The contributions of economic factors to female involvement in economic crime

Recent assessments of the causes of female criminality have been praised as signaling a turning away from the unfounded, sexist explanations of the past. However, new interpretations of the causes of female crime are not more likely to be rooted in empirical data than the explanations that focused solely on female biology. This paper examines new trends in the explanation of female economic crime as well as empirical data on the motivations and attributes of femole, economic offenders and suggests direction for future research.     

“Sun Arise”: The Appropriation of Australia’s First Peoples’ Music, 1956–1974

While the music of Australia’s First Peoples contributes to a growing list of academic books and articles, the appropriation of that music by non-Indigenous pop musicians has received little academic attention. During the 1950s and 1960s, Australian audiences dismissed early attempts at fusing pop with Indigenous instrumentation as embarrassingly kitsch; at the same time, many Australian historians and archaeologists viewed Aboriginality as something primitive, a relic of the “stone-age”. Consequently, there was very little commentary on the cross-pollination between pop and Indigenous music. This article examines this phenomenon. Drawing on contemporary newspaper articles and vinyl record releases, this article argues that pop music appropriated Australia’s Indigenous music soon after art developing its fusions with Indigenous culture. Older popular musicians were more prepared to experiment than young pop performers. The reluctance of young pop musicians to experiment with Indigenous music was primarily an economic decision—American rock’n’rollers had captured the local teenage market. After more recordings of Aboriginal music became commercially available, interest in Indigenous music accelerated, and younger non-Indigenous musicians saw opportunities to incorporate Indigenous themes and instrumentation into their own material.     

Taking Murals Seriously: Basque Murals and Mobilisation

The purpose of this article is to take the admonition of taking the visual seriously into the realms of murals. It will present empirical data on contemporary murals in the Basque Country with a view to examining why murals are important to the abertzale-left, the broad left-wing nationalist movement in the Basque Country which includes but ranges far beyond the armed group ETA. The struggle for Basque autonomy from Spain has its roots in a nationalist awakening in the late twentieth century. It has developed through the struggle with fascism; the prolonged authoritarian, centralist state; and the transition to democracy after the death of Franco. Central to this development has been the definition of Basque identity in terms of culture rather than birth. Language has been key, but there has also been a visual strand to the struggle. The article will examine the state of that visual strand currently by examining murals on a range of themes: language and culture, independence and socialism, armed struggle, political prisoners, torture and repression, martyrs and heroes, women and environmental issues.     

Melancholia in Vita Sackville-West’s Hogarth Press Novels

Author Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) has been understood as an author who celebrates in both prose and verse the institution of the English country estate, in part because of her personal attachment to her family’s Kentish house, Knole. The four popular novels that Vita Sackville-West published with the Hogarth Press during the early 1930s—The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), Family History (1932), and The Dark Island (1934)—are no exception, save for their particular focus on the agnatic inheritance of both aristocratic title and estate along with the female subject’s exclusion from that system. While the first pair of novels entertain the possibility of mediated success in obtaining the loved object, either the estate itself or an effective substitute, the latter works become melancholically resigned to the restrictions that effectively disinherit the aristocratic eldest daughter. This escalating melancholia, often Freudian in its narrative presentation, directs the novels’ successive focus less toward the act of mourning the loss of the country house, of some version of Knole either real or imagined, and more to the vexing inability to both acknowledge the disinheritance and mourn the loss. In fact, the melancholic dynamic threatens to erase each of Sackville-West’s protagonists, and as her novels detail the advancing impact of this disinheritance, the female characters face literal extinction. Thus, the celebratory stance so often attributed to Sackville-West is, in these works, a far more critical and essentially abject perspective that demands compensation.     

Performance Monitoring Public Services in Australia

The Industry Commission, the former Bureau of Industry Economics and the Economic Planning Advisory Commission have amalgamated on an administrative basis to prepare for the formation of the Productivity Commission. Legislation establishing the new commission is before parliament.
The Industry Commission has been involved in a number of projects that monitor the performance of a range of government services across Australia. The first monitors the performance of a large number of Australia's major government trading enterprises and the second has begun the process of monitoring the performance of a range of government service providers.
This article outlines why measuring and monitoring performance can be used to improve public sector performance and provides two examples of how this tool can successfully be used in practice.