Taxes and dying. Two certainties in life, and that was certainly the case in colonial Sydney. For more than 150 years Customs House has provided the means of collecting taxes on the movement of goods

Journalist Jeff McGill recently wrote an opinion piece in the Campbel/town Macarthur Advertiser with the heading ‘Nothing “yucky” about fibro cottages’. He continued that ‘Macarthur’s first big housing development was Campbelltown’s St Elmo Estates of the 1950s, guided by Neil McLean, a much-loved developer’.1 The McLean St Elmo land releases were…[Read more]

Journalist Jeff McGill recently wrote an opinion piece in the Campbel/town Macarthur Advertiser with the heading ‘Nothing “yucky” about fibro cottages’. He continued that ‘Macarthur’s first big housing development was Campbelltown’s St Elmo Estates of the 1950s, guided by Neil McLean, a much-loved developer’.1 The McLean St Elmo land releases were…[Read more]

A review of three poetry collections by Obiorah Momife titled So Far Away, Eyes of the One Who Loves and Where Two Roads Meet. The three books contain some of the most pungent poems penned by any poet in contemporary Nigeria. They are witty and engaging just as they inspire the reader to take steps to change the present decadent situation that…[Read more]

The period of masonic internationalism in the last third of the 19th and first third of the 20th centuries saw the most visible – and controversial – attempts to organisationally model the “cosmopolitan imperative” of freemasonry. The various freemasonries in Europe saw themselves as links in a world-spanning “chain of brothers” forged by the…[Read more]

A response to the decision of Wiley Global to “disappear” 1,300+ of their ebooks in the ProQuest catalog at the beginning of the Fall 2022 term without any communication to university libraries at all, thus taking libraries by surprise and indicating Wiley’s move away from libraries as repositories and lenders of their ebooks, passing on costs to…[Read more]

“In Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline, Dora Apel goes on the offensive against the myriad myths and delusions peddled about the Motor City; not only that, she rebuffs the blame and shame that have traditionally been directed at the Detroit citizenry, and redirects our attention to the corporations and bureaucrats who…[Read more]

Lynn Margulis’s writing about symbiosis has profoundly influenced contemporary evolutionary theory, as well as continental and analytic philosophy of science, the materialist turn, and new materialism. Nonetheless, her work, and all symbiosis or evolution, is founded on a paradox: symbiosis fictionalizes customary accounts of the origin and e…[Read more]

This article represents an attempt at re-examining some critical issues that are related to progress. There are several questions to be addressed in the following pages: Is progress really necessary? What fundamental purpose does it serve? Can our civilization survive without progressing? Does progress have roots in nature or is it merely a human…[Read more]

In the current social and political turmoil, few issues are more divisive and cause more controversy than issues related to the rights of sexual minorities and gender dissidents. The polarizing impact of these issues is really astounding given the size of these two groups. Explanations for this divisiveness of LGBTQ rights focus on either the…[Read more]

In ‘Degeneration’ (1892), Max Nordau included Émile Zola in his theory that fin-de-siècle artists were a danger to society. According to Nordau, the ‘false science’ in Zola’s Naturalist novels would erode social progress in their alleged preoccupation with disease, sexual deviancy and amorality. This article proposes that degeneration is, how…[Read more]

Early European settlers were the key actors in a place-making exercise that constructed an English-style landscape aesthetic on the colonial stage in the Cowpastures district of New South Wales. The aesthetic became part of the settler colonial project and the settlers’ aim of taking possession of territory involved the construction of a c…[Read more]

Publication cultures in academia are as diverse as their underlying research cultures. In today’s often normative discourse on Open Access, there is a danger that this diversity will be neglected or even lost in the medium term in favor of techno-solutionist implementations. In the following, I will therefore take a closer look at the approach of…[Read more]

Publication cultures in academia are as diverse as their underlying research cultures. In today’s often normative discourse on Open Access, there is a danger that this diversity will be neglected or even lost in the medium term in favor of techno-solutionist implementations. In the following, I will therefore take a closer look at the approach of…[Read more]

Publication cultures in academia are as diverse as their underlying research cultures. In today’s often normative discourse on Open Access, there is a danger that this diversity will be neglected or even lost in the medium term in favor of techno-solutionist implementations. In the following, I will therefore take a closer look at the approach of…[Read more]

Course Description: In 2022 we will be looking at the theme of ‘Whose Apocalypse?’. We will develop an understanding of environmental issues such as climate change, resource depletion, long-term pollutants, extinctions, food and water security and more. Rather than assuming these issues affect all humans in similar ways, however, we will explore…[Read more]

Many scholars have argued that climate change is, in part, a problem of time, with ecological, political and social systems thought to be out of sync or mistimed. Discussions of time and environment are often interdisciplinary, necessitating a wide-ranging use of methods and approaches. However, to date there has been practically no direct…[Read more]

Haussmann’s re-building of Paris in the 1850s and ’60s had created an ordered city. However, the bourgeoisie used the new urban configurations as a weapon against the lower classes. This article describes the spaces of the underground and the overground: the underground is the metaphorical and literal rubbish heap for those in the lower parts of…[Read more]