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"Life So Full of Promise: Further Biographies of Australia's Lost Generation" by Ross McMullin is a sequel to his acclaimed book "Farewell Dear People." The book focuses on the lives of three young Australians who were part of the 'lost generation' of World War I. Captain Brian Pockley, Norman Callaway, and Murdoch Mackay are profiled in the book, highlighting their pre-war potential, their war experiences, and the impact of their deaths on their families and communities. McMullin's writing is sympathetic and well-researched, providing insight into the emotional connections between the soldiers and their loved ones. The book raises questions about the worth of the war and the loss of talented young men. [Extracted from the article]

The nineteenth century witnessed the creation of a 'paper Panopticon' designed to capture information about offenders in England, especially those who were transported to Australia. This article considers the effectiveness of this new record-keeping system and asks whether convicts had some agency within it. These questions are explored through a macroscopic analysis of the recording of convict ages in nineteenth-century England and Australia, made possible by the Digital Panopticon project. By using the methodological opportunities opened up by digital technologies, we can test the accuracy of historical records in new ways, and in the process develop a better understanding of the encounter between state authority and convict agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book "Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia" edited by Evan Smith, Jayne Persian, and Vashti Jane Fox sheds light on the often overlooked topic of Australian right-wing radicalism. The book explores the historical context and various individuals, groups, and movements within the radical right in Australia. It also examines the relationship between the political mainstream and the radical right, as well as the opposition faced by anti-fascists. While the book has some imbalances and omissions, it offers important observations that can contribute to future research and debate on the subject. The book also addresses the tension between scholarship and activism, and the question of whether the Australian radical right is endogenous or influenced by international factors. Overall, the book provides valuable insights and should be read to stimulate further discussion and research. [Extracted from the article]

"A History of Crime in Australia: Australian Underworlds" by Nancy Cushing is an introductory text for students of crime history and criminology. The book explores the impact of English law on transported convicts and First Nations peoples in Australia, and how their own systems of law were disregarded by colonists. It is organized into twelve chapters, each focusing on a specific aspect of crime history in Australia. The book includes essays by historians in each chapter, providing examples of scholarly writing. While the book primarily focuses on the legal history of New South Wales and Victoria, it offers thought-provoking case studies and is accessible to both students and general readers interested in crime history. [Extracted from the article]

A Trip to the Dominions: The Scientific Event That Changed Australia: Edited by Lynette Russell. In July 1914 a large delegation from the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) disembarked at Fremantle to attend a BAAS annual congress in Australia, the remotest of imperial outposts. Boucher is interested in settlers' reactions to frontier violence in the mid-nineteenth century and offers some thoughtful reflections about the interface between amateur anthropology and settler colonialism. [Extracted from the article]

"Asbestos in Australia: From Boom to Dust" is a comprehensive and highly readable edited volume that explores the intersection of environment, industry, and public health in Australian life. The book synthesizes diverse literatures on asbestos in Australia, providing an overview of its business, economic, and social history from its rise as a "miracle mineral" in the late nineteenth century to its decline in the face of mounting medical evidence and public outcry. The collection includes historical, legal, and medical perspectives, as well as oral histories from communities affected by asbestos mining. It serves as a valuable reference work and highlights the ongoing challenges posed by industrial pollutants in Australia. [Extracted from the article]

"Cruel Care: A History of Children at Our Borders" by Jordana Silverstein is a powerful examination of Australia's immigration policies and their impact on children. The book challenges the prevailing reasoning behind mandatory detention for asylum-seekers and argues that the system is rooted in colonial control. Silverstein analyzes the emotional rhetoric surrounding children and how it has been used to justify harsh policies. The book also explores issues such as the best interests of the child, manufactured crises for political gain, and the unique Australian program of indefinite offshore detention. Silverstein's work is well-researched and thought-provoking, offering valuable insights for readers with diverse perspectives. [Extracted from the article]

