It is a common belief that Australians take little interest in their appearance. Yet from the first white settlement, clothing was of crucial importance to Australians. It was central to the ways class and status were negotiated and equally significant for marking out sexual differences. Dress was implicated in definitions of morality, in the relationship between Europeans and Aboriginal people, and between convict and free. This 1994 book, a history of the cultural practices of dress rather than an account of fashion, reveals the broader historical and cultural implications of clothes in Australia for the first time. It shows that the colonies did not always slavishly follow British fashion, and also looks at the impact of the gold field experience on Australian dress, the nature of local manufacturing and retail outlets, and the way in which rural men and their bush dress, rather than women's dress, became closely related to Australian identity.

Cattle has been big business in Australia for well over a century and earns substantial export dollars. Yet the contribution that Aboriginal people have made to this key sector of the Australian economy has not been widely recognised. This book uncovers the central role of Aboriginal labour in the Queensland cattle industry. It looks at a broad period, from Aboriginal land use at the time of first contact, resistance to white settlers and rapid absorption of Aboriginal people into the pastoral economy. The book also considers the impact of the introduction of equal pay rates in the 1970s and land management in the 1990s. Dawn May shows that the use of Aboriginal labour was a complex process involving a high degree of state intervention. Her book is an important economic and social history of the cattle industry in Queensland, but the pressing issue of native title makes the book highly relevant throughout post-Mabo Australia.

The material world of European settlement in Australia has been uncovered not only by historians but by the work of archaeologists as well. These archaeological enquiries have revealed new and direct pictures of the public and private lives of Australians at home and at work. This book, now in paperback, presents the insights gained from such investigations and makes them available to a wide audience. Historical archaeology is broad ranging and this book discusses the first European towns including those settlements that failed, the archaeology of convicts and archaeological evidence of the agricultural, maritime, industrial and manufacturing activities of early Australia. Graham Connah also examines the evidence of earliest external contact, contact between Europeans and Aboriginal people and looks at the diverse cultural forms of modern Australia. The book also suggests ways people can become involved in studying and protecting Australia's historical heritage.

Australia has a strong tradition of labour historiography, which until recently has been focused on the institutions of the labour movement: trade unions and labour parties. This book shifts the focus back to the workplace and looks at how and why the nature of work changed during the period from the late nineteenth century to World War II. The book focuses on three industries in the state of Victoria: clothing, bootmaking, and printing. Concerned with the complex relationship between economic and technological change, the nature of sexual division in the workforce, and the role of union, employer and state activists, it carefully traces the impact of all of these factors on wage levels for men and women. The treatment of these themes touches on wide historical issues, as we follow the fortunes of Victorian manufacturing, and consider the political strategies of the trade unions of the time and the state's response to them. The study is also an important piece of social history, evoking the nature of work for many Australians of the period.

War has shaped Australian society profoundly. When we commemorate the sacrifices of the Anzacs, we rightly celebrate their bravery, but we do not always acknowledge the complex aftermath of combat.In The Cost of War, Stephen Garton traces the experiences of Australia's veterans, and asks what we can learn from their stories. He considers the long-term effects of war on returned servicemen and women, on their families and communities, and on Australian public life. He describes attempts to respond to the physical and psychological wounds of combat, from the first victims of shellshock during WWI to more recent understandings of post-traumatic stress disorder. And he examines the political and social repercussions of war, including debates over how we should commemorate conflict and how society should respond to the needs of veterans.When the first edition of The Cost of War appeared in 1996, it offered a ground-breaking new perspective on the Anzac experience. In this new edition, Garton again makes a compelling case for a more nuanced understanding of the individual and collective costs of war.

The myth of Anzac has been one of Australia's most enduring. The belief in the superior fighting qualities of Australia's soldiers in the First World War is part of the national consciousness, and the much touted 'special' relationship between Britain and Australia during the war accepted as fact. This provocative and wide-ranging book is a reassessment of Australia's role in World War I and its relations - military, economic, political and psychological - with Britain. Eric Andrews shows that it suited all parties to propagate the myth of Anzac for their own purposes. It was widely assumed that Britain and Australia were countries with similar interests united by Empire. The book considers this assumption in the light of Australia's actual military experience in the War and finds that it was false. It also discusses the impact of the War on the Australian attitude to Empire. The book is a fresh - and at times controversial - consideration of issues of abiding interest and significance.

Ironically, the first civil case to be heard in Australia occurred at the behest of two convicts under sentence. Of course, convicts had first-hand experience of criminal law, but all the settlers were part of a culture which emphasised the rule of law as the guarantee of its fundamental political value, British liberty. This book, written by a lawyer and unique for its perspective based in both legal and social history, illuminates the important role played by the concept of the rule of law in the transformation of New South Wales from a penal colony to a free society. Dr Neal lucidly outlines the interaction between law and politics in early New South Wales and shows that because there were no official political structures, the courts served as a de facto parliament and a means of political expression.

