, No Man Is An Island: A Portrait of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990). pp.407. $17.95 ISBN 0 04 4000028.

Chris Moore and J.J. Richardson, in association with Jeremy Moon, Local Partnership and the Unemployment Crisis in Britain (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989) pp.163. $n.p. ISBN 0 04 352220 3.

Neil Nevitte and Roger Gibbins, New Elites in Old States: Ideologies in the Anglo‐American Democracies (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990) pp.xi + 209. $24.95 ISBN 0 19 540803 9.

Philip Norton (ed.), Legislatures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) pp.xi + 336. $28.95 ISBN 019 8275811.

Amin Saikal and William Maley, Regime Change in Afghanistan: Foreign Intervention and the Politics of Legitimacy (Bathurst, Australia: Crawford House Press, 1991).pp.viii + 190. $37.50 ISBN 1 86333 029 1.

Alan Tapper, The Family in the Welfare State (Sydney: Allen and Unwin in association with the Australian Institute of Public Policy) pp.x + 284. $17.95 ISBN 0 04 442309.

Elise K.Tipton, The Japanese Police State: Tokko in Interwar Japan (Sydney: Allen & Unwin 1991) pp.vii + 209. $24.95 ISBN 004 442258 X.

Wang Jiye and Terence H. Hull (eds.), Population and Development Planning in China (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991) pp.xx + 311. $24.95 ISBN 0 04 442323 3.

Political Theory and Methodology

John Dunn: Interpreting Political Responsibility: Essays 1981–1989 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. vii + 274. $32.95 ISBN 0 7456 0828 0.

David Held (ed.), Political Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991) pp.ix + 360. £12.50 ISBN 0 7456 0856 6.

Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990) pp.x + 270. $29.95 ISBN 0 86091 981 1.

Eugene Kamenka, Bureaucracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) pp.ix + 192. $24.95 ISBN 0 631 14579 6.

Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990) pp.xvi + 263. $34.95 ISBN 0–86091–919–6.

Alan Moran, Andrew Chisholm and Michael Porter (eds.), Markets, Resources and the Environment (Sydney: Allen and Unwin in association with National Priorities Project, Tasman Institute, Melbourne, 1991) pp.ix + 290. $19.95 ISBN 1 86373 025 7.

Joseph Raz (ed.), Authority (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) pp.330. $34.95 ISBN 0 631 15944 4.

Ian Shapiro, Political Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) pp.xii + 338. $n.p. ISBN 0 520 06672 3.

David West, Authenticity and Empowerment (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990) pp.xv + 198. $n.p. ISBN 0 7450 0516.

Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991) pp.168. $29.95 ISBN 0 7456 0603 2.     

Multidimensional Sequence Alignment Methods for Activity‐Travel Pattern Analysis: A Comparison of Dynamic Programming and Genetic Algorithms

Quantitative comparisons of space‐time activity‐travel patterns have been made at length in regional science. Traditionally, Euclidean Hamming distances have been widely used to measure the similarity between activity‐travel patterns that involve several attribute dimensions such as activity type, location, travel mode, accompanying person, etc. Other techniques, such as pattern recognition in signal processing theory, have also been introduced for this purpose. All these measures, however, lack the ability to capture the sequential information embedded in activity‐travel patterns. Recently, the sequence alignment methods (SAMs), developed in molecular biology that are concerned with the distances between DNA strings, have been introduced in time use research. These SAMs do capture the similarity of activity‐travel patterns, including sequential information, but based on a single attribute only. Unfortunately, the extension of the unidimensional SAMs to a multidimensional method induces the problem of combinatorial explosion. To solve this problem, this paper introduces effective heuristic methods for the comparison of multidimensional activity‐travel patterns. First, following a brief review of existing measures of activity‐travel pattern comparison, the problem of multidimensional sequential information comparison and the combinatorial nature of the method are discussed. The paper then develops alternative multidimensional SAMs employing heuristics based on dynamic programming and genetic algorithms, respectively. These heuristic SAMs are compared using empirical activity‐travel pattern data. The paper ends by discussing avenues of future research.     

Integrating Transportation Network and Regional Economic Models to Estimate the Costs of a Large Urban Earthquake

In this paper we summarize an integrated, operational model of losses due to earthquake impacts on transportation and industrial capacity, and how these losses affect the metropolitan economy. The procedure advances the information provided by transportation and activity system analysis techniques in ways that help capture the most important ecomonic implications of earthquakes. Network costs and origin-destination requirements are modeled endogenously and consistently. Indirect and induced losses associated with direct impacts on transportation and industrial capacity are distributed across zones and ecomonic sectors. Preliminary results are summarized for a magnitude 7.1 earthquake on the Elysian Park blind thrust fault in Los Angeles.     

