FRANK BONGIORNO Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
Dreamers and Schemers provides an expert overview of Australia’s political history. There is always a place for big history such as this. Near the end of his introduction, author Frank Bongiorno outlines his approach: The book begins in deep time, among Indigenous...
PETER BEILHARZ and SIAN SUPSKI (eds) The Work of History: Writing for Stuart Macintyre. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck
These essays are a tribute to one of Australia’s most significant historians, Stuart Macintyre. Stuart Forbes Macintyre has the distinction of being Australia’s leading historian of the last half century. Born in Melbourne in April 1947, educated at Scotch...
DEIRDRE O’CONNELL Harlem Nights: The Secret History of Australia’s Jazz Age. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck
Deidre O’Connell recounts how an American jazz band caused panic in White Australia. In the latter part of the 1920s, the JC Williamson Company was on the lookout for American talent to attract patrons to vaudeville shows at their Tivoli Theatres. One of the...
JANET McCALMAN Vandemonians: the repressed history of colonial Victoria. Reviewed by Lucy Sussex
Historian Janet McCalman discovers what happened to the freed convicts who settled in Victoria. New Zealanders like to call convicts ‘Australian royalty’, omitting the inconvenient fact that boundaries and identity were hardly fixed in stone back then. A convict could...
ROBERT HORNE: interviewed by Ben Ford Smith
Ben Ford Smith talks to the author of The Glass Harpoon about being longlisted for this year’s ARA Historical Novel Prize and South Australia’s history. After its inaugural year in 2020, the ARA Historical Novel Prize is already Australasia’s richest genre...
CAROLYN COLLINS Save Our Sons: Women, dissent and conscription during the Vietnam War; MEREDITH BURGMANN and NADIA WHEATLEY Radicals: Remembering the Sixties. Reviewed by Kathy Gollan
Save Our Sons and Radicals remind us that the anti-war protesters of the 1960s and 70s were many and varied, and so too were their campaigns. These two books canvass the decade 1965-75, during which the Vietnam War dominated political life in Australia. We had...
CASSANDRA PYBUS Truganini: Journey through the apocalypse. Reviewed by Suzanne Marks
Cassandra Pybus places Truganini centre stage in Tasmania’s history, restoring the truth of what happened to her and her people. The subtitle Cassandra Pybus has chosen is a powerful pointer to how she sees Truganini: not as the ‘last of the Tasmanian...
ANNE SCRIMGEOUR On Red Earth Walking: The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike, Western Australia 1946–1949. Reviewed by Kathy Gollan
Anne Scrimgeour’s history of the Pilbara Aboriginal Strike recounts a pivotal moment in Australian history when white pastoralists had to start paying their Aboriginal workers. In 1946 Aboriginal workers on the remote sheep stations of the Pilbara walked off the...
PAM MENZIES Port Kembla: A memoir. Reviewed by Pip Newling
In this lively and affectionate social history of place, Pam Menzies reveals Port Kembla to be both remarkable and ordinary – a driver of the nation as well as being, like so many places in Australia, on the receiving end of change and globalisation. The book is...
JUDITH BRETT From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia got Compulsory Voting. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
Australian politicians might rank low in public esteem but as this incisive book from Judith Brett reveals, our system of voting is admirable compared to the rest of the world’s democracies and certainly superior to those of the United Kingdom and the United States....
BARRY STONE The Squatters: The story of Australia’s pastoral pioneers. Reviewed by Ann Skea
The stories here of the European settlers’ progress from trespassers to squatters to established pastoralists are absorbing, fascinating and well-told. The Squatters tells the stories of the newcomers who, from the time of the First Fleet’s arrival in Australia,...
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