Informit Records: Magazine

Arena Quarterly, ISSN 2652-4775, is available from Informit.

Arena Magazine is currently included in two Informit full text products: Australian Public Affairs collection: Full Text - Issue 1 (1991) onwards, and Humanities & Social Sciences collection: Full Text - Issue 100 (Apr/June 2009) onwards.

Arena Journal (peer reviewed, published by Arena Printing and Publishing Pty Ltd, ISSN: 1320-6567) is included in: Australian Public Affairs collection: Full Text - Issue 1 (1992) onwards, and Literature & Culture collection: Full Text - Issue 21 (2003) onwards.

PDF copies of all individual articles are available for purchase from Informit.

The university: Eats its own

Gerd Schroder-Turk and academic freedom The news that Murdoch University is suing one of its own staff, Gerd Schroder-Turk, after he made comments on an ABC program is yet another indication that universities are little more than corporatised accreditation factories whose relationship to knowledge is not framed by truth or critical inquiry but by the generation of capital-where academic freedom has been sacrificed to the university brand. After Schroder-Turk, an associate professor and a member…

Are we all Keynesians (again) now ? [Book Review]

Review(s) of: In the long run we are all dead: Keynesianism, political economy and revolution, by Geoff Mann, Verso, 2019.

The proper truth

Is what a translator of Basho wrote to me: that the poem is not in the words...

Indigenous lives matter

The broken NT legal system, 'disremembering', and the Indigenous struggle For over twenty years Indigenous people in the Northern Territory have been subjected to increasing oppression, punitive measures and abuse by government social policies and criminal-law reforms. Their vulnerability to this has been compounded by a legal system that over this period has deteriorated in quality and standards. Their own legal representation, the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA), has been a collaborator with governments…

Finisterre

I'm standing at the end of the earth - where the old world ends on the rim of the Atlantic...

Screwtape Redux: A Devil’s Vaunt

What muddles may we not wring from such heads...

Finding a way forward [Book Review]

Review(s) of: Being left wing in Australia: Identity, culture and politics after socialism, by Geoff Robinson, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2019.

Three shots

The death of Kumanjayi Walker - the Northern Territory as police state 'Three shots were fired.' The acting deputy police commissioner of the Northern Territory thrust three fingers into the air as he addressed the crowd of grieving and angry residents who gathered on the Yuendumu basketball courts two days after Kumanjayi Walker had been shot and killed by police.

An Australian narrative

Arena Magazine came into being thirty years ago as contemporary Australia was being born. What is that beast? Trying to disentangle the recent history of Australia from its mythical past sometimes seems akin to labouring under the lights in Ceaușescu's enormous national kitsch factory, Romania's Palace of People, trying to sort plaster myth from real ornament. But it also seems a good time to try to do so, as this magazine of Australian commentary changes…

White House vs Deep State

Trump, Clinton and the US national-security establishment According to investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, the CIA and other allied intelligence agencies threw their considerable political weight behind Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. She was rightly seen as more interventionist than Trump, particularly on Syria, as she had been on Libya, while her opponent seemed disturbingly close to Russia's Vladimir Putin - an approach directly at odds with Deep State assumptions of permanent hostility between…

Privileged images

Review(s) of: The Souvenir, by Joanna Hogg, 2019.

Social agency and the anthropocene

Intellectual practice as social form, high-tech science as bearer of the Anthropocene There could hardly be a more dramatic development than is occurring today where the balance of powers between the natural world and one of its component species - 'Homo sapiens' - shifts, such that 'Homo sapiens' becomes a significant driver of changes that begin to shape, even unbalance, the natural world. This process is what is increasingly being called the Anthropocene.