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Much is speculative - as Karskens explains, there is too little evidence to be otherwise - but where other authors have retreated because of the fear that they would be seen to be speaking I for i Aboriginal people, Karskens has taken up the challenge. People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia: By Grace Karskens. Karskens refuses to accept the assumption so widely made that Indigenous and settler cultures were incompatible and so displacement of Indigenous life was rapid and complete. [Extracted from the article]

Dino Hodge recently produced an interesting study of how Dunstan's personal beliefs and sexuality influenced his political life, but it was much more limited in scope than Woollacott's contribution. (xii-xiii) Dunstan's biographer, Angela Woollacott, set herself the task of rekindling the brightness of the light, and she succeeds admirably in this comprehensive biography of one of South Australia's - and the Australian Labor Party's - most progressive figures. Don Dunstan: The Visionary Politician Who Changed Australia: By Angela Woollacott. [Extracted from the article]

While social histories of the war have hardly failed to note the significance of state power, Catherine Bond's study of the use of Australian law as an instrument in this process offers a precise means of studying the subject. Readers' responses to this moral intent may vary but many cases are certainly an apt reminder of the power wielded by law and the legal system. Buttressing the sense that the dynamics under review resonate beyond the war, the concluding chapter considers some of the war's legal legacies in Australian statutes, politics and lives. [Extracted from the article]