Reviews of books

Historical Archaeology -     

Book reviews

Australian politics

Cora Vellekoop Baldock, Volunteers in Welfare (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990) pp.xii + 171. $19.95 ISBN 0 04 442213 X.

Hugh V. Emy and Andrew Linklater (eds.), New Horizons in Politics: Essays with an Australian Focus (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990) pp.vii+207. $17.95 ISBN 0 04 442269 5.

P. Hay, R. Eckersley and G. Holloway, Environmental Politics in Australia and New Zealand (Hobart: University of Tasmania, 1989) pp.200. $n.p. ISBN 0 85901 405 3.

Peter Larmour (ed.) The Greening of Government: The Impact of the Labor/Green Accord on Government in Tasmania (Hobart: Royal Australian Institute of Public Administration, 1990) pp.iv + 74. $12.00.

Ian McAllister, Malcolm Mackerras, Alvaro Ascui and Susan Moss Australian Political Facts (Longman Cheshire, 1990) pp.x + 234. $12.99 ISBN 0 582 71258 0.

John Summers, Dennis Woodward and Andrew Parkin (eds.), Government, Politics and Power in Australia (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 4th edition, 1990) pp.375. $n.p. 0 582 86843 2.

Comparative and international politics

Archie Brown (ed.), Political Leadership in the Soviet Union (London: Macmillan, 1989) pp.xi + 245. $14.99 ISBN 0 333 41343 1.

Henry P. Frei, Japan's Southward Advance and Australia—from the sixteenth century to World War II (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1991) pp.xvii + 303. $34.95 ISBN 0 522 843921.

Manuel Antonio Garreton, The Chilean Political Process (Translated by Sharron Kellum and Gilbert W. Merkx) (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989) pp.xix + 220. $39.95 ISBN 0 04 497069 2.

Timothy Garton Ash, We The People, The Revolution of ‘89, Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin & Prague (Cambridge: Granta Books, 1990) pp.156. $12.99 ISBN 0 14 014023 9.

Misha Glenny, The Rebirth of History: Eastern Europe in the Age of Democracy (London: Penguin, 1990) pp.xiii + 245. $14.99 ISBN 0 14 014394 7.

Dennis Gilbert, Sandinistas: the party and the revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988, paperback edition, 1990) pp.xii + 238. $29.95 ISBN 1 55786 072 6.

Dennis Kavanagh and Peter Morris, Consensus Politics from Attlee to Thatcher (Basil Blackwell, 1989) pp.ix + 137. £6.95 ISBN 0 631 16566 5.

Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Southeast Asian Affairs 1990. (Southeast Asian Studies, 1990) pp.x + 395. $US37.00 ISBN 0377 5437.

David Lane, Soviet Society under Perestroika (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990) pp.xv + 401. $34.95 ISBN 0 04 445167 9.

Ralph Miliband, Divided Societies: Class Struggle in Contemporary Capitalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) pp.x + 277. $n.p. ISBN 0–19827535–8.

J.D.B. Miller and John Vincent (eds.), Order and Violence: Hedley Bull and International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) pp.viii + 220. $55.00 ISBN 0 19 827555 2.

Peter Riddell, The Thatcher Decade: How Britain has changed during the 1980s (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) pp.x + 236. $39.50 ISBN 631 16274 7.

Carlyle A. Thayer, War by Other Means: National Liberation and Revolution in Vietnam 1954–1960 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989) pp.xxx + 256. $19.95 ISBN 0 04 370187 6.

Malcolm Waters, Class and Stratification: Arrangements for Socioeconomic Inequality Under Capitalism (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1990) pp.ix + 199. $n.p. ISBN 0 582 86833 5.

Political theory and methodology

Rodney Barker, Political Legitimacy and the Stale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 990) pp. 216. $62.50 ISBN 0 19 827495 5.

John Braithwaite and Philip Pettit, Not Just Deserts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) pp.viii + 229. $65.00 ISBN 0 19 824233 6.

