Jon Piccini
Biographic Data
| ID | 325118 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jon Piccini |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jon |
| FAMILY NAME | Piccini |
| SIGNATURE | PICCINI J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian Catholic University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0770-8963 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Bringing the people back in
“The Pause That Refreshes”
Nearly 10% of the 3 million Americans who served in Vietnam spent one week of “R&R” leave in Australia—principally in Sydney. This “friendly invasion” constitutes a substantial neglected legacy of the conflict. Across dozens of oral history interviews and memoirs, US servicemen recall with fondness their week‐long respite in a nation that was at once comfortably familiar and safely distinct. Their preconceptions of Australia were framed by racial…
The Southern Frontier
Lucky Country or Shrinking Nation ? Australian Studies Past, Present and Future
Settling for Less
Tourism, Americanization and the Vietnam War R&R Scheme in Sydney, Australia, 1967–71
Australia's addition to the Vietnam War R&R scheme in September 1967 brought some 280,000 short-stay tourists to Sydney, and particularly its notorious ‘red light district’, Kings Cross. We show how Australia's experience of this ‘friendly invasion’ aided considerably in the development of a nascent tourist industry in Sydney, due in no small part to the considerable efforts of government promoters and local entrepreneurs. This influx also create…
Time Is Against Us’
This article traces the importance of anti-communist organisations to the development of early Papua New Guinean political elites. Focusing on Oala Oala-Rarua (1934–80), it shows how his participation in activities organised by the spiritual group Moral Re-Armament and the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom provided avenues and platforms through which to articulate an increasingly nationalist politics. Both groups feared that radical nat…
Thinking in Papua New Guinean Terms
Australia's unsuccessful attempt to remove 'sensitive' files from the Territory of Papua and New Guinea (PNG) in 1972 adds new insights into emerging literature on the migrated archive. This paper argues that fears of reputational damage, possessiveness and race-based logics animated Australia's actions. It illuminates how an unlikely alliance of Australian archivists and academics with PNG nationalist elites saw the removals policy reversed, thu…
On the genocide concept
A. Dirk Moses' The Problems of Genocide builds on his decades of work in the field of genocide research. This review article looks at the impact the book has had to date before considering its two key arguments - that genocide's invention in the 1940s distilled a centuries old 'language of transgression', which in turn served to justify and normalise what Moses dubs 'liberal permanent security'. I conclude by considering the possibilities and lim…
The Ex‐Services Human Rights Association of Australia, the Vietnam War, and the Remaking of the Anzac Tradition
The Ex‐Services Human Rights Association of Australia (ESHRAA) emerged in 1966, supporting conscientious objectors to national service and opposing the Vietnam War. Unlike the cornucopia of similarly focussed groups, ESHRAA members publicly identified as ex‐service people, a privileged category of citizens in Australia with particular purchase on public debate. In this article, I locate ESHRAA within the long tradition of Australian opposition to…
Over Sexed, Over Paid and Over Here … Again? Americans on R&R in Vietnam-Era Sydney
Between 1967 and 1971, 280,000 US military personnel visited Sydney on ‘Rest and Recreation’ (R&R) leave from the conflict in Vietnam. During the period in which the R&R program was being negotiated, Australian authorities, along with correspondents to daily newspapers, worried that the presence of large numbers of ‘cashed-up’ Americans would see the public repudiate the R&R scheme, the war and the relationship with the United States. These conce…
Democratic Adventurer
Democratic Adventurer: Graham Berry and the Making of Australian Politics." Australian Historical Studies, 53(1), pp. 172–173
A Fundamental Human Right'? Mixed-Race Marriage and the Meaning of Rights in the Postwar British Commonwealth
This article explores the removal or exclusion in the late 1940s of people in interracial marriages from two corners of the newly formed Commonwealth of Nations, Australia and Britain's southern African colonies. The stories of Ruth and Sereste Khama, exiled from colonial Botswana, and those of Chinese refugees threatened with deportation and separation from their white Australian wives, reveal how legal rearticulations in the immediate postwar e…
