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This article examines nightclubbing in Perth in the 1980s. The specific focus is on the ways ethnicity and race related to which nightclub people went to, and the kinds of music played in the nightclubs. The article is based on interviews. The article focuses on three specific clubs, Hannibal’s, where the Italo-Australians and other southern Europeans went, Palladium, where Italo-Australians mixed with white Australians, and Jules, where Anglo-Indians and Anglo-Burmese, who self-identified as black, would go. The clubs for Australians, white Australians, were Pinocchio’s and Gobbles. Official multiculturalism was established during the 1980s and helped legitimise the cultural diversity found in Hannibal’s, Palladium and Jules. Likewise, the gradual termination of the White Australia policy enabled the presence of people identified by many Australians as non-white, who thought of themselves as black and identified with African Americans and their music. When the American navy ships docked in Fremantle, the African-American sailors went to Jules. In 1990 Hannibal’s, Palladium and Jules all closed. It was the end of an era. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article examines the relationship between Christianity and claims about Australian culture. In modernity Christianity was reconstructed as fundamentally European and white. This article argues that English middle-class values, which historically have been deeply imbricated with the values expressed by the Church of England, have been taken up in Australia as the foundation of Australian culture. In official multiculturalism non-Anglican Christian denominations have been with ethnics. This includes Catholicism which, in spite of the numbers of Italians, Maltese, and other Catholics now present in Australia, is still associated with the Irish. This article argues that the Howard government was a watershed in the political use of Christianity to claim a hegemonic Australian morality and this has been established in opposition to other religious groups in Australia, most obviously Muslims. At the same time, this Christian morality is implicitly white and the members of other religions are assumed to be non-white. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The Sapphires was the most popular Australian film of 2012. Loosely based on history, the film tells the story of four Indigenous young women, three of whom move in 1968 from a country reserve to Melbourne, who are transformed from singing hymns and country and western to becoming a soul group in the mould of the Supremes and who then tour Vietnam during the war entertaining the American troops. This article analyses the reasons for the popularity of the film. I argue that beyond the feelgood drama, including a romantic comedy subplot, the film minimizes the mistreatment of Indigenous Australians during the 1950s and 1960s, elides the 20 years era of self-determination and suggests a positive continuity between the period of assimilation and paternalism and the John Howard Liberal-dominated government's neoliberal ideology of personal responsibility. To this end, the film also plays down the racism of the assimilationist period and, through the character of Kay, implies that the policy of taking children away from their families (the Stolen Generations) had positive results. The film denies the young women's agency by introducing the character of the Irish Dave Lovelace as the creator and manager of the Sapphires. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

There is limited scholarship about Paul Fenech’s television comedy series and films. What there is tends to focus on Pizza (2000–2007) and place it, and its spin-off film, Fat Pizza (2003), within what has been called the wogsploitation cycle that includes most prominently The Wog Boy (2000). In this article I discuss two of Fenech’s television series, Pizza and Housos (2011–2013), in the context of representations of the underclass. I argue that the discourse of the underclass has evolved as the Other of neoliberalism in a similar way that the dangerous class, what Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariat, was constructed as the Other of industrial capitalism. The characters in Pizza, with their pitiful below-minimum-wage earnings, exist on the borderline of the underclass, while the characters in Housos are immersed in the underclass existence. The film Housos v Authority (2012) is a populist exploration of Australian underclass life. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper examines the genre of tracks centred around the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s which include aural representations of female sexual pleasure. The two most important tracks, and the ones on which this paper focuses, are Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’ and Donna Summer ‘Love To Love You Baby’. The paper argues that this new audibility of female sexual pleasure related to the transformation in the understanding of female orgasm associated with Alfred Kinsey and with William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the American sexologists who radically changed Western understandings of sexual behaviour in the 1950s and 1960s. More broadly, the paper argues for a link between the so-called sexual revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s and the popularity of tracks in which sounds identified as female sexual pleasure were upfront in the musical mix.

Over the last twenty years or so there has been a greatly increased anxiety in Australia over those people now often identified as asylum seekers. In this article I argue that this change of attitude is connected with the ongoing reconstruction of Australia as a neoliberal state. I link the importance of the border of the nation-state with the development of capitalism and go on to argue that there is a direct relation between the assumptions of neoliberalism and Giorgio Agamben's theorization of the state of exception. With this argument I suggest that the state of exception is fundamentally raced. I discuss the Australian relationship between migrants, race and capitalism, which historically worked in terms of the White Australia policy, and think about how asylum seekers are understood to threaten the racialized, neoliberal order of Australian capitalism. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The five interlinked essays in this issue of Continuum consider questions of the (re)production of borders - biopolitical, spatial, legal, historical, symbolic - intended to contain and exclude asylum seekers. The essays situate these modalities and technologies of exclusion in the context of broader questions of nationalism, citizenship, biopolitics, neoliberalism and the transnational genealogies of colonialism and racism. They make the collective argument that the issue of border security is not the preoccupation of a single political party or government but serves to magnetize a cluster of concerns and issues that are central to contemporary formations of citizenship, identity, territoriality and statehood in the West. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article considers the Australian film Lucky Miles (2007) in the context of the developing emphasis in Australia through the 1990s and 2000s on neoliberal policies. This emphasis started with the Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and was qualitatively reinforced by the conservative coalition government of John Howard. Lucky Miles is a film which narratives the experience of asylum seekers arriving on the Australian mainland. My focus is particularly on the impact of neoliberalism on the role of the border and on the popular attitude towards asylum seekers. To help develop this argument I also consider the film Children of Men (2006), which is set in Britain in a dystopian future. I analyse Lucky Miles to understand how it replicates anxieties about asylum seekers and the porosity of the border that are, at bottom, a consequence of changing attitudes bred by neoliberal policies. Refereed/Peer-reviewed