Spring 2003

NEWSLETTER NO. 27         SPRING 2003
THE EDWARD A. CLARK CENTER FOR AUSTRALIAN & NEW ZEALAND STUDIES
THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

 

Henry Albinski, Pioneer of Australian and New Zealand Studies, DiesProfessor Henry Albinski, founder of the Penn State Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies and of the Australian Studies Association of North America (ASANA), succumbed to lymphoma in Sydney on April 6, 2003. At his death Henry was 71 years old. His life and work were celebrated in a memorial service at Sydney University late in April. Henry was a close friend and prized adviser of the Clark Center, and it is appropriate to remember his splendid life and work in this Yacker.

Born in Chicago in 1931, Henry was the son of Stephen and Josephine Wilczynski Albinski, who had migrated from Poland. Henry took his B.A. and M.A. degrees in political science from U.C.L.A. during the early 1950's and in 1959 he obtained his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota. From that year he was a faculty member of Penn State University for the next four decades. There he specialized on Australia's politics and its foreign and defense policies, and on the manifold relations between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Over the course of his career, Henry published 15 books and several hundred articles and essays on these topics. He was without question the leading North American academic authority on them.
Beginning in the early 1980's, Henry was the driving force behind Australian and New Zealand Studies in this country. He founded the Penn State Center in 1982, and it quickly became the primary locus for academic work on Australia and New Zealand, as well as the U.S. destination for many scholars from both countries. In John Keller, Bob Brand and others, Henry created at Penn State a lively group of Australian and New Zealand specialists who were dedicated to fostering greater American knowledge about the two countries. Once the Clark Center was founded in 1988, Henry worked closely with John Higley, Desley Deacon, Frank Poyas, Robert and Frances Cushing, Robert Ross, and others in Austin to make the new Center a success. Aided and abetted by his wife Nan, during the early 1990s Henry worked tirelessly to create ASANA.
When budget pressures forced the Penn State Center's closure in 1998, Henry became Visiting Professor in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. At Sydney Henry and Rawdon Dalrymple, Australia's former Ambassador to the U.S., worked during the remaining years of Henry's life to build a major focus on Australia-U.S. relations - teaching courses and supervising students, hosting conferences, pouring out publications, and, as ever, playing a sparkplug role for academic and policy work on the two countries.
Even after he was diagnosed with lymphoma in May 2002, Henry continued to lecture and write about the subjects that had preoccupied him throughout his career. He battled his illness for nearly a year while continuing to bombard his friends and colleagues with e-mailed ideas and observations about Australia and the U.S. The Clark Center and all American scholars working on the Antipodes will long cherish Henry Albinski's warm friendship and all that he accomplished. 

 

Message from the Director

Now that Australia has withdrawn its military forces from Iraq, the most important item on the Australia-U.S. agenda is negotiation of a bilateral Free Trade Agreement. In early May I attended a major conference on U.S. Free Trade Agreements, held at the Institute for International Economics in Washington. The conference surveyed prospects for FTA's between the U.S. and a number of countries around the world, but it was agreed that an FTA with Australia has pride of place. Both governments have ordered an acceleration of the FTA negotiations, which began in February, so that they will be concluded late this year, perhaps even in time for President Bush's tentatively scheduled October visit to Australia.

If adopted, the FTA will be another milestone in the two countries' relations. It will foster further integration of their business communities, with investment and personnel moving more freely and in greater magnitudes between them. The FTA will also have an important security overlay because it will cement cooperation between Australia and the U.S. in combating terrorism in Southeast Asia and beyond.
The FTA is not without obstacles. Various provisions covering agriculture will be opposed by agricultural lobbies in both countries, provisions governing Intellectual Property Rights will be opposed by Australians who fear American domination of their cultural industries, and there are problems with Australia's pharmaceutical benefits scheme, Australian access to the totally protected U.S. fast ferry market, the high U.S. tariff on imported light trucks, Australia's protected government procurement market -- just to mention some of the sticking points. Nevertheless, from all that I could glean in Washington, trade officials on both sides are confident that these and other problems will be overcome, and at their most senior levels the two governments are committed to a deal.
Those who follow Australian politics and who are mindful of the conspicuous anti-American sentiment that the Iraq venture unleashed wonder how much of a fight there will be over this FTA.  ALP leaders have repeatedly pronounced themselves "skeptical" about the venture, and probably the Greens, and what's left of the Australian Democrats, will oppose it outright. Considerable opposition, some of it virulent, can also be expected from segments of the academic, artistic, and general intellectual community. In the U.S., by contrast, it must be doubted that the FTA will get on the public's radar screen at all.  On the other hand, whereas Congressional approval of the FTA is necessary in the U.S., it will apparently not require formal approval by the Australian Parliament, although implementing legislation will have to go through Parliament and could spark significant fighting, especially in the Senate.
When at the A.N.U. during June and July, I hope to get a better sense of how much the FTA question will roil Australia's political waters. I hope, too, that I might finds ways in which the Clark Center can assist this major change in Australia-U.S. relations.                        
 John Higley
Faculty News
Prof. David Anderson has been on research leave from his position in the Law School at UT-Austin during the spring semester to take up residence first at the Univ. of Melbourne Law School and then with the Law Faculty at Murdoch University. While visiting these universities, he worked on a law review article that compares First Amendment limitations on tort law in the U.S. with how the High Court has made common law rules instead of  constitutional rules to limit torts such as defamation. Prof. Anderson lectured on this topic at Melbourne and Murdoch universities and at the ANU's Research School of Social Sciences.
Prof. Don Graham, who has taught a course on Australian literature and film in UT's Dept. of English each semester during the past decade, has published a book about The Kings of Texas: The 150-Year Saga of an American Ranching Empire (New York: Wiley, 2003).  Dealing with the famed King Ranch in South Texas, this is Graham's fourth book about Texas and Texan culture. During the spring semester he traveled widely across the U.S. to give talks about the King Ranch and its place in Texas lore.
Prof. John Higley, Clark Center Director, has completed the second of his four years as Chair of UT's Government Department. With 2,000 undergraduate majors, this is the University's largest department. In February, Prof. Higley attended this year's ANZSANA meetings in Philadelphia; in early April he presented a paper on "The Bush Elite and America's Post-9/11 Democracy" to the European Consortium for Political Research Workshops in Edinburgh, Scotland; and during May he attended a Washington conference on US trade policy; and he gave an analysis of current Australian political developments as part of a day-long Australia briefing for this year's National Association of Foreign Studies Advisors (NAFSA) meetings in Salt Lake City. After attending a conference about European Parliamentary Elites 1848-2000 in Granada, Spain, Prof. Higley will be in residence at ANU's Research School of Social Sciences from June 23rd until the end of July, where he is Adjunct Professor of Political Science.
Dr. Jane Maxwell, a Research Scientist with UT's Center for Social Work Research, recently presented a paper about substance abuse to the Australian Institute of Criminology in Canberra and the University of Queenland's Alcohol and Drug Research Centre. Dr. Maxwell will be back at U.Q. (St. John's College) from June 26th to July 17th to deliver the keynote address at this year's Drug Abuse Conference in Brisbane and to present a paper at a second conference on drug abuse that will take place in Townsville.    
Prof. Roy Mersky, Director of the Tarleton Law Liberary at UT, will be in Australia during July to deliver a paper about the evolution of legal dictionaries for the Law and Language Conference that is being hosted by the International Association of Forensic Linguists at Sydney University.
Dr. Robert Ross, the former distinguished editor of Antipodes and Center Research Associate, has returned to Dallas, accompanied by his wife Anita, from three years of living in Aachen, Germany, where Anita worked in Germany's high tech sector.
Prof. Ross Terrill, who has taught a course on Australian Politics in UT's Government Department during each of the past four spring semesters, has published a book about The New Chinese Empire: What it Means for the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2003). The Australian Embassy hosted a public launch of Terrill's new book early in April, and the public attention given to the book has made for a busy schedule of talks and book signings around the U.S.