That brotherhood may prevail’
International House opened its doors at the University of Queensland in early 1965 to an initial intake of some 66 residents, split between Australians and students from all over the Asia-Pacific and beyond. Based on college and governmental records, this article makes two arguments. Firstly, that the ‘everyday humanitarians’ in civil society organisations like Rotary International who championed International House at once critiqued and upheld c…
Alison Holland on Aboriginal defenders
To claim that Australia’s colonial past was free of violence or coercion – something to be ‘comfortable and relaxed’ about, in the words of Prime Minister John Howard – would have come as a surpris
Dissent
(Re)Thinking 1968 and its Legacy in Australia
The Far Left in Australia since 1945
The far left in Australia had significant effects on post-war politics, culture and society. The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) ended World War II with some 20,000 members, and despite the harsh and vitriolic Cold War climate of the 1950s, seeded or provided impetus for the re-emergence of other movements. Radicals subscribing to ideologies beyond the Soviet orbit – Maoists, Trotskyists, anarchists and others – also created parties and organi…
Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History
Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History . Edited by Anna Clark, Anne Rees and Alecia Simmonds (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp.199, £67.99 (hb)
Women are a colonised sex’
This article situates Australian Elizabeth Reid’s contribution to International Women’s Year (IWY) (1975) within ongoing historiographical discussions on development and human rights. The world’s first advisor on women’s affairs to a head of government, Reid used the burgeoning Women’s Liberation Movement’s critique of ‘sexism’ to challenge IWY’s goals of formal equality, a limited and undesirable outcomes that prevented women and men from instea…
From Victims to Suspects
From Victims to Suspects: Muslim Women Since 9/11. By Shakira Hussein (Sydney: NewSouth, 2016), 192 pp. AU$24.99 (pb)
The House that Jack Built
The House that Jack Built: Jack Mundey, Green Bans Hero. By James Colman (Sydney: NewSouth Books, 2016), 376pp., AU$49.95 (pb)
Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s
Australia is rarely considered to have been a part of the great political changes that swept the world in the 1960s: the struggles of the American civil rights movement, student revolts in Europe, gue
Indigenous activism in a global frame
Blackfella Films/SBS’s Black Panther Woman (directed by Rachel Perkins) provides a fine portrait of its protagonist, Marlene Cummins, as well as an at times fascinating, frustrating, sad and inspir
The Aboriginal Tent Embassy
Women are a colonised sex’
This article situates Australian Elizabeth Reid’s contribution to International Women’s Year (IWY) (1975) within ongoing historiographical discussions on development and human rights. The world’s first advisor on women’s affairs to a head of government, Reid used the burgeoning Women’s Liberation Movement’s critique of ‘sexism’ to challenge IWY’s goals of formal equality, a limited and undesirable outcomes that prevented women and men from instea…
That brotherhood may prevail’
International House opened its doors at the University of Queensland in early 1965 to an initial intake of some 66 residents, split between Australians and students from all over the Asia-Pacific and beyond. Based on college and governmental records, this article makes two arguments. Firstly, that the ‘everyday humanitarians’ in civil society organisations like Rotary International who championed International House at once critiqued and upheld c…
People Treated Me with Equality
This paper discusses the entwining of Australian communists, trade unions and indigenous activists: a much-studied topic. However, I approach it from a "transnational" perspective, unearthing intersections between global ideas and local activism through a case study of how the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and trade union bodies under its control or influence sent particular indigenous activists abroad during the 1950s and 1960s. It looks at…
More than an abstract principle”
The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) increasingly adopted ideas of universal rights throughout the 1960s. Responding to changes in the Soviet Union and the party's increasing irrelevancy at home, leading members of the CPA theorised a universal notion of rights—one that applied equally either side of the Iron Curtain—to critique Soviet actions on a variety of questions. In a local setting, the party aired for the first- time significant critiqu…
