White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War History of Migration to Australia

SHEILA FITZPATRICK

The very word ‘Russia’ evokes romance and exotica. Glittering onion domes, Zhivago and Lara in the snow, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Or the hammer and sickle, Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev. Or spies -- the Cambridge Five, the Petrovs -- and oligarchs who own football teams and political foes who are poisoned, imprisoned, shot. Somehow always bigger than ordinary life, more revolutionary, more evil, more tragic.

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Fiona Poulton
Vernacular Visions - A folklife history of Australia

NORIS IOANNOU

A fundamental requirement for any historian is to be able to see the world as it is and not how you would like it to be. Equally important is having sufficient confidence not to be beholden to modish schools of analysis and criticism. It is a great strength of this book that it encounters the world not with a rush to judgment but a quest for understanding.

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Fiona Poulton
Pay Dirt! Ballarat & Other Gold Towns

DOROTHY WICKHAM AND CLARE GERVASONI (EDS)

An endorsement of the old adage ‘good things come in small packages’ is this celebration of Ballarat Heritage Services’ 21 years of publishing. The overarching theme is of Victoria’s central goldfields but looking also to wider transnational relationships.

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Fiona Poulton
The Kangaroo Islanders: A story of South Australia before colonisation 1823

WA CAWTHORNE, EDITED BY RICK HOSKING

When the South Australian Company landed on Kangaroo Island in 1836 to begin the official settlement of the province, they were surprised to find several others were already living there. William Cawthorne, writing in 1854, tells of some of these people, voiced in regional English dialects and rich with nautical expressions honed through their sea life.

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Fiona Poulton
The Last Navigator

PAUL GOODWIN WITH GORDON GOODWIN

The Last Navigator is the inspiring story of Queenslander Gordon Goodwin DSO, a Royal Australian Air Force navigator, who survived five years of dangerous service flying missions over north-west Europe, to become the Chief Navigator for Qantas in its pre-jet years.

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Fiona Poulton