Quest for grace: fraternal authority and feminine resistance in colonial Australia

The emergence of feminism in Australia, as elsewhere, was grounded in personal experience. This paper explores the small and private rebellion of one woman against fraternal authority, an episode that took place before women had access to a feminist ideology with which to express their feelings of oppression. It argues that an examination of the tissue of domestic life – in this instance, a tiff about piano-playing – can be read at a number of levels: as a metaphor of inarticulate resistance and as an important precondition for feminism.     

Cause for concern: young women and leisure, 1930–50

During the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s the leisure of young women attracted much interest from youth workers, psychologists and educationalists. Indeed, in 1939 their leisure became an organised and respectable focus of state intervention. This article addresses how, and in what ways, the leisure of young women came to acquire significance as an issue of concern, object of analysis, and sphere of intervention. The argument developed here is that public approaches to young women's leisure need to be understood in terms of the ways in which ‘leisure’ was discursively constructed during the inter-war period as a social phenomenon of considerable significance, and how this intersected with discourses on female adolescence within a framework of concern for the stability of British society and democracy. Such concerns about society were strong throughout the inter-war period but were intensified during and immediately after the Second World War. The interconnection of these three themes of ‘leisure’, ‘adolescence’ and societal stability are illustrated with reference to discussions in the 1930s and 1940s about what constituted the problem of young women's leisure and suggestions concerning young women's leisure needs.     

Endeavours to export a migration crisis: Policy making and Europeanisation in the German migration dilemma

This article examines the potential for ‘Europeanising’ the policy process within Germany ‐ examining the constraints and facilitators that have played a defining role in ‘Europeanising’ asylum and immigration issues. It demonstrates that despite the magnitude of the asylum crisis within Germany, blockages evident within the domestic policy process initially prevented a domestic policy solution. In response the federal government instituted a concerted attempt to resolve the issue outside the domestic arena, exporting the issue to the European decisional level. The processes that governed policy making on the European level within this policy sector proved incapable, however, of adequately addressing the issue. Thus, although agreement on the need to harmonise asylum and immigration policies was forthcoming, consensus on the means to achieve and implement substantive policy harmonisation proved elusive. The ‘Europeanisation’ of asylum and immigration policies within Germany has therefore been inherently limited. In response the German government felt compelled to supplement measures agreed at the European level both with a renewed effort within the domestic arena to resolve the constitutional deadlock and through bilateral agreements with their eastern neighbours.     

Electronic Monitoring of Offenders

This article discusses what the electronic monitoring of offenders involves and the use that is now being made of electronic monitoring within the criminal justice system in England and Wales.     

Is the Environment Getting Its Fair Share? An Analysis of the Australian Water Reform Process Using a Social Justice Framework

Australia is currently undergoing fundamental and far-reaching reforms in water management that have been prompted by wide-spread environmental degradation caused by past water management practices. This paper is an extract of a wider study that explores how governments incorporate social justice into water reform policies and how that effort is perceived by non-government stakeholders. Using a comprehensive Social Justice Framework, we used a mixed methods approach that combines a quantitative content analysis of key water reform documents with a qualitative semistructured interview process to identify and analyse three principles of social justice that apply to the environment as a water stakeholder: need as a distributive justice principle, representativeness and accuracy as procedural justice principles. We found that the environment is identified as a legitimate water stakeholder whose needs are meant to be assured through the water reform process. However, the environment suffers from a crisis of identity. Other water stakeholders claim to speak for the environment but say different things. Thus, due to a diversity of voices, strong government intention to satisfy environmental needs is diluted in practice. Furthermore, the prerogative to define and measure environmental needs through science, while deemed to be fair and objective, leads to unintended consequences that complicate management and disenfranchise less scientifically capable stakeholders. Overall, we believe that the formal recognition of the environment as a stakeholder in water reform is a significant forward step but its crisis of identity must be resolved before the environment can fully utilise its new role as a stakeholder.     

‘Unhomely moments’: Civilising domestic worlds in colonial Australia

This article explores the multiple connections between the colonisation of Australia in the nineteenth century and the formation of domestic worlds as the site for ‘civilising’ children. The affective bonds of family were often regarded as an indispensable element in the nurture and training of children, but where the bonds of ‘natural affection’ seemed to pose an obstacle to the civilising project, they were ruthlessly severed.