ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at being ‘out of’ work—an oblique angle, perhaps, on the meaning of work in Australia, but it reveals the way in which work has a determinate effect even on those who do not have jobs or those who will soon be looking for one. So the State in Australia provides both an employment service, the Commonwealth Employment Scheme (CES), to help willing workers to find jobs, and subsistence money, the dole, to unemployed people who have no other means of support and are not ‘dole bludgers’. The journey of an unemployed youth through the CES system is itself a text as well as an encounter with other kinds of text; our unemployed youth is called Anna. For all these reasons, it’s not possible now to claim that video parlours are either distinctively Australian or a focus of critical, oppositional thinking and feeling among the young working-class and unemployed.