No area of social welfare in Australia has seen as much conflict as health policy. Clashes have involved the medical profession, bureaucrats, friendly societies and political parties, often to the detriment of the patient. This 1991 book provides background to the current debate by studying the political conflict over health policy in Australia from 1910-60. It looks at both state and national levels for the origins of the system of publicly subsidized private practice epitomized in the fee-for-service scheme. The different currents within state policy are analysed along with the various obstructions to the development of the national health insurance policy. The role of the British Medical Association, which in its indigenous form continues to have a hostile relationship with the government because of its determination to maintain its independence and fee-for-service practices, is closely examined. The Price of Health will be of particular interest to health policy makers.

The Origins of Australia's Capital Cities is a comprehensive survey, well illustrated with maps and plans, which aims to answer two questions. First, why Australia's eight capital cities are situated where they are, and second, how they were established. Pairs of chapters on each of the State capitals - Sydney, Hobart, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane - are accompanied by studies of Canberra as the federal capital and Darwin as a territorial capital. A capital is the administrative centre of a political entity, and in Australia, unlike many overseas countries, a uniquely high proportion of the population resides in the capitals. Companion chapters examine the causes of initial European settlement in each area, and reasons for the actual establishment of each capital city. Attention is given to such topics as planning and layout, the basis of growth, potential rivals, the social nature of the cities and the nature of their spread. While there have been no other volume covering all the capitals to seek answers to the same basic questions. This will therefore be an invaluable source book, and provide a stimulus to further enquiry in the social history of Australia. An introduction by the editor pulls together the general strands which link the chapters, and highlights the ways in which the Australian experience contrasts with the urban experience overseas.

The last book in a trilogy of explorations on space and time from a preeminent scholar, The Boundless Sea is Gary Y. Okihiro's most innovative yet. Whereas Okihiro's previous books, Island World and Pineapple Culture, sought to deconstruct islands and continents, tropical and temperate zones, this book interrogates the assumed divides between space and time, memoir and history, and the historian and the writing of history. Okihiro uses himself-from Okinawan roots, growing up on a sugar plantation in Hawai'i, researching in Botswana, and teaching in California-to reveal the historian's craft involving diverse methodologies and subject matters. Okihiro's imaginative narrative weaves back and forth through decades and across vast spatial and societal differences, theorized as historical formations, to critique history's conventions. Taking its title from a translation of the author's surname, The Boundless Sea is a deeply personal and reflective volume that challenges how we think about time and space, notions of history.

In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia…

An epic description of the brutal transportation of men, women and children out of Georgian Britain into a horrific penal system which was to be the precursor to the Gulag and was the origin of Australia. The Fatal Shore is the prize-winning, scholarly, brilliantly entertaining narrative that has given its true history to Australia.

Pitcairn, a tiny Pacific island that was refuge to the mutineers of HMAV Bounty and home to their descendants, later became the stage on which one imposter played out his influential vision for British control over the nineteenth-century Pacific Ocean. Joshua W. Hill arrived on Pitcairn in 1832 and began his fraudulent half-decade rule that has, until now, been swept aside as an idiosyncratic moment in the larger saga of Fletcher Christian's mutiny against Captain Bligh, and the mutineers' unlikely settlement of Pitcairn. Here, Hill is shown instead as someone alert to the full scope and power of the British Empire, to the geopolitics of international imperial competition, to the ins and outs of naval command, the vicissitudes of court politics, and, as such, to Pitcairn's symbolic power for the British Empire more broadly.

Fiji is a country whose recent political instability can be directly traced to its distinctive colonial and post-colonial experience. For one particular region of Fiji the authors examine the environmental, social and economic aspects of this experience, at scales ranging from national and regional to island, village and household. Discussions in Third World geography, regional economics and development planning have been full of rhetoric about 'underdevelopment', 'centre-periphery relations' and 'dependency', but seldom are the actual processes which give rise to these phenomena examined in detail. In this book the authors explore in depth the interrelations between the island landscape, the cultural geography of the islanders and the intrusive values and opportunities of the market economy. Some important lessons are to be learnt from the gap between what might be predicted from abstract theories of development and what is actually happening in the real world of politicians, planners, farmers and fishermen.

How, asks John Terrell in this richly illustrated and original book, can we best account for the remarkable diversity of the Pacific Islanders in biology, language, and custom? Traditionally scholars have recognized a simple racial division between Polynesians, Micronesians, Melanesians, Australians, and South-east Asians: peoples allegedly differing in physical appearance, temperament, achievements, and perhaps even intelligence. Terrell shows that such simple divisions do not fit the known facts and provide little more than a crude, static picture of human diversity.

