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Open Dialogue is an approach to working with people and their families experiencing psychosocial distress. Interest in Open Dialogue in Australia has been growing recently, raising questions about its adaption and implementation to local contexts. This article is an attempt to answer some of the frequently asked questions we have encountered in training and discussions about Open Dialogue. We attempt to provide responses to questions of how Open Dialogue is different to what is done already, how it fits with current approaches, how you know if you are doing it, whether it is passive or just about doing reflections, issues about including the social network, and concerns about the evidence base. This article aims to present a variety of viewpoints in relation to these questions and to hopefully further discussions on how Open Dialogue can be implemented and adapted to Australian health care and social care contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foster parents often despair over the lack of information about the past experience of the children in their care, particularly with children who have experienced infant trauma and neglect. In the context of family therapy these unknowns pose both a challenge and an opportunity. The author proposes that foster children gives clues to their past experiences in therapeutic moments, which the therapist may recognize as a result of her own inner conversation. In conjunction with a sound theoretical knowledge of infant trauma and neglect, these moments have the capacity to open a dialogue in the relationships between therapist, child and foster family. This dialogical process offers an opportunity for the child's past experience of infant trauma and neglect to be expressed in silence, and the foster parent's present experience to be heard in stillness, opening for them a way to go on beyond the family therapy sessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the clinical practice of open dialogues in Finland and articulates some challenges and resonances for clinicians of this way of working. It is a collaborative paper based on a series of reflecting conversations in a North-South dialogue between four Finnish family therapists and an Australian family therapist. The paper begins with an overview of the context of open dialogues in Finland. It then introduces each individual Finnish therapist, followed by dyadic reflecting conversations about the work, before moving to a joint North-South dialogue where all voices join together in responding to each other's contributions. The clinical practice of open dialogues is revealed as ways of thinking, doing and being in relation to self, client, family, networks, and colleagues. Mutual understanding between all involved in the work emerges as a core theme. The paper offers the clinical wisdom of the Finnish therapists to those interested in adapting this way of working to the Australian and New Zealand context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies thematic patterns and visual codes in several inter-war Australian home movies, and analyses how these films' narrative and stylistic commonality illuminates the filmmakers' national identity outside established imperial modes of representation. The study of these films was prompted by their documentary merit evident across scenes that escape or challenge the British imperial iconography. They often show counter-history records of a time and people whose identities and ways of life are revealed beyond their typical portrayals found in fictionalised and government productions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines, through the work and attitudes of its first four governors, the relations between Church and State in the last Australia colony to be established. It covers the period from the foundation of the colony in 1829 to the arrival of the first resident bishop of Perth in 1857. It challenges the prevailing historiography of a colonial administration wedded to Anglican privilege, and discusses the persistence of an erastian mind-set among the colonial governors in the 1840s despite the advent of a new paradigm of autonomous imperial engagement by the Church of England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the nineteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century, Irish constitutional nationalism developed an ambivalent discourse on the relationship between Ireland and the empire. As proponents of Repeal or Home Rule, Irish leaders repeatedly denounced the political, economic, and cultural domination imposed on Ireland through the union with Great Britain. And yet they avoided defining Ireland as a colony, and rather stressed Ireland's participation in British empire building as one further argument in favor of Irish legislative autonomy. Leading figures like Daniel O'Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, John Dillon, or John Redmond at times opposed British imperial policy, but they were not committed anti-imperialists. Only a minority of MPs including Frank Hugh O'Donnell, Alfred Webb, and Michael Davitt were more active in denouncing the excesses of British colonialism in India or South Africa. The anti-imperialism of Irish constitutional nationalists was all the more limited as Repeal of Home Rule was not meant to lead to the dismemberment of the empire. On the contrary, leading Irish nationalist MPs were aware that, with the granting of legislative autonomy to colonies like Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, the very nature of the empire was changing and that autonomy and empire were perfectly compatible. Taking the newly autonomous colonies as models to follow, they contemplated the possibility of reorganizing the empire into a federation including Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]