Risky Drinking and Driving/Riding Decisions: The Role of Previous Experience

Factors related to risky drinking and driving/riding decisions were explored by presenting vignettes to 135 older adolescents, 17–24 years of age, with vignettes related to drinking and other social behaviors engaged in at a party. Analyses revealed that alcohol-related behaviors, attitudes toward the acceptability of drinking and driving, and previous drinking and driving/riding experiences were all significant predictors of decisions about driving or riding while intoxicated. Indeed, the overall model accounted for 46% of risky drinking and driving/riding decisions. As predicted, older respondents had more previous experiences with driving while intoxicated and riding with intoxicated drivers than did younger respondents, and they reported that drinking and driving was more acceptable among their peers. However, contrary to expectations, there were no differences in the number of risky decisions made by the two age groups or between males and females. The importance of previous experiences is discussed.     

Writing the Body

Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the mapping of bodies and spaces, edited by Rosalyn Diprose and Robyn Ferrell, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991.     

Anti‐Cartel or Anti‐Foreign? Australian Attitudes to Anti‐Competitive Behaviour before the First World War

More than a century elapsed between Australia's first legislative attempts to modify anticompetitive behaviour (the Australian Industries Preservation Act 1906) and its most recent efforts to criminalise price fixing (Trade Practices Amendment (Cartel Conduct and Other Measures) Act 2009). After a burst of activity in the first decade of Federation, the intervening years saw only sporadic interest by governments to promote competitive markets, with limited impact until the late 1960s. This paper assesses the first period of Australia's attempts to promote competition. It traces the political, economic and social environments of anticompetitive business behaviour in Australia from 1901 up to World War I. We suggest that Australia's initial forays into regulating cartels were motivated more by protectionist aims than by efforts to increase competition, which in part also explains the next half‐century of legislative apathy towards anti‐competitive legislation.     

From Protection to Competition: The Politics of Trade Practices Reform in Australia and the Trade Practices Act 1965

The Trade Practices Act 1965 was widely criticised as being weak and unproductive. It was a significantly watered‐down version of the original Bill overseen by Garfield Barwick. Although the final form of the Act was perceived as ineffective at the time, it is now viewed as an important step towards a national competition policy and a precursor to the opening up of the Australian economy. This paper outlines the economic, political and social background to the introduction of the legislation. We specify some of the factors that explain why its creation caused controversy and its importance in initiating change in Australians' attitudes towards collusive behaviour and economic protectionism.     

From autobiography to biography: Roma the First

Roma Flinders Mitchell, 1913–2000, AC, DBE, Queen's Counsel, Judge, Founding Chair of the Human Rights Commission, Chancellor of the University of Adelaide, Governor of South Australia, was the first woman in Australia—often also the first in the British Commonwealth—to gain the positions and honours that gild any narrative of her life. How did she do this? What was it like for her? Such questions follow immediately. And then, making it more complicated, what else was there in her life besides achievements and honours? What other doors opened before her as she moved through her days? And what doors closed? How did she choose some doors and not others?

These are questions that we are addressing in our biography of Roma Flinders Mitchell. They are not questions that we will consider here, though. Rather, our subject in this article is not our narrative but Roma Mitchell's own story of her life. It develops into a three‐stranded narrative, composed principally of interviews for press and television, predominantly during the last decades of her life. It is therefore a story shaped by her recognition of herself as exceptional, ‘Roma the First’, and also by other people's desires that she be—for them—precisely that: ‘Roma the First’. This is the ‘authorised’ narrative of Roma Mitchell's life, the story that she told herself. Many regard it as unquestionably definitive, and therefore determining. Yet, it does, itself, prompt an array of questions.

The story is set in Australia, ‘the last of lands, the emptiest’ wrote poet A.D. Hope, in a time that historian Michael Ignatieff deemed ‘“the worst century there has ever been,” in wanton destruction of human life and in murderous unreason masking itself as reason’. More specifically, it takes its beginning from the early years of the twentieth century, in the city of Adelaide, core of a British colony founded less than a century earlier, on the plain that had basked in the custodianship of the Kaurna people before the arrival of the ships from Britain, roughly in the middle of the southern curve defining the Australian continent. The forms that appear in the story derive from those origins: the British law which the colonists practised, with all its theatrical paraphernalia and terminology; a gradually developing copy of Westminster government, but with deference to British rule and allegiance always observed; education adopted from schools and universities in England and Scotland. Only in its churches was it distinct, for, among all of Britain's colonies in Australia, South Australia was the ‘paradise of dissent’. Here, on the edge of the anglophone world, this story did not so much unfold as gather itself together and take off.     

Encouraging Writing on the White Walls: Co‐production in Museums and the Influence of Professional Bodies

Museums, along with other public sector organisations, have been urged to co‐produce. Co‐production may offer increased resourcing and greater effectiveness, and enhances public value through stronger relationships between government and citizens. However, co‐production, particularly that which involves collaboration with communities, is largely resisted by public sector organisations such as museums. This research examines the extent to which museums co‐produce and the role played by professional bodies in driving or inhibiting co‐production. It finds that the study of co‐production in museums reveals the influence of ‘institutional inertia’ and the limits to which professional bodies are able to ‘diffuse’ co‐production and change established professional practice.