Should we be maintaining and preserving Indigenous languages? There have been ongoing discussions on whether or not Indigenous language should be taught in schools…but which language and who would teach it?
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/counterpoint/indigenous-languages/4652826
Shading in the heroes and villains of an animated realm is graphic novelist Dylan Horrocks. This week: Australian comics.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/nights/20130424
Tagged with rnz comics dylan horrocks new zealand australia
Rear Vision dives into the murky waters of superannuation to see just how Australia came up with its unusual system of retirement funding.
A means-tested age pension became available in Australia to all women aged sixty and men aged sixty five in 1910. It was - and is - paid out of general revenue. Superannuation – a retirement savings scheme in which our employer contributes a certain percentage of our wages into a fund – didn’t become widely available in Australia until it was introduced by the Keating government in the early 1990s. Rear Vision looks at how Australia came up with its unusual system of funding retirement through a mix of superannuation and the age pension.
Guests:
Professor Susan Thorp, Chair of Finance and Superannuation, University of Technology, Sydney
Peter Martin, Economics correspondent for Fairfax Media
Professor Francis Castles, Emeritus Professor, School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University
Further Information:
ASIC Money Smart (https://www.moneysmart.gov.au/superannuation-and-retirement)
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/superannuation-in-australia/4626038
Does Australia really care about Asia? Are we too narrow in our perspective of a relationship that may just be too one sided? Sure they are major trading partners but beyond that how much do we understand, or want to understand our near neighbours.
Guests:
Michael Wesley, Former Executive Director The Lowy Institute for International Policy. Former Professor of International Relations and Director of the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University, and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Hong Kong and Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China.
Publications:
Title: There Goes The Neighbourhood: Australia and the Rise of Asia
Author: Michael Wesley
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
ISBN: 978 1 742 232 720
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/counterpoint/australia-and-asia/4285814
To celebrate reaching double figures, the boys play a drinking game on this episode, as a result they are more relaxed, but it would be fair to say the quality suffers. Topics discussed on this episode include; lost in translation stories (quickly turns to a brag session), underage drinking, selling out and interpreting the 10 commandments for our information age…oh and the slap is back!
The Tin Sheds were a hothouse of art, music, ideas and politics. They were one of the most radical and memorable ‘alternative art spaces’ in Australia during their heyday from the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s. A group of dilapidated corrugated iron sheds across a busy city road from the University of Sydney were a place where — for a time — it seemed anything was possible.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/hindsight/the-hothouse/4162158
Mark Dodgson continues his look at innovation in Australia. We hear about Australian inventor Arthur Bishop (1917–2006), described as a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci. He took on the world car industry with his new steering mechanism. Politician John Button sought to modernise Australia’s backward approach to industry in the 1980s, and the CSIRO, bruised and battered at the turn of the century survives as it transforms itself making its research more market-focussed. This week it launched its latest flagship, concentrating on digital communications.
Warning: This radio documentary contains sexual references.
A century ago, Australian sex reformer William Chidley (c.1860-1916) was locked up for speaking openly about a taboo subject, and ultimately died in Callan Park Mental Hospital. But the moral outrage he provoked was largely to do with the kind of sex he advocated. It’s also what prompted later historians to call Chidley a ‘true feminist’.
Chidley’s ideas about how sex should proceed still raise an eyebrow and provoke responses ranging from ridicule to alarm. In essence, he wanted to demote the erection, and elevate instead the woman’s readiness as the crucial determiner of when sexual intercourse should start. The Answer was dedicated ‘to womankind’.
As well as being a sex reformer, Chidley was a dress and food reformer. To combat the human misery he saw all around him, he prescribed vegetarianism, fresh air, sunlight and unrestrictive clothing. But it was his critique of conventional sex that led him into trouble.
In the years leading up to the First World War, he was a familiar sight in the streets of Melbourne and Sydney, dressed in a simple Grecian-style tunic, selling his book The Answer and addressing crowds for as long as he could get away with graphically describing his recipe for ‘natural coition’. He was repeatedly arrested and prosecuted; one police record lists twenty-five court appearances between 1912 and 1916.
Even though he was regarded by many as a crank, Chidley gained a following and found people willing to defend him from persecution by the state. His supporters included free speech advocates, socialists and feminists. In this way, his story intersects with the most significant social movements of his day and forms part of the Australian history of radicalism.
In the end, the arbiters of public morality defeated Chidley. The Answer was suppressed by a Supreme Court decision in 1914, and on three occasions between 1912 and 1916 Chidley was declared insane, with compulsory detention at asylums in Darlinghurst, Callan Park and Goulburn. He died of heart disease at Callan Park, just a couple of months after a failed suicide attempt in gaol.
Good Sex – The Confessions and Campaigns of W.J. Chidley reveals how Chidley came to develop his unorthodox sexual theory through promiscuous life experience and wide reading in public libraries. It places his ideas in the broader context of social reform efforts around the turn of the century.
Along the way, we glimpse a vivid and contested social order in early twentieth century Australia. We are introduced to the disparate forces that lined up in Chidley’s defence, as well as the machinations deployed by the state to suppress him. Ultimately we learn why Chidley’s critique of the politics of sexual intercourse was anathema in a patriarchal state on the brink of war.
Guests:
Sally McInerney, Editor - The Confessions of William James Chidley – Keep an eye out for a new edition of Chidley’s Confessions which Sally McInerney is currently working on.
Associate Professor Frank Bongiorno, Associate Professor in History, Australian National University
Professor Mark Finnane, Professor of History, Griffith University
Dr Lisa Featherstone, Lecturer in History, University of Newcastle
Publications:
Title: The Confessions of William James Chidley
Author: W.J. Chidley edited by Sally McInerney
Publisher: University of Queensland Press, 1977
Title: The Answer
Author: W.J. Chidley
Publisher: Australasian Authors’ Agency, 1911
Title: The Sex Lives of Australians - A History
Author: Frank Bongiorno
Publisher: Black Inc. 2012
Title: ‘Censoring Sex: The Case of W.J. Chidley’
Author: Lisa Featherstone
Publisher: article currently in press
Title: ‘The Popular Defence of Chidley’
Author: Mark Finnane
Publisher: Labour History (journal), November 1981
Title: What Rough Beast? The State and Social Order in Australian History
Author: Sydney Labour History Group
Publisher: Allen & Unwin 1982
Australia in the years following European settlement was so markedly different from today. So much that we take for granted in food production, medicine, communications transport and much else had not been developed. The early settlers’ approach to innovation was shackled by a colonial dependence on imported technology and a focus on individuals rather than any collective endeavour. Despite this, Australia had its inventors tinkering and making great strides, some of which were at the forefront of the world’s developing technologies. What was their secret? What needs to happen now? And why have Australians not heard of Henry Sutton, described by Professor Mark Dodgson, presenter of this series, as possibly one of the greatest inventors in history?
Come on a journey to Woomera in search of space junk; the human debris that litters the universe but has come to earth, in Rocket Park, Woomera.
Space Junk is the detritus, the stuff left behind, circling the earth at enormous speed. Since the 1950s the vast outback deserts of central and western Australia have been considered the testing ground and launching pad for the British and American space programs and rocket testing. Woomera is central to this history—it owes its existence entirely to the space industry and weapons testing programs.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/360/space-junk/4496330
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