The book "Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the Revolution" edited by Michelle Arrow is a collection of essays that explores the agenda for women during the Whitlam government in Australia. The book is divided into five sections, each focusing on different aspects such as political influence, the law, health and social policy, media, arts, and education, and the legacies of the era. The essays provide historical knowledge, personal stories, and inspiration for readers. The collection aims to shape the future by examining the past and highlighting what was achieved and what still needs to be done for women's equality and justice. The book also emphasizes the importance of diverse perspectives and voices, including Indigenous contributors, in the fight for lasting and meaningful change. [Extracted from the article]

O'Gorman grounds this argument in a range of sites, stitching them together over seven chapters that explore the dynamic more-than-human histories of certain water landscapes. We are now perhaps overly familiar with accounts of the Murray-Darling Basin as a "biocultural terrain" (96) over which the effects of colonial (mis)management are writ large, not least because of O'Gorman's 2012 book I Flood Country i . Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-Than-Human Histories of Australia's Murray-Darling Basin: By Emily O'Gorman. [Extracted from the article]

This article investigates northern Australia's Spanish-speaking community, in order to probe the formation of migrant identity and the perception of Australian society. The community communicated extensively with other members of the global Hispanic Diaspora throughout Europe and the Americas, and used this correspondence to reflect on their experiences in Australia. One individual in particular, Salvador Torrents, wrote a large number of articles and short stories, demonstrating the complex interplay between local and international issues. Migrants used this interaction of local and global events, and the framework provided by transnational radical Hispanic debate, to critique Australian society and migrants' place within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History" is a book that explores Indigenous perspectives on time and history. The book consists of twelve essays and an introduction by the editors, who aim to incorporate Indigenous temporalities into modern historical thinking. The essays in the book alternate between Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives, highlighting the differences in understanding and conceptualizing time and history. The book emphasizes the importance of blending different understandings of the past to enrich our overall historical understanding. [Extracted from the article]

In her introduction, by bringing the book into the present and not allowing the modern welfare state off the hook, Beaumont prepares us to make sense of the Great Depression from a perspective based in the here and now. Beaumont's chapter twenty-six, titled "Women at Risk", further steps outside of existing Depression Era historiography, addressing a highly overlooked sector in most historical examinations of the period. Australia's Great Depression: How a Nation Shattered by the Great War Survived the Worst Economic Crisis It Has Ever Faced: By Joan Beaumont. [Extracted from the article]

Cox is aware of the limitations of using George Augustus Robinson as a source for the inner life of Kickerterpoller and is generally sensitive to the difficulty of interpreting a man whose behaviour shifted over time. There is another element to the subtitle of the book, as Cox claims Kickerterpoller "sparked Australia's bloodiest war". Broken Spear: The Untold Story of Black Tom Birch, the Man Who Sparked Australia's Bloodiest War: By Robert Cox. [Extracted from the article]

Yet the relatively small presence of Pacific Islanders in Australia can mask the extent of Australia's presence in Pacific people's lives. The theme of Australia's national amnesia about the Pacific is present one way or another throughout the book. Not all island populations have admittedly had or have that level of access and Hoskins does not ignore the history of such barriers, including the perception of New Zealand as a "back-door". [Extracted from the article]

Indeed, by tying together stories of individuals, families, communities, countries, and international systems, Balint and Kalman sensitively show the breadth of the histories within which we all live our lives. Balint and Kalman skilfully show the different ways people understand themselves and their journeys; the way they make sense of what they have endured and achieved. Smuggled: An Illegal History of Journeys to Australia: By Ruth Balint and Julie Kalman. [Extracted from the article]

