australia Archives

The Known Soldier

In 2009, the Australian and British governments, in collaboration with French authorities, began a programme of exhumation and DNA-testing of 250 Australian soldiers from the First World War Battle of Fromelles. It was the first large-scale application of modern forensic techniques to a mass grave from the War, and thousands of potential relatives came forward to offer a sample of their DNA for matching with soldiers in the grave. It was a highly successful investigation. Over 70% of the dead were identified and the Commonwealth War Grave Commission constructed a new cemetery to rebury them. A new museum was constructed soon after, and Fromelles was transformed as a heritage site.

The Known Soldier brings this remarkable endeavour to life through interviews with relatives of soldiers who died at Fromelles and undertakes a critical assessment of how genetic testing intersects with memory and mourning. Relatives reflect on the temporal, affective, political and ethical dimensions of DNA-testing war dead, as scientific advances allow these investigations to reach further back in time. This book examines the state’s use of scientific methods in its official commemoration of war, and considers how relatives navigate, and sometimes resist, scientific methods and official narratives. The stories of individual soldiers that emerge shape the historical and political representation of the battle at key moments such as its centenary.

Walter Benjamin’s Ark

In July 1940, amidst fear of Nazi invasion, HMT Dunera left England. On board were a few British soldiers guarding over 2000 interned male Enemy Aliens, mostly Germans. Some of the internees were passionate Nazis, but most were Jewish refugees. Among them was Stefan Raphael Benjamin, the estranged child of the German-Jewish intellectual, Walter Benjamin.

Cue Walter Benjamin’s Ark which re-reads the life and work of Walter Benjamin via the curious life of his only child. The focal point is Stefan’s dramatic voyage from England to Australia in 1940, a voyage rich in intellectual suggestion, shared as it was with obscure men with famous names such as Wittgenstein, Kafka, Marx and Wilde. Central to the book is the one substantive text that can be ascribed to Stefan: Benjamin’s meticulous transcription of Stefan’s utterances as an infant. This fascinating text has been largely overlooked, despite the insistence of Benjamin’s biographers that ‘it continued to play a role in Walter Benjamin’s writing until the end of his life’. This book thus seeks not only to bring into view the intriguing figure that is Stefan but also to identify him as that most crucial of Benjaminian spectres, namely, the secret ‘you’ or addressee of Benjamin’s writings.

Panopticon versus New South Wales and other writings on Australia

The present edition of Panopticon versus New South Wales and other writings on Australia consists of fragmentary comments headed ‘New Wales’, dating from 1791; a compilation of material sent to William Wilberforce in August 1802; three ‘Letters to Lord Pelham’ and ‘A Plea for the Constitution’, written in 1802–3; and ‘Colonization Company Proposal’, written in August 1831, the majority of which is published here for the first time. These writings, with the exception of ‘Colonization Company Proposal’, are intimately linked with Bentham’s panopticon penitentiary scheme, which he regarded as an immeasurably superior alternative to criminal transportation, the prison hulks, and English gaols in terms of its effectiveness in achieving the ends of punishment. He argued, moreover, that there was no adequate legal basis for the authority exercised by the Governor of New South Wales. In contrast to his opposition to New South Wales, Bentham later composed ‘Colonization Company Proposal’ in support of a scheme proposed by the National Colonization Society to establish a colony of free settlers in southern Australia. He advocated the ‘vicinity-maximizing principle’, whereby plots of land would be sold in an orderly fashion radiating from the main settlement, and suggested that, within a few years, the government of the colony should be transformed into a representative democracy.

Jeremy Bentham and Australia

Jeremy Bentham and Australia is a collection of scholarship inspired by Bentham’s writings on Australia. These writings are available for the first time in authoritative form in Panopticon versus New South Wales and other writings on Australia, a volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham published by UCL Press.

In the present collection, a distinguished group of authors reflect on Bentham’s Australian writings, making original contributions to existing debates and setting agendas for future ones. In the first part of the collection, the works are placed in their historical contexts, while the second part provides a critical assessment of the historical accuracy and plausibility of Bentham’s arguments against transportation from the British Isles. In the third part, attention turns to Bentham’s claim that New South Wales had been illegally founded and to the imperial and colonial constitutional ramifications of that claim. Here, authors also discuss Bentham’s work of 1831 in which he supports the establishment of a free colony on the southern coast of Australia. In the final part, authors shed light on the history of Bentham’s panopticon penitentiary scheme, his views on the punishment and reform of criminals and what role, if any, religion had to play in that regard, and discuss apparently panopticon-inspired institutions built in the Australian colonies.

This collection will appeal to readers interested in Bentham’s life and thought, the history of transportation from the British Isles, and of British penal policy more generally, colonial and imperial history, Indigenous history, legal and constitutional history, and religious history.

Regulating Content on Social Media

How are users influenced by social media platforms when they generate content, and does this influence affect users’ compliance with copyright laws?

These are pressing questions in today’s internet age, and Regulating Content on Social Media answers them by analysing how the behaviours of social media users are regulated from a copyright perspective. Corinne Tan, an internet governance specialist, compares copyright laws on selected social media platforms, namely Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter and Wikipedia, with other regulatory factors such as the terms of service and the technological features of each platform. This comparison enables her to explore how each platform affects the role copyright laws play in securing compliance from their users. Through a case study detailing the content generative activities undertaken by a hypothetical user named Jane Doe, as well as drawing from empirical studies, the book argues that – in spite of copyright’s purported regulation of certain behaviours – users are ‘nudged’ by the social media platforms themselves to behave in ways that may be inconsistent with copyright laws.