This article questions conceptualisations and attributions that record the emergence of Australia's first national drug campaign as a necessary and inevitable governmental response to an escalating social problem around drug abuse. I argue that the proposal for, and subsequent establishment of, the National Campaign Against Drug Abuse (NCADA) in 1984-85 was contingent upon historically specific discourses and events in the lead up to the 1984 federal election that were not primarily or solely concerned with drug use or 'abuse' (as suggested by the campaign's title), but with perceptions of crime and governmental corruption, and the social and political anxiety these were generating. As such the NCADA was more an expression of political rather than health concerns.

This article examines the controversy around the proposal in the late 1980s and early 1990s to mainstream HIV/AIDS treatment, services, and care in Australia. With the predicted increase in HIV infections, and with improved prophylaxis and antiretroviral therapy (such as AZT) extending the lives of people with HIV/AIDS, mainstreaming was proposed as a strategy that could meet the anticipated increased demand in HIV/AIDS services. Our analysis suggests that mainstreaming was strategically positioned as a necessary intermediary step between specialist and community control, one in which general practitioners and local health workers would serve as conduits through which specialist knowledge and information could be deployed. The strategy also reflected a general shift in thinking and acting on public health that emerged in the late 1980s, a shift that sought, inter alia, to reorientate health services towards fostering the self-managing capacities of HIV/AIDS affected communities.

'The Other Side of Nowhere' is an informative and significant collection of scholarly articles on musical improvisatory practices, and the influence such practices have on the socio-cultural and political milieu from which they emerge. The book's title refers to the "alternative sound-world" engendered and articulated in the art or practice of improvisation. It denotes a space that both challenges and creates alternatives to aesthetic and socio-cultural certainty, predictability and orthodoxy, and in doing so generates the potential for other ways of thinking, acting and communicating, including different (and hopefully enhanced) forms of social relationships. Improvisation and improvised music is placed in opposition, and as an alternative to, a socio-cultural and/or musical system that seeks to either absorb or marginalise originality and difference. In a hostile milieu of co-optation and commodification, improvised music presents both a way out, and a critique of, normative and conforming practices and forces. As the editors note, the very fact that improvised music seeks to foster and sustain originality constitutes a "dissonant critique" of wider assimilative socio-cultural forces.