Travel, Politics and the Limits of Liminality During Australia’s Sixties
Victor Turner describes the individual experience of travel as ‘liminal’. Opening new vistas of possibility, it upturns ordinary social conventions and codes, constructing in their place new communities of hope and change. Such utopian moments of encounter are, however, just that—moments that are fleeting and generally inconsequential. This paper seeks to understand and critique Turner’s ideas of liminality, pilgrimage and communitas within the c…
Travel, Politics and the Limits of Liminality During Australia’s Sixties
Victor Turner describes the individual experience of travel as ‘liminal’. Opening new vistas of possibility, it upturns ordinary social conventions and codes, constructing in their place new communities of hope and change. Such utopian moments of encounter are, however, just that—moments that are fleeting and generally inconsequential. This paper seeks to understand and critique Turner’s ideas of liminality, pilgrimage and communitas within the c…
There is no Solidarity, Peace or Friendship with Dictatorship’
The World Festivals of Youth and Students — elaborate Soviet sponsored gatherings attracting thousands of young people from across the globe — provide a window into how Australian radicals encountered, critiqued and abandoned Soviet communism during a period historians term the ‘long 1960s’. This article demonstrates that the diverse experiences of attendees at three Festivals not only reflected the changing realities of global Cold War politics,…
Light from the East”
Throughout the “long Sixties” a diverse array of Australian activists traveled beyond what was popularly known as the “bamboo curtain” into the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This paper will argue that they found not the monolithic “red menace” presented by media and government, but an often contradictory set of images mediated by their own political agendas and the changing nature of Chinese politics. More than useful idiots, these radicals t…
Heroes and Villains
More than an abstract principle”
The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) increasingly adopted ideas of universal rights throughout the 1960s. Responding to changes in the Soviet Union and the party's increasing irrelevancy at home, leading members of the CPA theorised a universal notion of rights—one that applied equally either side of the Iron Curtain—to critique Soviet actions on a variety of questions. In a local setting, the party aired for the first- time significant critiqu…
Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s
Australia is rarely considered to have been a part of the great political changes that swept the world in the 1960s: the struggles of the American civil rights movement, student revolts in Europe, gue
Indigenous activism in a global frame
Blackfella Films/SBS’s Black Panther Woman (directed by Rachel Perkins) provides a fine portrait of its protagonist, Marlene Cummins, as well as an at times fascinating, frustrating, sad and inspir
The Aboriginal Tent Embassy
People Treated Me with Equality
This paper discusses the entwining of Australian communists, trade unions and indigenous activists: a much-studied topic. However, I approach it from a "transnational" perspective, unearthing intersections between global ideas and local activism through a case study of how the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and trade union bodies under its control or influence sent particular indigenous activists abroad during the 1950s and 1960s. It looks at…
From Victims to Suspects
From Victims to Suspects: Muslim Women Since 9/11. By Shakira Hussein (Sydney: NewSouth, 2016), 192 pp. AU$24.99 (pb)
The House that Jack Built
The House that Jack Built: Jack Mundey, Green Bans Hero. By James Colman (Sydney: NewSouth Books, 2016), 376pp., AU$49.95 (pb)
The Far Left in Australia since 1945
The far left in Australia had significant effects on post-war politics, culture and society. The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) ended World War II with some 20,000 members, and despite the harsh and vitriolic Cold War climate of the 1950s, seeded or provided impetus for the re-emergence of other movements. Radicals subscribing to ideologies beyond the Soviet orbit – Maoists, Trotskyists, anarchists and others – also created parties and organi…
Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History
Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History . Edited by Anna Clark, Anne Rees and Alecia Simmonds (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp.199, £67.99 (hb)
Women are a colonised sex’