David Gauthier, Moral Dealing: Contract, Ethics, and Reason (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). pp.377. $14.95 ISBN 0 8014 2431 3.

G.T. Kaplan and C.S. Kessler (eds.), Hannah Arendt (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989) pp.xi + 178. $16.95 ISBN 0 04 920109 3.

David W. Lovell, Marx's Proletariat: The Making of a Myth (N.Y.: Routledge, 1988) pp.261. $27.59 ISBN 0–415–00116–1.

Schmidtz, David. The Limits of Government: An Essay on the Public Goods Argument (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991) pp.xviii + 197. $21.00 ISBN 0 81 330871 2.

Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, Aaron Wildavsky, Cultural Theory (Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press, 1990) pp.xiv + 296. $49.95 ISBN 0 8133 7863 X.     

Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.     

Dams,Diversions, and Development: Slow Resistance and Authoritarian Rule in the Salween River Basin

We engage geography's longstanding debate on what “counts” as resistance by introducing slow resistance to account for temporal-political strategies against unjust developments, particularly under authoritarian conditions. We draw on over a decade of fieldwork in the Salween River Basin where dams and diversions have been proposed since 1979, including the most recent iteration, the Yuam River water diversion project in Northwest Thailand. We find that resistance by impacted communities and civil society encompasses slow, strategic, and considered actions over time and generations. Such resistance is necessarily protracted to contest developments (re)proposed over decades. By foregrounding the strategic use of time and temporality, we highlight often overlooked actions and strategies of resistance by a diverse range of actors, showing how resistance movements are incremental and interconnected over time, even when “under the radar”. These strategies are key to contesting and (re)shaping the conditions of development in the Basin.     

From the interpersonal to the internet: social service digitisation and the implications for vulnerable individuals and communities

In Australia, e-government is continuously re-defining service boundaries. While this may be good in the case of transactional interactions, for example the online submission of tax returns, it is less clear that interpersonal services, such as working closely with the long-term unemployed, are best delivered digitally. We consider the impact of social services digitisation on vulnerable communities drawing on an analysis of remote Aboriginal communities. Digital uptake affords great opportunities, but it also carries risks. Some communities have no digital infrastructure and in certain cases traditional face-to-face services have been curtailed, leaving those not online with reduced assistance. We find that concerns about the ‘digital divide’ are well founded. Problems generated by e-government flow across boundaries and appear left to the third sector to resolve with the state playing an even more diminished role in the lives of disadvantaged citizens.     

Invasive cordgrass (Spartina spp.) in south‐eastern Australia induces island formation,salt marsh development,and carbon storage

Invasive vegetation species can lead to major changes in the geomorphology of coastal systems. Within temperate estuaries in the southern hemisphere, especially Australia and New Zealand, the cordgrass Spartina spp. has become established. These species are highly invasive, and their prolific growth leads to the development of supratidal environments in formerly intertidal and subtidal environments. Here, we quantified the impact of Spartina invasion on the geomorphology and sequestration capacity of carbon in the sediments of Anderson Inlet, Victoria, Australia. Spartina was first introduced to the area in the 1930s to aid in land reclamation and control coastal erosion associated with coastal development. We found that Spartina now dominates the intertidal areas of the Inlet and promotes accretion (18 mm/year) causing the formation of over 108 ha of supratidal islands over the past 100 years. These newly formed islands are calculated to potentially contain over 5.5 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent carbon. Future management of the inlet and other Spartina‐dominated environments within Australian presents a dilemma for resource managers; on the one hand, Spartina is highly invasive and can outcompete native tidal marshes, thereby warranting its eradication, but on the other hand it is likely more resilient to rising sea levels and has the potential for carbon sequestration. Whether or not the potential advantages outweigh the significant habitat change that is anticipated, any management strategies will likely require additional research into costs and benefits of all ecosystem services provided by Spartina including in relation to nutrient cycling, shoreline stabilisation, and biodiversity as well as in response to the longevity of carbon found within the sediments.