CASS News Reel: 2009

Senator The Hon Joe Ludwig joined numerous College of Arts & Social Sciences alumni, staff & students and their guests in launching the publication, Australia: The State of Democracy.

Written by CASS’ Political Scientists, Professor Marian Sawer AO, Dr Norman Abjornsen and Dr Phil Larkin, the book outlines how Australia was an early pioneer of a notional democracy that is now prescribed as inseparable from good governance, as a recipe for accountability and as an antidote to corruption.

Are you looking for funds to enable you to engage or collaborate with international researchers? Would a travel grant to get you overseas, or to bring an international leader in your field to Australia, help you (and your colleagues) establish new collaborative research relationships? 

Then you should apply for the new funding programme for humanities and creative arts scholars administered by the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

ANU School of Art graduate, Danie Mellor (PhD 2005), has been awarded Australia’s prestigious Indigenous art prize – the national Telstra Art Award, at the 26th Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award for his work titled From Rite to Ritual.

Measuring 2.07m x 1.54m the mixed media on paper artwork features intricate layers of imagery with Aboriginal people and Indigenous animals placed against a setting that is littered with elements of European culture.

From Rite to Ritual explores the encounter and fragile co-existence between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, or settler cultures. In this case the meeting place is the interior of a Freemason’s lodge and the work highlights the importance of secret and public ceremony and initiation in both cultures; it speaks of the challenges of settlement, and the differences in spiritual enactment and belief.

After Anzac Cove and the Kokoda Track, the Thai-Burma Railway is one of the most important sites for the commemoration of Australian war history overseas. Thousands of tourists visit it each year and the Australian Government funds a memorial museum at Hellfire Pass cutting. But what do the people of Thailand make of this reverence for a part of their territory and fragment of their history? Thai and Australian students have gone some way to bridging that divide in a new project on cultural memory and war heritage.

by Simon Couper from the ANU Reporter