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What was postmodernism? -- Tourism and the semiotics of nostalgia -- Gift and commodity -- Toute la mémoire du monde : repetition and forgetting

The paper explores the idea of settlement in each of its three major senses: as a place of human habitation; as a fixed and stable order of habitation; and as a political consensus reconciling fractious groups. Arguing that traditional accounts of settlement depend, with a kind of pastoral nostalgia, upon a view of abstraction and social complexity as in themselves harmful, it follows through the implications of the concept for ways of dealing with the stranger, and it uses a drawing by the nineteenth-century indigenous Australian artist Tommy McRae, done about 1890 and entitled Corroboree, or William Buckley and dancers from the Wathaurong people, to propose a counterfactual model through which a settlement with the stranger might be imagined.

A review of Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Duke University, Durham, 2007).

This essay explores the flawed legal regime governing national security in Australia. It focuses on legislation related to anti-terrorism and discusses the negative effects of the bills, particularly in relation to the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. The author reflects on the harsh political and social climate of Australia during the era of the Howard government and One Nation party, noting that democratic and the liberal values can be in conflict.

This article discusses recent developments in the commodification of information. It is argued here that the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) treaty has set a clear historical demarcation in the global control of information, and has imposed a definition of intellectual property rights directly disadvantageous to Third World countries which, holding few patents themselves, have been brought within the scope of a regime where they will be held strictly accountable for their state of exponentially increasing indebtedness. The arguments offered here are based on an exploration of a series of recent developments which have extended the possibility of locking up aspects of "nature" itself. Topics of discussion include the patent status of genetically engineered organisms (GMO's); the commodification of GMO and hybridized plants; the uneven global distribution of biological diversity, and the relationship of that distribution to the location of less developed countries; and the balance between the common good and intellectual property rights. 59 References. T. K. Brown