Bushwalking in Kakadu: a study of cultural borderlands

This paper examines the relationship between the contested domains of Aboriginal traditional owners and non‐Aboriginal Park users, specifically bushwalkers, in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. It argues that Kakadu remains a cultural borderland where a negotiated relationship between local Aboriginal traditional owners and non‐Aboriginal Park users is struggling to emerge. It finds that the rhetoric of Aboriginal/non‐Aboriginal co‐existence, which pervades the Park, is infused by the legacy of a colonial settler state, which has presumed access to territory, marginalized Indigenous people and obviated their social and cultural landscape in favour of an expansionist aesthetic of wilderness preservation and appreciation. This paper finds that the activities of bushwalkers and the concerns that these activities generate in the local Aboriginal domain produce a novel space where place is contested and transformed, a space of negotiation and resistance where people's cherished values both compete with and influence one another.     

The Voting Rights of Incarcerated Australian Citizens

Drawing on and combining political science and legal frameworks, this article explores the validity of disenfranchising Australian prisoners. The authors examine and critically assess the various arguments used in Australia by both legislators and High Court Justices to defend the practice of disenfranchisement. Such arguments are assessed against liberal democratic principles as well as jurisprudence arising from cases in settings that provide protection for electoral rights in formal charters of rights. The authors show that in settings that entrench voting rights in the Constitution, any infringement attracts strict scrutiny from the courts. Courts insist that any abridgement of voting rights should serve a legitimate government purpose and be proportionate to that purpose. The arguments made for prisoner disenfranchisement by legislators in the Australian context invariably fail both parts of this test.     

Worker Housing in the Vermont Copper Belt: Improving Life and Industry Through Paternalism and Resistance

During the mid-nineteenth century, east-central Vermont supported two major copper mines and their associated villages. In order to wrest thousands of tons of copper from the earth these mines, the Elizabeth and Ely mines, hired and housed thousands of miners, laborers, and their families. Both mines pursued the same resource in the same environment during the same period, but the Ely Mine developed a centralized village, while the Elizabeth Mine housed its workers in isolated housing clusters. The causes of these differences in worker housing can be traced to differences in scale, setting, and managerial philosophy, and can be analyzed within the larger historical context of Improvement and the larger ethnographic context of paternalism in mining communities.