The Diaries of Daisy Smith: The Experience of Citizenship for an Exempted Family in Mid‐Twentieth Century Queensland

There has been limited sustained analysis of the lived reality of citizenship amongst Indigenous Australians exempted from protectionist legislation last century. Through examining the diaries of Daisy Smith, this paper explores how her household, exempted from such legislation in Queensland, experienced citizenship during the 1940s and early 1950s. The diaries show that Daisy Smith and her family exercised civil, political and social rights of citizenship, enjoyed meaningful lives and had a sense of belonging to the Australian nation. However, they also show that Daisy Smith constantly worked hard to uphold the conditions of exemption and protect her family's exempted Aboriginal status. These conditions required the Smith family to deny and relinquish all connection with their Indigenous heritage and embrace the dominant Anglo‐Celtic culture or risk losing exemption. In this way, their inclusion in the Australian nation and enjoyment of citizenship rights were conditional upon them being manifestly normative Anglo‐Celtic citizens. Their experience of citizenship was by its nature restrictive and coercive.     

Building a nation: religion and values in the public schools of the USA,Australia, and South Africa

Although the systems of public schools differ among Australia, South Africa and the USA, all three countries recognize that religion plays a significant role in determining values. All three countries have written constitutions but only South Africa and the USA have a Bill of Rights that protects persons’ exercise of religious beliefs. In Australia, the place of religion in education has largely been shaped by state legislatures, administrative regulations and interpretations of the national constitution. In the USA, the long tradition of religious values being represented in public education has been severely restricted over the past 60 years, resulting in artificial judicial lines being drawn between private religious expression and government expression. However, even private expression can be prohibited if it interferes with the educational mission of a school. South Africa had a long tradition of Christian religious practices in government schools under apartheid. However, the post-apartheid 1996 Constitution and 1996 South African Schools Act still give these schools considerable latitude in investing religious values into the educational process. In Australia, values, religion and education have always been a preoccupation of those providing education, although the blurring of public and private education in Australia has resulted in a different direction for the role of religion than in the USA.     

Exploring the Impact of Child Sex Offender Suicide

This paper explores the issues and widespread impact surrounding child sex offenders (CSO) who commit suicide after learning they are under criminal investigation. This phenomenon, which has received scant attention in the literature, affects family, friends, and victims of offenders who may experience a range of conflicting emotions including anger, guilt, confusion, betrayal, and loss. Involved law enforcement may, likewise, experience a range of complex reactions. Law enforcement personnel are neither trained nor required to assess offenders’ suicidality. However, awareness of how CSOs are impacted by an investigation may mitigate the risk of suicide and enhance operational strategies, including officer safety.     

Australian Medical Intellectuals and the Great War

This article considers the way in which the Great War created unique conditions where medical intellectuals became part of a wider canvas of debate about psychology and medicine; mind and body; and, more broadly, crossed the artificial divide between the humanities and the medical sciences. Medicine has not been usually identified as a field for “intellectuals” as such. The nature of cultural and social analysis lends itself more readily to those working in the fields of sociology, political science, literature and history. But the medical intellectuals who are the subject of this article can be seen as extending our understanding of the relationship between the self and society. Such an intellectual engagement was considerably assisted, it is argued, by the advent of the Medical Journal of Australia a month before the outbreak of war. which initially served to document practices associated with medical science, but quickly evolved into a journal that connected medicine to the broader society and wider culture. The devastating impact of the war provided an extraordinary context within which these discussions took place, and radically challenged many assumptions held by the medical profession, especially with regard to the relationship between the mind and the body.     

The 2005 World Summit: UN Reform, Security, Environment and Development

This article reviews the negotiations leading up to the High-Level Plenary Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, which centred on United Nations reform, a review of the Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and a follow-up of major UN conferences. The article considers the human security concept and the different perspectives of developed and developing countries in environmental negotiations. It provides an overview of the negotiations in the months before the Summit. The final part of the article considers the outcome of the World Summit and institutional questions related to the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and the new UN Peace-Building Commission.