Climate change, conflict and development in Sudan: global neo-Malthusian narratives and local power struggles

Dystopian accounts of climate change posit that it will lead to more conflict, causing state failure and mass population movements. Yet these narratives are both theoretically and empirically problematic: the conflict–environment hypothesis merges a global securitization agenda with local manipulations of Northern fears about the state of planetary ecology. Sudan has experienced how damaging this fusion of wishful thinking, power politics and top-down development can be. In the 1970s, global resource scarcity concerns were used locally to impose the fata morgana of Sudan as an Arab-African breadbasket: in the name of development, violent evictions of local communities contributed to Sudan's second civil war and associated famines. Today, Darfur has been labelled ‘the world's first climate change conflict’, masking the long-term political-economic dynamics and Sudanese agency underpinning the crisis. Simultaneously, the global food crisis is instrumentalized to launch a dam programme and agricultural revival that claim to be African answers to resource scarcity. The winners, however, are Sudan's globalized Islamist elites and foreign investors, whilst the livelihoods of local communities are undermined. Important links exist between climatic developments and security, but global Malthusian narratives about state failure and conflict are dangerously susceptible to manipulations by national elites; the practical outcomes decrease rather than increase human security. In the climate change era, the breakdown of institutions and associated violence is often not an unfortunate failure of the old system due to environmental shock, but a strategy of elites in wider processes of power and wealth accumulation and contestation.     

Space–Time Accessibility Under Conditions of Uncertain Travel Times: Theory and Numerical Simulations

Recently, several accessibility measures using the space–time prism concept have been suggested in the literature. These measures fail to take into account (i) the ability of individuals to adjust their activity–travel patterns in coping with constrained choice sets, (ii) uncertainty in the perception of travel times, (iii) temporal variability of travel times, and (iv) the influence of travel information on accessibility. The aim of the present article is to contribute to this literature by addressing these four shortcomings. Theory will be developed and illustrated using numerical simulations. The results suggest that the accessibility measure proposed in this article is a useful indicator of social inclusion in terms of the time individuals can spend to conduct their preferred activities. Moreover, accessibility is found to be affected by the presence of schedule delay penalties, restrictions in time allocation to activities, and the provision of travel time information in order to reduce uncertainty.     

Hunter-gatherer burials and the creation of persistent places in southeastern Australia

One of the difficulties in interpreting hunter-gatherer mortuary practices is that many mortuary theories are derived from sedentary societies and rely upon an excavated record. This paper is an analysis of both historical and archaeological evidence of Aboriginal burial practices in the Murray River region of southeastern Australia. The archaeological data relies primarily upon analysis of burials exposed through erosion rather than systematic excavations which limits the range of burial characteristics that may be recorded and interpreted. The mortuary practices identified are highly patterned but regionally and locally variable. It is argued that the evidence demonstrates the persistence of place for Aboriginal people. The existence of persistent places is further related to a potentially fluid but structured connection between people and land.     

Obscure oases: natural,cultural and historical geography of western Queensland's Tertiary sandstone springs

The distribution of surface water dictates human and animal activity in arid zones. Although typically small, hidden, and inaccessible, springs and wells fed by local aquifers were the only sources of reliable water across vast areas of inland Australia until the last century. Compared to larger, more accessible water sources such as riverine waterholes and Great Artesian Basin discharge springs, their history is sketchy and poorly documented, although rich in intrigue and mythology. Since the expansion of artificial waters and motorised transport, many of these small oases have been forgotten, and their location and permanence are now less well‐known than for thousands of years. We examine the distribution, hydrogeology, cultural history, and biological values of Tertiary sandstone springs in western Queensland based on a review of historical literature, interviews with long‐term residents, and extensive field surveys. One hundred and sixty springs were documented, and nearly 40% of these have declined in flow or become inactive since pastoral settlement for reasons that are not well understood. While their decline in some areas seems related to shallow bores sunk into their local aquifers, it is possible that some smaller springs owed their existence to regular human maintenance. Others are probably naturally dynamic over decadal time scales. This study documents an almost‐forgotten aspect of Queensland's natural and cultural history.