Publication Date: Mar 2015
RRP: $39.95
ISBN: 9781922235558
Format: Paperback
Size: 153mm x 234mm
Pages: 288
Category: Australasian & Pacific

Thinking the Antipodes

Australian Essays

Peter Beilharz


‘Reading this collection, we are better able to appreciate the sustained intellectual commitment, breadth of sympathy, and responsiveness to changing cultural and political priorities, that characterises Beilharz’s work.’ Graeme DavisonThe Journal of Sociology, 1-3(2017)

Thinking the Antipodes brings together essays across a wide intellectual terrain articulating views about Australian social, historical and political understanding beyond mainstream conventions…it is very much to be welcomed.’ Lionel OrchardLabour History, Number 110, May 2016

‘This collection of essays is an important Marxist hymnbook dedicated to the intellectual struggle of imagining what it is to be Antipodean.’ Phillip HallPlumwood Mountain Online Journal


In 1956 Bernard Smith wrote that we in Australia were migratory birds. This was to become a leading motif of his own thinking, and a significant inspiration for Peter Beilharz. Beilharz came to argue that the idea of the antipodes made sense less in its geographical than its cultural form, viewed as a relation rather than a place. Australians had one foot here and one there, whichever ‘there’ this was. This way of thinking with and after Bernard Smith makes up one current of Beilharz’s best Australian essays.

Two other streams contribute to the collection. The second recovers and publicises antipodean intellectuals, from Childe to Evatt to Stretton to Jean Martin, who have often been overshadowed here by the reception given to metropolitan celebrity thinkers; and examines others, like Hughes and Carey, who have been celebrated as writers more than as interpreters of the antipodean condition.

The third stream engages with mainstream views of Australian writing, and with the limits of these views. If we think in terms of cultural traffic, then the stories we tell about Australia will also be global and regional in a broader sense. Australia is the result of cultural traffic, local and global.


Peter Beilharz

Peter Beilharz is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology at La Trobe University. He has published 24 books and 200 papers across five continents. His major works include Imagining the Antipodes (1997) and Sociology – Antipodean Perspectives, with Trevor...
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