Graduate Student News
Two Ph.D. candidates who are writing dissertations on Australian topics in UT's Government Department, Greg Brown and Rhonda Evans Case, were both Assistant Instructors, teaching courses that had significant Australian content, throughout the 2002-03 academic year. Brown is analyzing the Croate and Serb diasporas in Australia, principally in Melbourne, and the politics that suffused them during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990's. Evans Case is writing about the conjunction and disjunction between international legal treaties and conventions and national politics in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.S. Having both received excellent student evaluations, they have been reappointed as Assistant Instructors for the 2003-04 academic year.
Two graduate students in UT's School of Social Work completed their social work internships while at Flinders University this spring. Kristen Knight was an intern at the Adelaide Central Mission Youth and Parent Services Program, and Andrea Lasater worked as an intern at the Anglicare Loss and Grief Centre in Adelaide.
Dr. Jason Pierce, a former graduate student closely affiliated with the Clark Center, has completed his first year as Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Dayton. During May and early June Dr. Pierce has taken four Dayton students to Sydney and Canberra for field research on the High Court, which was the focus of his doctoral dissertation.
Anglo-Celtic Australia
Prof. Alyson Greiner, Associate Professor of Geography at Oklahoma State University, and Prof. Terry Jordan-Bychkov, who holds the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas in UT's Geography Department, have this past spring published a handsome volume that expands greatly on the doctoral research Prof. Greiner did with Clark Center support when she was a Ph.D. student at U.T. during the 1990's. Titled Anglo-Celtic Australia: Colonial Immigration and Cultural Regionalism (Santa Fe: The Center for American Places, 2003), the book reconsiders Australia's Anglo-Celtic origins and cultural legacies.

The data underpinning this reconsideration are novel in the extreme because they derive from the authors' personal inspections of stones marking 13,499 graves in 565 graveyards located over the length and breadth of Eastern Australia. As John Higley writes in his Foreword to the book, it asks how much cultural variation there is among Australia's major regions, especially in material culture, and whether this variation can be traced to uneven patterns of free migration from the British Isles after about 1830. Higley observes that this research into the supply side of Anglo-Celtic migration to Australia turns up many nuggets that, when added, alter significantly our understanding of Australian culture today.

 

Philadelphia ANZSANA Meeting A Success

Hosted by John Wells and Arcadia University in Chestnut Hill, a suburb of Philadelphia, this year's meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Studies Association of North America was highly successful. Highlights of the meeting included panels and addresses by Tony Abbot, Speaker of the Australian House of Representatives, Michael Thawley, Australia's Ambassador to the U.S., Peter Baxter, DCM at the Australian Embassy, and David Walker, DCM at the New Zealand Embassy. Marian Wilkinson, Washington correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, gave a riveting summary of her much-discussed book, Dark Victory, about the last federal election. A dozen academic papers were presented by scholars from around the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Information re the new ANZSANA executive is located at the Center's website:
www.utexas.edu/depts/cas.

ANZSANA's 2004 meeting is planned for Toronto in late February.

 

YACKER Is published in the fall & spring by The Edward A. Clark Center for Australian & New Zealand Studies,
Harry Ransom Center 3.362
The University of Texas, Austin, TX 78713-7219
Telephone: 512/471-9607 Fax : 512/471-8869 email: yacker@www.utexas.edu
Website: www.utexas.edu/depts/cas/
This Newsletter was not printed with state funds.