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This article considers the broad historical and ideological processes that participate in forming the continuities and discontinuities of Australian egalitarian nationalism. We draw attention to its forma- tion and re-formation in the debates surrounding the so-called Han- son phenomenon. Hansonism refracts the crisis of what we regard as the Australian society of the state in the circumstances of the devel- opment of neoliberal policies and the more recent neoconservative turn of the current Howard government. Our argument is directed to exploring the contradictions and tensions in Australian egalitarian thought and practice and its thoroughgoing creative reengagement in contemporary postcolonial and postmodern Australia.

The essays in this forum collection are concerned primarily with the application of expert knowledge in fields where there is the expectation of considerable cultural, social, and political consequence for human populations, as a result of state, corporate, or non-governmental organizational action. The essays here are, with a couple of exceptions, written by anthropologists whose knowledge—insofar as it may be distinct from others in the social sciences—is based conventionally in a methodology of long-term fieldwork of a small-scale, faceto-face kind, and founded in theoretical orientations which are sensitive to cultural and social difference.