'When it comes to our future, misplaced optimism is as dangerous as blind faith. What is needed is the courage to face the way things are, and the wisdom and imagination to work out how to make things better.' Australia's unprecedented run of economic growth has failed to deliver a more stable or harmonious society. Individualism is rampant. Income inequality is growing. Public education is under-resourced. The gender revolution is stalling. We no longer trust our major institutions or our political leaders. We are more socially fragmented, more anxious, more depressed, more overweight, more medicated, deeper in debt and increasingly addicted - whether to our digital devices, drugs, pornography or 'stuff'. Yet esteemed social researcher Hugh Mackay remains optimistic. Twenty-five years ago, he revolutionised Australian social analysis with the publication of Reinventing Australia. Now he takes another unflinching look at us and offers some compelling proposals for a more compassionate and socially cohesive Australia. You might not agree with everything he suggests, but you'll find it hard to get some of his ideas out of your head. Argued with intelligence and passion, this book is essential reading for everyone who loves Australia enough to want to make it a better place for us all.

Australian English is perhaps best known for its colourful slang, but the variety is much richer than slang alone. This collection provides a detailed account of Australian English by bringing together leading scholars of this English variety. These scholars provide a comprehensive overview of Australian English’s distinctive features and outline cutting-edge research into the variation and change of English in Australia. Organised thematically, this volume explores the ways in which Australian English differs from other varieties of English, as well as examining regional, social and stylistic variation within the variety. The volume first explores particular structural features where Australian English differentiates itself from other English varieties. There are chapters on phonetics and phonology, socio-phonetics, lexicon and discourse-pragmatics as these elements are core to understanding any variety of English, especially within the World Englishes paradigm. It then considers what are arguably the most salient aspects of variation within Australian English and finally focuses on historical, attitudinal and planning aspects of Australian English. This volume provides a thorough account of Australian English and its users as complex, diverse and worthy of study. Perhaps more importantly, this volume’s scholars provide a reimagining of Australian English and the paradigm through which future scholars may proceed.

This book re-evaluates New Left and Marxist texts from the 1980s, in order to explore problems facing the study of ‘class’ which have emerged within Australian and international theories. The author contrasts the popular ideas of Connell, Bourdieu and the ‘Death of Class’ thesis, with those of lesser known texts, concluding that no single definition can account for the various historical meanings of class. Instead, loosely following Castoriadis, the concept of class can best be understood as creatively imagined and institutionalised. Paternoster proposes that class is best studied through historical phenomenology, which can be used to link political economy, cultural sociology and anthropological ethnographies. This approach allows the contributions of Marxist and New Left authors to be reintegrated with contemporary theories. Doing so highlights the significance of labour populism, while cautioning against the ahistorical applications of texts such as Bourdieu’s Distinction. Reimagining Class in Australia will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, history, political economy and anthropology.

This book offers an ethnographically informed critique of the hyper-politicised debate on the facilitation of irregularised migration for people seeking asylum between Indonesia and Australia. While state authorities decry such facilitation as “people smuggling” and push for its criminalisation, the book’s focal points are the need for unsanctioned passages for people seeking asylum and the detrimental consequences of the criminalisation of “people smuggling” for both the facilitators and the people seeking asylum. Drawing on court verdicts and interviews with convicted facilitators and law enforcement officials in Indonesia, this book provides a unique and holistic picture of the causes, conditions, procedures and intricacies surrounding the facilitation of irregularised maritime journeys between Indonesia and Australia covering almost four decades. It scrutinises the micro-level operational and place-specific characteristics of people smuggling and the consequences of anti-people-smuggling policies in Indonesia and relates those consequences to changes in the macroenvironment, which include relevant legal, political, social and economic factors that determine the overarching conditions of irregularised mobility. Compared to other states in the Global North, Australia has claimed to be more “successful” with its comprehensive approach to eliminate unsanctioned migration at sea by combining punitive, communicative–reventive and interceptive measures. This book challenges key achievements and objectives in regard to criminalising the facilitation of irregularised migration by foregrounding the many negative side effects that have emanated from “stopping the boats”. The book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of anthropology and sociology, law and criminology, Asia-Pacific Studies, Southeast Asian Studies and international migration.

Planning Australia’s Healthy Built Environments shines a quintessentially Australian light on the links between land use planning and human health. A burgeoning body of empirical research demonstrates the ways urban structure and governance influences human health—and Australia is playing a pivotal role in developing understandings of the relationships between health and the built environment. This book takes a retrospective look at many of the challenges faced in pushing the healthy built environment agenda forward. It provides a clear and theoretically sound framework to inform this work into the future. With an emphasis on context and the pursuit of equity, Jennifer L. Kent and Susan Thompson supply specific ways to better incorporate idiosyncrasies of place and culture into urban planning interventions for health promotion. By chronicling the ways health and the built environment scholarship and practice can work together, Planning Australia’s Healthy Built Environments enters into new theoretical and practical debates in this critically important area of research. This book will resonate with both health and built environment scholars and practitioners working to create sustainable and health-supportive urban environments.