Alfred Deakin experienced himself as divided between an inner and outer self. He remembered himself as an unhappy child who sought solace in books and fantasy, creating an inner chamber of day-dreaming and escape. Historians have puzzled over this fruitlessly but on the basis of psychoanalytic theory and new evidence about his mother Sarah I argue that one possible source of Deakin's complex psychology is his mother's depression in the early years of her migration when Deakin was a young child. Also formative for Deakin was his parents' active participation in mid-Victorian literary culture and their unusually strong commitment to their children's education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia, our history with nuclear matter and its processes has its origins in the early twentieth-century scientific adventurism of famed Antarctic explorer Douglas Mawson. As much as Mawson's life has come to be defined by his forays into the ice, an examination of his personal and academic papers provides insight into how his relationship with radium was also of great importance, mirroring the shifting political and historical forces impacting upon the geologist. These are forces that he impacted in turn. Further to this, charting Mawson's relationship with the radioactive from 1904 until his death in 1958 demonstrates the ways that Australia's nuclear history entwines with scientific discovery, settler nationalistic ambition and colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1931, the All for Australia League and other 'citizens movements' mounted a major challenge to the established conservative parties. Traditional views of the League saw it as a reflection of economic group interests, whether of the business establishment or dissident capitalists such as manufactures. More recent scholarship has stressed middle-class concerns with 'sound finance' as the inspiration of the League. This paper instead situates the League in the historical context of centre party projects in New South Wales, and of progressivism, in particular industrial psychology. The economic crisis and the rightward shift of the nationalists enabled a group of political entrepreneurs to transform the League from a front group ]hr business into a populist movement. However, the shift of mainstream conservatism back to the political centre fatally undercut the League's support base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intersection of labour, race, and immigration is a neglected area of comparative history and this article suggests its potential. This article draws particularly on the papers of Arthur Calwell who, as a leading figure in the Australian Labor Party, was unyielding in his defence of 'White Australia'. Calwell used the 1958 riots against West Indians in Nottingham and London to bolster his opposition to the admission of non-whites. His attitudes are contrasted with the views of selected figures in the British labour movement who championed class over race, and upheld the virtues of the multi-racial British Commonwealth. These differences are held up as a mirror to the contrasting attitudes of Australian and British labour towards race and immigration. These differences, however, narrowed considerably during the late 1950s and 1960s as the ALP abandoned its traditional commitment to 'White Australia', and the British labour movement modified its earlier support for 'coloured' immigrants and their presence within Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malcolm Henry Ellis (1890-1969) was a distinguished historical biographer. His lives of Lachlan Macquarie, Francis Greenway and John Macarthur are substantial contributions to Australian historical writing. But Ellis is more widely remembered for his acerbic reviews, especially of volume one of Manning Clark's History of Australia, and his controversial disputes with professional historical groups like the Royal Australian Historical Society and the Australian Dictionary of Biography. A prominent Cold War intellectual, Ellis appeared before the 1949 Victorian Royal Commission on Communism as its `historical expert'. This article examines the intersections between Ellis's anticommunist politics and his work as a pioneering Australian historian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates white Australia's racialisation of the Pacific War. Specifically, it focuses on contemporary disputes over racialised depictions of the conflict, and how such contentions figured in understandings of Australian identity. By looking at wartime newspaper and magazine articles, wartime propaganda, and the public responses to them, this article demonstrates the diversity and complexity of white Australia's racialisation of the Pacific War. Though the view of the Pacific War as a 'race war' was certainly common among white Australians, it was not universal. That said, most white Australians at the time, regardless of whether they supported the racialisation of the conflict, upheld a racialised worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Australian press attention to the violence that erupted when Indonesian soldiers from the Dutch colonial army (KNIL) were interned in Australia during the Indonesian National Revolution (1945–49). Dutch authorities used their extra-territorial rights in Australia to confine mutinous soldiers in camps as colonial subjects. Australian authorities sought to expel these men as 'aliens' while also supporting their citizenship of a nascent Republic. Our research refines historical understanding of the impetus behind the 1947 repatriation of these soldiers. Regional press reports and photographs from the mid-1940s accommodated two emerging, complementary notions of citizenship in their mediation of this situation. One was growing support for Australia's recognition of the citizenship claims of Indonesians wanting an independent Republic, particularly where those claims were violently denied by Dutch authorities in Australia. The other was a steadfast commitment to national sovereignty and citizenship premised on upholding a 'white Australia'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1950, 'ethnic dancer' Beth Dean made her living on a lecture-demonstration touring circuit of the dance traditions of Australia, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and North America. To assert her expertise, she claimed to have studied Māori and Australian Aboriginal cultures for a number of years. This article investigates