Julian Meyrick Knihy

In 1948, Angela left Malta. Having gathered up five children, she sailed out on the Strathnavar, leaving poverty and the war behind. Her destination: Australia. In Surry Hills, she could build a bright new life. If only she could first learn the language, finish shoring up their dilapidated house, find new friends, get the racist neighbour off her back and keep her son away from sly grog queen Kate Leigh's kids. Back in Malta, someone else has made a journey. Making his way along Kalkara's glistening harbourside, a young man with flowing black hair has returned to claim his past. Paul Capsis is walking home. A journey that begins at a kitchen table becomes a sprawling family history and a fitting tribute to a much-loved matriarch. (1 male or 1 female).

Phiddian explores the distinction between satirical and comic laughter, and the role of satire in licensing public expression of harsh emotions defined in neuroscience as the CAD (contempt, anger, disgust) triad. With a focus on eighteenth-century satirists such as Jonathan Swift, he reveals the importance of satire to free political expression.

Too often, cultural leaders and policy makers want to chase the perfect metric for activities whose real worth lies in our own personal experience. The major problem facing Australian culture today is demonstrating its value - to governments, the business sector, and the public in general. When did culture become a number? When did the books, paintings, poems, plays, songs, films, games, art installations, clothes, and the objects that fill our daily lives become a matter of statistical measurement? When did experience become data? This book intervenes in an important debate about the public value of culture that has become stranded between the hard heads (where the arts are just another industry) and the soft hearts (for whom they are too precious to bear dispassionate analysis). It argues that our concept of value has been distorted and dismembered by political forces and methodological confusions, and this has a dire effect on the way we assess culture. Proceeding via concrete examples, it explores the major tensions in contemporary evaluation strategies, and puts forward practical solutions to the current metric madness. The time is ripe to find a better way to value our culture - by finding a better way to talk about it.