The National Institute of Standards and Technology

About the author

Andrew Galan

Andrew Galan is the author of two collections of poetry, That Place of Infested Roads and For All the Veronicas, and his work has...

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Aca-lyte

Poetry Che Guevara is white and wearing a shirt with his face on it, mansplaining Derrida or Adorno a hat like your grandfather used to wear though...

IntroductionStatus itself is a little like a riddle: a code to be cracked, a hand in which you can’t see all the cards. Unless you’re Batman, however, the stakes for solving riddles tend to be comfortingly low, whereas the pressures of deciphering status can occupy a far more consequential role in our lives (it’s all fun and games until somebody loses their cultural capital).

The Gordon cult

Non-fictionFrom a modern perspective Gordon makes an odd choice for a national poet, since he wrote only rarely about the country that embraced him. He set many of his popular verses in England and studded the others with the classical references familiar to an English gentleman. Yet before the passage of the 1931 Statute of Westminster – or, more exactly, until similar laws passed through the Australian Parliament in 1942 – Britain retained the legal right to determine foreign relations for the Australian Commonwealth. Accordingly, prior, during and for some time after the Great War, respectable Australian nationalism generally manifested as Empire patriotism.