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Recent senior anthropologists have heralded a new era where performative social and cultural kinship may eclipse procreational 'biological kinship' in contemporary western society. This article takes research on permanent residents in caravan parks as an extreme case that may act as an exemplar for future western contexts. Between 2003 and 2008, interviews with caravan-park managers, 50 interviews with park residents and short field stays at 17 outer Melbourne and rural Victorian caravan parks, provided multi-sited ethnographic material for analysis. I argue that contemporary contexts for relatedness give scope for creative development of social performative ties with 'ex' spouses and in-laws, friends and pets. 'Biological' kin and family with a material dimension remain central, however, and a response to family need or rupture is often the broadening of the procreative kin links between grandparent and grandchild and between siblings. Childhood institutionalisation and divorce in particular, contributed to pathways towards caravan park housing. Other kin-based motivations include finding safe accommodation for wives; providing housing for young adult males after injury and family divorce; and arranging for housing succession for children. Ideas of blood and folk biology demonstrate considerable resilience in contemporary kinship arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Childlessness is increasing and might reflect acceptance of diversity, scope for individual choice and a creative ‘social imaginary’ about being feminine without being a mother. Childlessness also appears to have a contextual manifestation arising from the recognition that the long-hours work culture in many organizations does not support appropriate parenting. A qualitative study of Australian managers reveals the contradictory discourses of childlessness around enlightened equality, maternalism, an elusive, ideal ‘work–life balance’ and individualism. The article explores a contextually nuanced, dynamic, generative theory of agency which does not hinge on the mother–child dyad, in explaining women managers’ choices to remain childless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns a community, Valinda, on the suburban fringe of Melbourne. It considers the processes by which the community has acted to reject the perceived attributes of suburbanisation. Optimistic aims of progress in the 1940s and 1950s have been replaced by more nostalgic points of view in the 1970s and 1980s, a transition I document in a number of different areas. The paper concludes with an examination of key agents in the anti-suburban discourse and the genealogy of that discourse. Valinda's search for an ecological spirituality, I suggest, particularly resonates with David Tacey's popular Jungian work Edge of the Sacred, published in 1995. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]