A Paper Inheritance
DYMPHNA STELLA REES
‘[T]he best memoirists allow their life experiences to shed light on a culture, a historical moment, a time, a place, a social problem, a political issue...’ said Natalia Rachel Singer, a professor of English. While the memoir is usually categorised as creative non-fiction, when it does as Singer applauds, it can illuminate the historical record. Dymphna Stella Rees has made such a contribution with her actual paper inheritance, out of which she has woven a compelling story of Australia’s literary life from the 1930s on.
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Made in Lancashire: A Collective Biography of Assisted Migrants from Lancashire to Victoria 1852-1853
RICHARD TURNER
Detailed migration studies such as this, which rely on extensive interrogation of the records, do much to enhance our understanding of the development of the colonies.
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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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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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Country, Kin and Culture: Survival of an Australian Aboriginal Community
CLAIRE SMITH
Smith, an archaeologist, has turned to history to successfully recast the subjects of her enquiry ─a complex of Aboriginal groups, whose ancestral lands spanned the southern Arnhem Land plateau. She foregrounds the lived circumstances of the generations she came to know, rather than the idealised lives of their ancestors.
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Like a Wicked Noah’s Ark: The Nautical School Ships Vernon & Sobraon
SARAH LUKE
This book makes lively use of institutional and court records, as well as children’s testimonies, to bring to life the experiences of boys housed on industrial training ships moored in Sydney Harbour until 1911.
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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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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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People of the River: lost worlds of early Australia
GRACE KARSKENS
Take a fascinating trip down Dyarubbin (the Hawkesbury-Nepean River) in the early colonial period with a trusty and observant guide.
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A River with a City Problem: a history of Brisbane floods
MARGARET COOK
A River with a City Problem is a pleasure to read. Despite encompassing a myriad of resources and themes, the narrative histories of the Brisbane floods of 1893, 1974 and 2011 flow effortlessly.
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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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Celluloid Subjects to Digital Directors: changing Aboriginalities and Australian documentary film, 1901-2017
JENNIFER DEBENHAM
This book tells how sixteen films about Indigenous Australians were made and exhibited, and the influence they exerted on mainstream audiences.
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The Convict Valley: the bloody struggle on Australia's early frontier
MARK DUNN
Clashing cultures, clashing classes, rampant land grabs and dispossession of the original inhabitants are the central themes in this history of the Hunter Valley.
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East Coast Encounters 1770
PAULINE CURBY (EDITOR)
The notion that Cook represents the clash of an ancient culture with a rising empire is the centralising theme of this collection of ten essays.
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