how Dean's didactic performances drew on American traditions of ethnic dance to present apparently authoritative representations of Indigenous cultures, supported by Adult Education Boards in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia and national arts organisations. I argue that Dean exploited the symbolic potential of 'corroboree' as a performance of intercultural communication to establish her authority to speak about and perform Australian Aboriginal dance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent archival discovery reveals that around four hundred visas were issued to students from China to study in Australia from 1920 to 1925. This article explains and explores the significance of this little-known initiative under the White Australia Policy by reference to China's global resurgence, the role of the Chinese consulate-general in local community affairs, and support and resistance among Chinese community leaders in response to these developments. It highlights a paradox associated with the students' arrival, specifically the Melbourne publication of fabricated ‘Chinese letters home’ at a time when literate students were writing personal letters to their families and friends in China about their impressions of Melbourne, their understanding of local labour and gender relations, and their engagement with the big political and business issues of the day. The recently-released letters and papers of a contemporary student, Joe Tong, tell an untold story of Chinese Australians in the postwar era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 1900, a new type of charity event – the advertising poster ball – was introduced to Australia. The event brought together a range of pre-existing cultural forms to promote mass market brands, facilitated by a new, visual advertising culture. Over the next forty years, the poster ball was adopted by community groups, becoming a regular feature on the social and fundraising calendar. By harnessing people's innate longing for creative expression and shared social activity to the promotion of commercial brands, the poster ball linked these brands to pleasurable social events, helping embed them in Australian cultural memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the career of Australian-born economist and United Nations lobbyist Persia Campbell (1898–1974) to track the influence of Federation-era Australian welfarism into the postwar international sphere. I argue that Campbell, a pioneer of American consumer economics and an influential commentator on international development, derived her lifelong preoccupation with consumer welfare and living standards from a youthful immersion in Australian economic thought. Although she lived abroad from 1929, her worldview was indelibly shaped by this early training. Campbell’s example therefore points to the international afterlives of Australia’s foundational welfarism, and offers an Australian corrective to a development historiography dominated by the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Town planning for Australia's cities and towns emerged as a new community and public policy concern in the years after Federation. In 1913, George A. Taylor, the Sydney-based editor of Building magazine, mooted the formation of the Town Planning Association of Australia as a unifying nation-building force. Drawing on newly discovered records of the New South Wales Town Planning Association, this paper investigates moves towards this national voluntary association. It explores both support and resistance to the nationalistic New South Wales-driven initiative. The First Australian Town Planning Conference held in Adelaide in 1917 ultimately presented an alternative model for successful national discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Louis Nowra's recently published Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal Men's Violence Against Women and Children (2007} includes an ethno-historical study of gender relations in Aboriginal "traditional" society, drawing on early explorers" observations and anthropoloqical accounts. Inga Clendinnen likewise included a chapter on Aboriginal sexual politics in Dancing with Strangers (2003). This paper critiques their conclusions and methods, and closely analyses the same terrain--late eighteenth-century European representations of Aboriginal sexual relations. My aim is not to deny that there were instances of violence in the sexual conduct of eighteenth-century Aboriginal societies. Instead, this paper demonstrates that Nowra and Clendinnen's ethno-histories fail to present a holistic account of the myriad descriptions of Indigenous gender dynamics that permeate the European explorers' accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese communities maintained a variety of institutional networks linking Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands and southern China over the first half of the twentieth century. This paper explores one of these networks, the Australasian branch network of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuo Min Tang or KMT). By focusing on two institutional initiatives of the Australasian Kuo Min Tang--one in China and one in Australia--the paper asks whether there was anything distinctively Australasian about Chinese-Australasian networks besides their location in the South Pacific. Reflecting on the life of a contemporary Chinese-Australian journalist, the paper draws connections between the institutional history of the KMT and personal observations on what it may have meant to be Chinese Australian in China and Australia over the first half of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on images of women who worked in government offices and explores the ways in which age, along with gender and class, became institutionalised as a marker of difference among them in the early twentieth century. It argues that the girl typist was etched sharply in the public imagination and, although there were anxieties about her youth and femininity, by the 1930s the more ambiguous image of the middle-aged single 'lady officer' constituted the greater threat to patriarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the feminists campaign for economic independence of married women in Australia. How the feminists became preoccupied with the anomalous condition of wives in a modern democracy; Illustration on the case of Mrs. Pauline Wilson in Tasmania in 1944; Legal status of the women in Australia.

