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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Jon Piccini, "Human Rights in Twentieth-Century Australia" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Description: After the Second World War, an Australian diplomat was one of eight people to draft the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. And in the years that followed, Australians of many different stripes—including activists fighting for Aboriginal rights and women’s rights, communists, and even anticommunists—invoked human rights in their respective political struggles. Yet, despite these Australians’ embrace of human rights, the Australian government didn’t sign the Declaration of Human Rights until 1972, and then it took even longer to ratify it.Australia’s ambiguous relationship with human rights is precisely what Jon Piccini untangles in his fasci...