A detailed description of Hovell and Hume's early 19th Century explorations in Victoria, Australia (now the location of Melbourne).

Bushrangers are Australian legends. Ned Kelly, Ben Hall, 'Captain Thunderbolt' and their bushranging brothers are famous. They're remembered as folk heroes and celebrated for their bravery and their ridicule of inept and corrupt authorities. But not all Australian bushrangers were white men. And not all were seen in this glowing light in their own time. In Boundary Crossers, historian Meg Foster reveals the stories of bushrangers who didn't fit the mould. African-American man Black Douglas, who was seen as the 'terror' of the Victorian goldfields, Sam Poo, known as Australia's only Chinese bushranger, Aboriginal man Jimmy Governor, who was renowned as a mass murderer, and Captain Thunderbolt's partner, Aboriginal woman Mary Ann Bugg, whose extraordinary exploits extended well beyond her time as 'the Captain's Lady'. All lived remarkable lives that were far more significant, rich and complex than history books have led us to believe.

Migration documentary films played an important role in promoting Australian images to the outside world. Many films were made in this period to fulfill the function of migrant-recruiting and nation-building objectives. In these films, Australia was presented as a progressive and liberal nation seeking to establish her identities. The slogan "Australia for the White Man" prevailed over the entire period from 1908 to 1961. It was not until 1972 that The White Australia Policy was officially abolished. The historical meanings of these transformations are definitely worth exploring. The relationships among immigration policies, documentary films and the construction of national identities become valuable subjects for examination. This innovative book is the first in the field that comes with a systematic and comprehensive study of migration documentary films in post-war Australia. In the analysis of the sixty-seven films, this book reveals that the project for recruiting migrants to settle in Australia was not a simple matter of overseas campaigns. The terrain for media publicity was never just the emigrant countries and the target audience were both foreigners and local Australians. These migration documentary films are actually propaganda films in nature. However, visual images, narratives, and myths represented in these films were important in the self-depiction of Australian and in the formative discourse of national identity. This book shows how absences and under-representations of film images are important to examine in order to fully understand the particular, utopian visions of the post-war period. This book argues that open-door policies, coastal images, and modernization narratives gradually became a new "maritime myth" in the quest of a redefined Australian identity, and "new Australians," the post-war immigrants, became battlers, echoing the "bush legend" existing in the Australian narrative. Themes of modernization, industrialization, Anglo-centric identity, "the Australian way of life" itself, political freedom, and democracy of the overall films were stressed.

This book provides a fully researched biography of the naval career of Matthew Flinders, with particular emphasis on his importance for the maritime discovery of Australia. Sailing in the wake of the eighteenth-century voyages of exploration by Captain Cook and others, Flinders was the first naval commander to circumnavigate Australia's coastline. He contributed more to the mapping and naming of places in Australia than virtually any other single person. His voyage to Australia on H.M.S. Investigator expanded the scope of imperial, geographical and scientific knowledge. This biography places Flinders's career within the context of Pacific exploration and the early white settlement of Australia. Flinders's connections with other explorers, his use of patronage, the dissemination of his findings, and his posthumous reputation are also discussed in what is an important new scholarly work in the field.

The years 1900 to 1954 marked the transformation from an exotic, colonized "Far East" to a more autonomous, prominent "Asia Pacific". This anthology examines the grand strategies of great powers as they vied for influence and ultimately hegemony in the region. At the turn of the twentieth century, the main contestants included the venerable British Empire and the aspiring Japan and United States. The unwieldy leviathan of China, the European imperial holdings in Southeast Asia, and the expanses of the western Pacific emerged as battlegrounds in literal and geopolitical terms. Other less powerful nations, such as India, Burma, Australia, and French Indochina, also exercised agency in crafting grand strategies to further their interests and in their interactions with those great powers. Among the many factors affecting all nations invested in the Asia Pacific were such traditional elements as economics, military power, and diplomacy, as well as fluid traits like ideology, culture, and personality. The era saw the decline of British and European influence in the Asia Pacific, the rise and fall of Japanese imperialism, the emergence of American primacy, the ongoing struggle for independence in Southeast Asia, and China's resurrection as a contender for hegemony. Great powers shifted and so too did their grand strategies.