Examines feminists' campaigns for Aboriginal rights in Australia during 1927 and 1957 which were complicated by their conflicting loyalties to empire, nation, sex, race and their own political agendas. Information on the political agendas; Political focus on the convergence of maternalist feminism and imperial protectionism; Information on the political rights of mothers in Australia; Details on imperialism in Australia.

Focuses on Australian servicemen who received genital mutilation, face disfigurement and limblessness as a result of fighting in the first world war. Number of Australian men who fought in the Great War; Examination of the surgical and medical services offered to these soldiers; How these soldiers adapted to their injuries; Detailed information on the Great War.

In 1959, the United Nations (UN) proclaimed the year 1959–60 World Refugee Year (WRY). The aim of WRY was to urge members of the UN to focus on the issue of refugees in camps, provide additional financial support and foster humanitarian solutions to resettle refugees. In this article, I focus on the Victorian committee which was formed to oversee WRY activities, to consider the concept of 'rights', and its relationship to humanitarianism. Three arguments are advanced. First, moving beyond the polarisation between human rights and humanitarianism this article discusses the notion of humanitarian rights to capture the shifts taking place during the postwar period. Second, WRY illustrates techniques of modern humanitarian campaigning and fundraising, suggesting that compassion had to be generated. Finally, WRY provides a valuable opportunity to consider a key historic moment which throws into sharp relief a consideration of humanitarian rights in postwar Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the centrality that the Gallipoli Peninsula and the 1915 campaign have in the psyche of many Australians, the battlefield itself has not been physically studied in great detail. This paper reports on the first season of archaeological fieldwork conducted in 2010 in the ANZAC battlefield. Innovative methodologies were used by new national and disciplinary collaborations and new systems combining landscape archaeology and digital analysis with historical data. It argues such collaborations can deepen our understandings of the experience of 1915, as we approach this key centenary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia was a precocious mass democracy. In the middle of the 19th century the franchise was extended to nearly all white male adults, the secret ballot was introduced, and other important reforms implemented. Surprisingly, these developments have attracted little recent attention. Dominant interpretations are based on selective surveys of particular colonies; they either elevate the gold diggings or else cynically claim that democratisation was mostly accidental and inglorious. This paper encompasses a survey of the three major colonies. It argues that widespread collective action was a spur to political change, and that electoral reforms were introduced to contain future contention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 1846 a ten-year-old Aboriginal boy witnessed a large scale Aboriginal attack on a station north of Brisbane. Although he survived the attack, the boy had the terrifying experience of observing the brutal killings of his employer and acting guardian and a female station worker. From the very next day he was called upon to relive the attack for the inquest and between 1846 and 1854 he was a material witness, and in some cases the only witness, in one coronial inquest, three committal hearings and three Supreme Court trials of Indigenous men for attacks on Europeans. This paper how colonial law was effectively manipulated to suit frontier interests in these years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ways in which Europeans experienced the legal system for crimes against Aboriginal people needs more systematic research. Although for the first fifty years of Australian settlement Aboriginal legal status was protractedly ambiguous, the foundational principle of later-established South Australia was that Aboriginal people were British subjects and settler crimes against them would be punished 'with exemplary severity'. This paper puts this foundational principle to the test by examining the working of the legal system where Europeans were investigated for the deaths of Aboriginal people. Ultimately, we argue, the principle of protecting Aboriginal people as British subjects not only failed, but became inverted into a principle of Aboriginal punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]