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Recent quantitative investigations consistently single out considerable gender variations in the experience of loneliness in Australia, and in particular how men are especially prone to protracted and serious episodes of loneliness. In 2017 the Director of Lifeline implicated loneliness as a significant factor in suicide among Australian men – currently three times the rate of suicide among women. Compared to women men also struggle to talk about loneliness or seek help from a range of informal and professional sources. We know very little about men's experience of loneliness or why they are so susceptible to it currently and research is urgently needed in order to design specific interventions for them. To date, psychology has dominated the theoretical research on loneliness but in this article we argue that sociology has a key role to play in broadening out the theoretical terrain of this understanding so as to create culturally informed interventions. Most researchers agree that loneliness occurs when belongingess needs remain unmet, yet it is also acknowledged that such needs are culturally specific and changing. We need to understand how loneliness and gender cultures configure for men; how they are located in different ethnic, class and age cohort cultures as well as the changing social/economic/spatial/public/institutional bases for belonging across Australia. Theoretical enquiry must encompass the broader social structural narratives (Bauman, Giddens and Sennett) and link these to the changing nature of belonging in everyday life – across the public sphere, the domestic sphere, work, in kinship systems, housing and settlement patterns, associational life, in embodied relationships and online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hailed as the most important cultural event since the opening of the Sydney Opera House, the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Tasmania seemingly made very substantial changes to visitor experiences of an art gallery, catalysed a significant cultural florescence in Hobart and achieved tourism-led urban and regional regeneration on a par with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Drawing on a large survey of visitors this article illuminates the origins, social aims and impacts of successful attempts to push art museums beyond what Hanquinet and Savage call ‘educative leisure’. It contributes to our knowledge of the processes by which traditional forms of ‘highbrow’ cultural experience associated with the dominance of the classical and historical canon are being eclipsed by newer, performative, emotional and sensual forms of cultural taste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses an embodied account of hunting and angling as a means of understanding hunting's paradoxical popularity in late modernity. Evaluation of the significance of the pro-hunting and angling discourses of Isaak Walton and Neo-Darwinian writers; Waltonian discourse's encouragement of the development of a highly sensual relation with the natural world.

While broad international currents of change affected human-animal relations in Australia, the precise course and pattern of change was influenced by changes specific to Australian society. The paper suggests that two discourses are especially significant in specifying the nature of change. First, a colonial dis course (Britainisation), which sentimentalised British species and sought to implant them in Australia, and second, a nationalising discourse (Austra lianisation) that used the Australian biotic community to symbolise Australia, national identity and citizenship. Hunting and angling in Australia are com paratively free from the criticism that such sports attract in the USA and the UK, and it is argued that we can understand why this is so in relation to the historic tensions between the two discourses and their effects on Australian classifications of and attitudes to animals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]