This book offers an historical portrait of the first generations of women home scientists at the University of New Zealand in the early decades of the twentieth century. It adopts the tools of biographical research to interrogate their professional lives in a new colonial university. With a specific focus on Home Science, this book contests contemporary views that a university education would produce glorified housekeepers. Previous scholarship has not fully considered how Home Science expanded the range of professional, academic and career options for educated women. Drawing extensively on archival material from New Zealand, the United States, and England, this book examines how women worked with, around, and against gender stereotypes to establish themselves as professional scholars in the field of Home Science. This book is a rich micro-history of gender identities and roles. It demonstrates how Home Science, intended by male academic administrators to confine women to their "proper" domestic sphere, was used by home scientists to create new professional opportunities for women, both in the academy and in the scientific community at large. These determined and talented women were not victims of patriarchy but creative agents of change and promise. As activist women before them, they worked with, around, and against gender stereotypes to expand the area of "women's sphere." The portraits sketched in this book illuminate the extent to which New Zealand home scientists established connections with women in the US and England and their contribution to this transnational community of scholars. The authors go beyond arguments that Home Science, as a subject and field of study, hindered women to ask instead how and why it developed as it did. They trace the lives and careers of early home scientists to understand how these educated and mobile women transcended gendered views that their work was little more than "glorified housekeeping." The careers of academic women were deeply marked by the gendered boundaries of the Academy as well as the profoundly gendered expectations of their daily lives. The portraits presented in this book suggest that academic women were politically astute. That is, they were able to 'read' the context in which they lived and worked and while on the one hand they appeared to accept their gendered positioning, on the other, they used these opportunities to neutralize their marginal status and create a specialized education for women. Successive generations of graduate women derived benefits from the professionalization of women's work and were able to consider a range of career options that provided real alternatives to domesticity. There can be little doubt that these first generations of academic women occupied dangerous territory; and it is this terrain that contemporary women academics inhabit. The history of women's higher education continues to be deeply marked by enduring struggles for recognition of their scholarly contribution and expertise. Historical Portraits of Women Home Scientists is an important book for those interested in the history of women's higher education, gender and the professions, historical methodology, and transnational histories of women home scientists.

Until the latter decades of the twentieth century historical works on Australian education tended, almost without exception, to not foreground gender. The revitalisation of feminism in both the social and academic worlds in the 1970s nurtured scholarship whose primary purpose was to place gender at the centre of policy and research. One strand of this project was to map the careers and structural positioning of women teachers. However, while this important advance brought an analytical lens to bear on what had been a significant lacuna in the history of education the emphasis on the overt structural and cultural exclusions faced by women who taught tended to perpetuate stereotypes of teaching and professionalism. Thus, women teachers were understood as victims of patriarchal bureaucratic systems. The possibility that women teachers had more complex and agentic lives was largely unexplored. More recent scholarship has called for the need to investigate the subjective experiences of becoming and being a woman teacher thus creating a greater set of bounded studies which pay close attention to ethnic, class and regional differences as well as instances where women teachers exercised autonomy and resistance. A further significant development has been the insistence on the inclusion of 'stories from below' gathered through the biographical and autobiographical writings of women teachers as well as oral history testaments. This book is part of that ongoing historical exploration of women teachers' lives and makes a unique contribution. This is partly due to the location, Western Australia, and also in the focus on the process of becoming a woman teacher. Oral testimonies from twenty-four womenteachers who graduated from the only Western Australian teachers' college in the early twentieth century provide the personal perspective, while secondary sources, policy texts and institutional records are used to create the historical context. This book challenges the assumption that families and schools unproblematically reproduced prevailing gender regimes. By becoming teachers, these women had been exposed to traditional expectations that they would accept masculine authority and eventually leave teaching to become wives and mothers. On the other hand they were also educated, encouraged to enter the teaching profession, and rewarded for their achievements. They learned to invest themselves in developing their rational and critical capacities. If they stayed in the profession they would have to remain spinsters, an apparently unacceptable social position. It might have seemed like an impossible choice but in the final chapter of the book Janina Trotman details the nature of these choices and the rich and varied lives of the women who made them. Girls Becoming Teachers will appeal to a wide range of groups. Scholars engaged in researching gender, education and professionalism would find much of interest, as will those who investigate the construction of subjectivities. Since much of the book is based on oral testimonies it would be an important addition to an Oral History Collection. Finally, since stories are a source of pleasure and fascination, many teachers, both retired and in service would find the book a pleasure to read.

This book draws on archival, oral history and public policy sources to tell a history of foster care in Australia from the nineteenth century to the present day. It is, primarily, a social history which places the voices of people directly touched by foster care at the centre of the story, but also within the wider social and political debates which have shaped foster care across more than a century. The book confronts foster care's difficult past-death and abuse of foster children, family separation, and a general public apathy towards these issues-but it also acknowledges the resilience of people who have survived a childhood in foster care, and the challenges faced by those who have worked hard to provide good foster homes and to make child welfare systems better. These are themes which the book examines from an Australian perspective, but which often resonate with foster care globally.