During World War II Australia was under threat of invasion. Could Australia be invaded by the Japanese? Even with the heavy censorship by the government many certainly thought so and the nation was gripped by fear that the danger would soon be on their doorstep. The Japanese appeared to be looming closer; there were submarines in Sydney Harbour, Japanese planes flying overhead and harassment on our coastline. Australians were fearful for their safety. Anxious parents made decisions to protect their children, with or without government sanction. Small children were sent away, often unaccompanied, by concerned parents to friends, relatives, or even strangers living in `safer' parts of the country. Some had little comprehension of what was happening and thought they were going on holiday to the country. The history of these child evacuees in Australia remains largely hidden and their experiences untold. Author Ann Howard, who was evacuated with her mother from the UK during World War II, has set the records straight. A combination of extensive research and the first-hand stories of the evacuees captures the mood of the time and the social and political environment that they lived in. Unlike the sometimes sad and horrible experiences of their UK counterparts, for many Australian child evacuees there enforced `holiday' was a surprisingly happy time. A Carefree War tells the story of the largest upheaval in Australia since white settlement using oral memoirs and box camera photos, all placed within the frameworks of history. The voices of over one hundred contributors join together to paint a vivid picture of wartime Australia; the fear, the chaos and civilians floundering under the impact of a war that would change their way of life forever.

In Alchemy in the Rain Forest Jerry K. Jacka explores how the indigenous population of Papua New Guinea's highlands struggle to create meaningful lives in the midst of extreme social conflict and environmental degradation. Drawing on theories of political ecology, place, and ontology and using ethnographic, environmental, and historical data, Jacka presents a multilayered examination of the impacts large-scale commercial gold mining in the region has had on ecology and social relations. Despite the deadly interclan violence and widespread pollution brought on by mining, the uneven distribution of its financial benefits has led many Porgerans to call for further development. This desire for increased mining, Jacka points out, counters popular portrayals of indigenous people as innate conservationists who defend the environment from international neoliberal development. Jacka's examination of the ways Porgerans search for common ground between capitalist and indigenous ways of knowing and being points to the complexity and interconnectedness of land, indigenous knowledge, and the global economy in Porgera and beyond.

Phillip Parker King has been described as the greatest of Australia's early marine surveyors. But while the achievements of Cook and Flinders are widely known, this is the first telling of King's story. Unlike Cook and Flinders, King was Australian-borna "the son of Philip Gidley King, governor of New South Wales. In a series of gruelling voyages between 1817 and 1822, King charted most of the north-west coast of Australia from the eastern tip of Arnhem Land all the way round to Cape Leeuwin and King George Sound. He surveyed Macquarie Harbour in Van Diemen's Land and the treacherous waters inside the Great Barrier Reef, filling gaps in the work of his famous predecessors. Marsden Hordern, a splendid storyteller, creates for the reader a sense of following, engrossed, in King's wake. The hazards of reefs, shoals and tides are ever-present, as is delight in unfamiliar wildlife and curiosity about the Aboriginal people. The question left hanging is whether King might be better known today had he been a less capable, good and faithful servant of the Crown, and more inclined to the excess and ineptitude of certain other early explorers. Winner of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award for General History. Companion volume to Mariners are Warned!, another prize-winning maritime biography by the same author.

Hoarding New Guinea provides a new cultural history of colonialism that pays close attention to the millions of Indigenous artifacts that serve as witnesses to Europe's colonial past in ethnographic museums. Rainer F. Buschmann investigates the roughly two hundred thousand artifacts extracted from the colony of German New Guinea from 1870 to 1920. Reversing the typical trajectories that place ethnographic museums at the center of the analysis, he concludes that museum interests in material culture alone cannot account for the large quantities of extracted artifacts. Buschmann moves beyond the easy definition of artifacts as trophies of colonial defeat or religious conversion, instead employing the term hoarding to describe the irrational amassing of Indigenous artifacts by European colonial residents. Buschmann also highlights Indigenous material culture as a bargaining chip for its producers to engage with the imposed colonial regime. In addition, by centering an area of collection rather than an institution, he opens new areas of investigation that include non-professional ethnographic collectors and a sustained rather than superficial consideration of Indigenous peoples as producers behind the material culture. Hoarding New Guinea answers the call for a more significant historical focus on colonial ethnographic collections in European museums.

Sixty years after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and FDR's Executive Order 9066 making possible the incarceration of over 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent (two thirds of them American citizens) one question remains unresolved: "Could it happen again?" To the writers in this book--novelists, memoirists, poets, activists, scholars, students, professionals--the WWII internment of Japanese Americans in the detention camps of the west is an unfinished chapter of American history. Former internees and their children join with others in challenging readers to construct a better future by confronting the past. This is a fresh look at a compelling story, that continues to tarnish the American dream.

On 2 September 1845, the convict ship Tasmania left Kingstown Harbour for Van Diemen's Land with 138 female convicts and their 35 children. On 3 December, the ship arrived into Hobart Town. While this book looks at the lives of all the women aboard, it focuses on two women in particular: Eliza Davis, who was transported from Wicklow Gaol for life for infanticide, having had her sentence commuted from death, and Margaret Butler, sentenced to seven years' transportation for stealing potatoes in Carlow. Using original records, this study reveals the reality of transportation, together with the legacy left by these women in Tasmania and beyond, and shows that perhaps, for some, this Draconian punishment was, in fact, a life-saving measure.