'How can I get in touch with this real self, underlying all my surface behaviour? How can I become myself?' Carl Rogers, US psychotherapist The Inner Self is a book about the ways we hide from the truth about ourselves and the psychological freedom we enjoy when we finally face that most searching question of all: 'Who am I, really?' Hugh Mackay explores our 'top 20' hiding places - from addiction to materialism, nostalgia to victimhood. He explains how it is our fear of love's demands that drive us into hiding. He argues that love is our highest ideal, the richest source of life's meaning and purpose, and the key to our emotional security, personal serenity and confidence. Yet Mackay exposes the great paradox of human nature, that while love brings out our best, we don't always want our best brought forward. Powerfully written and drawing on a lifetime of research, The Inner Self is a work of extraordinary insight by one of Australia's most respected psychologists.

Reading the Bible in Australia invites reflection about how the Bible matters to Australia. Contributors probe intersections between vital debates about Australian identity (who we have been, are, and aspire to become) and the Bible, bringing a range of perspectives to critical themes—indigeneity, colonization, and migration; landscape, biodiversity, and climate; gender and marginality; economics, ideology, and rhetoric. Each chapter explores the past and present influence of a biblical text or theme. Some offer fresh contextually and ethically informed readings. All interrogate the wider outcomes of reading the Bible in different ways. Given the tragic consequences of how it has been used historically, and sometimes still is, some Australians would exclude the Bible and its interpreters from public debate. Yet, as Meredith Lake’s The Bible in Australia demonstrates, “a degree of biblical literacy—along with critical skill in evaluating how the Bible has been taken up and interpreted in our history—can only help Australians grapple well with the choices Australia faces.” Love it or hate it, there is no getting around the reality that the Bible, and how it is read, still matters.

Explores neo-Victorianism in contemporary culture as a response to the impact of Imperial decline in postcolonial literature.

To do ethnography, a researcher must have rapport with research subjects. But what is rapport? Ethnography and ethnographic methods have increasingly become a feature of social inquiry in general and sociolinguistics in particular, and rapport is generally considered a prerequisite for fieldwork. And yet, unlike related terms such as "communication" and "phatic communion," this concept has remained largely unexamined. Reimagining Rapport turns a critical eye to the use of the term "rapport" across disciplines. The collection analyzes the very idea of rapport, both exploring how it has been shaped by historical forces and actors within sociocultural anthropology, and questioning its usefulness. Rather than viewing the term as simply denoting a type of positive social relationship that needs to be formed between researcher and consultant before research can begin, this book invites us to reimagine rapport theoretically, methodologically, and meta-methodologically. Zane Goebel and other leading sociolinguists challenge readers to think about how rapport has been constructed within these disciplines, and ultimately to see rapport as an emergent, co-constructed social relationship that is actively built during situated multimodal encounters. The contributors collectively examine the role of ideology and mediation in the construction of rapport, and argue that reconceptualizing research-subject relationships is essential for establishing more sophisticated ways of understanding, interpreting, and representing research context. A valuable resource for scholars and students of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropologyas well as for others engaged in ethnographic fieldworkReimagining Rapport is the first collection to provide an in-depth investigation of this critically important but previously unexamined concept.

Recognizing that climate politics has been an increasingly contentious and heated topic in Australia over the past two decades, this book examines Australian capitalism as a driver of climate change and the nexus between the corporations and Coalition and Australian Labor parties. As a highly developed country, Australia is punching above its weight in terms of contributing to greenhouse gas emissions despite rising temperatures, droughts, water shortages and raging bushfires, storm surges and flooding, and the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. Drawing upon both archival and ethnographic research, Hans Baer examines Australian climate politics at the margins, namely the Greens, the labour union, the environmental NGOs, and the grass-roots climate movement. Adopting a climate justice perspective which calls for "system change, not climate change" as opposed to the conventional approach of seeking to mitigate emissions through market mechanisms and techno-fixes, particularly renewable energy sources, this book posits system-challenging transitional steps to shift Australia toward an eco-socialist vision in keeping with a burgeoning global socio-ecological revolution. Accessibly written and including an interview with renowned comedian and climate activist Rod Quantock OAM, this book is essential reading for academics, students and general readers with an interest in climate change and climate activism.