Essays
Engineering Redemption
The key aspects and features of the adoption policy in Australia in the 1960s are discussed. Women who relinquished their children during the period in Australia, and in Canada where a similar policy was in place, are typically full of guilt.
Closed Adoption Policy in the 1960s
The closed adoption policy that saw hundreds of thousands of white babies relinquished by their unmarried mothers in many western countries was among a range of seemingly humane social engineering projects popular during the 1950s and 60s. The policy was abandoned in the 1970s with subsequent investigations of the practice revealing human rights abuse. Yet so many acts are undertaken in the context of a time?a context that blinkers society to the pain inflicted, until the context mutates. This book explores the social construction of individual motivation and the uses of fiction in exposing that construction. In doing so it opens up a dialogue between psychology and literary theory. Connections are made between the closed adoption policy, the removal of Aboriginal children from their families in Australia, and the conscription and later shaming of soldiers sent to fight the War in Vietnam. The work includes an exegesis and a work of fiction titled, ?A Certain Kindness?.
Restoring Nature’s Hydraulic pulse
How many of us would choose to pave our driveways if we knew it was interfering with nature’s hydraulic pulse? How many of us understand the role of swamps, ponds, lagoons and the meandering of rivers and creeks in holding water in what is the driest occupied continent on the globe?
Water. it is the substance of life. We would panic if taps ran dry in our homes. It is equally concerning when a landscape runs dry.
‘Nature is not a place to visit. It is home’. So writes Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Gary Snyder. It is also true that we are not simply in a landscape; we are ‘of it’, part of a common living being. This has particular resonance in our region, where our cities shares space with a World Heritage National Park and the rivers and tributaries that make up the massive Hawkesbury-Nepean water catchment.