This article situates Australian Elizabeth Reid’s contribution to International Women’s Year (IWY) (1975) within ongoing historiographical discussions on development and human rights. The world’s first advisor on women’s affairs to a head of government, Reid used the burgeoning Women’s Liberation Movement’s critique of ‘sexism’ to challenge IWY’s goals of formal equality, a limited and undesirable outcomes that prevented women and men from instea…
Dissent
(Re)Thinking 1968 and its Legacy in Australia
That brotherhood may prevail’
International House opened its doors at the University of Queensland in early 1965 to an initial intake of some 66 residents, split between Australians and students from all over the Asia-Pacific and beyond. Based on college and governmental records, this article makes two arguments. Firstly, that the ‘everyday humanitarians’ in civil society organisations like Rotary International who championed International House at once critiqued and upheld c…
Alison Holland on Aboriginal defenders
To claim that Australia’s colonial past was free of violence or coercion – something to be ‘comfortable and relaxed’ about, in the words of Prime Minister John Howard – would have come as a surpris
A Fundamental Human Right'? Mixed-Race Marriage and the Meaning of Rights in the Postwar British Commonwealth
This article explores the removal or exclusion in the late 1940s of people in interracial marriages from two corners of the newly formed Commonwealth of Nations, Australia and Britain's southern African colonies. The stories of Ruth and Sereste Khama, exiled from colonial Botswana, and those of Chinese refugees threatened with deportation and separation from their white Australian wives, reveal how legal rearticulations in the immediate postwar e…
The Ex‐Services Human Rights Association of Australia, the Vietnam War, and the Remaking of the Anzac Tradition
The Ex‐Services Human Rights Association of Australia (ESHRAA) emerged in 1966, supporting conscientious objectors to national service and opposing the Vietnam War. Unlike the cornucopia of similarly focussed groups, ESHRAA members publicly identified as ex‐service people, a privileged category of citizens in Australia with particular purchase on public debate. In this article, I locate ESHRAA within the long tradition of Australian opposition to…
Over Sexed, Over Paid and Over Here … Again? Americans on R&R in Vietnam-Era Sydney
Between 1967 and 1971, 280,000 US military personnel visited Sydney on ‘Rest and Recreation’ (R&R) leave from the conflict in Vietnam. During the period in which the R&R program was being negotiated, Australian authorities, along with correspondents to daily newspapers, worried that the presence of large numbers of ‘cashed-up’ Americans would see the public repudiate the R&R scheme, the war and the relationship with the United States. These conce…
Democratic Adventurer
Democratic Adventurer: Graham Berry and the Making of Australian Politics." Australian Historical Studies, 53(1), pp. 172–173
Time Is Against Us’
This article traces the importance of anti-communist organisations to the development of early Papua New Guinean political elites. Focusing on Oala Oala-Rarua (1934–80), it shows how his participation in activities organised by the spiritual group Moral Re-Armament and the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom provided avenues and platforms through which to articulate an increasingly nationalist politics. Both groups feared that radical nat…
Thinking in Papua New Guinean Terms
Australia's unsuccessful attempt to remove 'sensitive' files from the Territory of Papua and New Guinea (PNG) in 1972 adds new insights into emerging literature on the migrated archive. This paper argues that fears of reputational damage, possessiveness and race-based logics animated Australia's actions. It illuminates how an unlikely alliance of Australian archivists and academics with PNG nationalist elites saw the removals policy reversed, thu…
On the genocide concept
A. Dirk Moses' The Problems of Genocide builds on his decades of work in the field of genocide research. This review article looks at the impact the book has had to date before considering its two key arguments - that genocide's invention in the 1940s distilled a centuries old 'language of transgression', which in turn served to justify and normalise what Moses dubs 'liberal permanent security'. I conclude by considering the possibilities and lim…
Political science (27 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics (16 works) · Australian History and Society (14 works) · History (14 works) · Law (11 works) · Media studies (10 works) · History (9 works) · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics (8 works)