This extraordinary book, published in 2000, explores the feelings of non-Aboriginal Australians as they articulate their sense of belonging to the land. Always acting as a counterpoint is the prior occupation and ownership by Aboriginal people and their spiritual attachment. Peter Read asks the pivotal questions: what is the meaning of places important to non-Aboriginal Australians from which the indigenous people have already been dispossessed? How are contemporary Australians thinking through the problem of knowing that their places of attachment are also the places which Aboriginals loved - and lost? And are the sites of all our deep affections to be contested, articulated, shared, foregone or possessed absolutely? The book cleverly interweaves Read's analysis (and personal quest for belonging) with the voices of poets, musicians, artists, historians, young people, Asian Australians, farmers and seventh generation Australians.

Fighting The Enemy, first published in 2000, is about men with the job of killing each other. Based on the wartime writings of hundreds of Australian front-line soldiers during World War II, this powerful and resonant book contains many moving descriptions of high emotion and drama. Soldiers' interactions with their enemies are central to war and their attitudes to their adversaries are crucial to the way wars are fought. Yet few books look in detail at how enemies interpret each other. This book is an unprecedented and thorough examination of the way Australian combat soldiers interacted with troops from the four powers engaged in World War II: Germany, Italy, Vichy France and Japan. Each opponent has themes peculiar to it: the Italians were much ridiculed; the Germans were the most respected of enemies; the Vichy French were regarded with ambivalence; while the Japanese were the subject of much hostility, intensified by the real threat of occupation.

For every Aboriginal child taken away by the state governments in Australia, there was at least one white family intimately involved in their life. "One Bright Spot" is about one of these families--about "Ming," a Sydney wife and mother who hired Aboriginal domestic servants in the 20s and 30s, and became an activist against the Stolen Generations policy--the removal of Aboriginal children by the Australian government. Her story, reconstructed by her great-granddaughter, tells of a remarkable, yet forgotten, shared history.

Australia's development, from the most unpromising of beginnings as a British prison in 1788 to the prosperous liberal democracy of the present is as remarkable as is its success as a country of large-scale immigration. Since 1942 it has been a loyal ally of the United States and has demonstrated this loyalty by contributing troops to the war in Vietnam and by being part of the "coalition of the willing" in the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and in operations in Afghanistan. In recent years, it has also been more willing to promote peace and democracy in its Pacific and Asian neighbors. This fourth edition of Historical Dictionary of Australia covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Australia.

The colonial practice of rationing goods to Aboriginal people has been neglected in the study of Australian frontiers. This book argues that much of the colonial experience in Central Australia can be understood by seeing rationing as a fundamental, though flexible, instrument of colonial government. Rationing was the material basis for a variety of colonial ventures: scientific, evangelical, pastoral and the post-war program of 'assimilation'. Combining history and anthropology in a cultural study of rationing, this book develops a new narrative of the colonisation of Central Australia. Two arguments underpin this story: that the colonists were puzzled by the motives of the Indigenous recipients; and that they were highly inventive in the meanings and moral foundations they ascribed to the rationing relationship. This study goes to the heart of contemporary reflections on the nature of Indigenous 'citizenship'.

This is the first comprehensive study of the ways in which Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have been excluded from the rights of Australian citizenship over the past 100 years. Drawing extensively on archival material, the authors look at how the colonies initiated a policy of exclusion that was then replicated by the Commonwealth and State governments following federation. The book includes careful examination of government policies and practice from the 1880s to the 1990s. It argues that there was never any constitutional reason why Aborigines could not be granted full citizenship.

This is the first comprehensive study of the ways in which Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have been excluded from the rights of Australian citizenship over the past 100 years. Drawing extensively on archival material, the authors look at how the colonies initiated a policy of exclusion that was then replicated by the Commonwealth and State governments following federation. The book includes careful examination of government policies and practice from the 1880s to the 1990s. It argues that there was never any constitutional reason why Aborigines could not be granted full citizenship.

The 1890s were a watershed in Australian history, a time of mass unemployment, industrial confrontation and sweeping social change. They also nurtured a flourishing radical culture: anarchists, socialists, single taxers, feminists and republicans. This 1997 book, informed by feminist theory and cultural studies, recreates that political and social vision. Bruce Scates reappraises these radicals and the debates they entered into and the causes they espoused. He offers new insights into a broad range of topics: the creation of the Labor Party and the meaning of citizenship; the rise of 'first-wave' feminism and contested gender definitions; the vibrant literary culture; the Utopian vision of the radicals and the communities they established; and the harsh realities of poverty and unemployment. The book tells the story of the politics of the street, and draws out many of the striking resonances between the 1890s and the 1990s.

This pioneering study of Australian, New Zealand, and Pacific Christianity opens up new perspectives on Christianization and modernization in this richly complex region. The reception of Christianity into Pacific cultures has produced strongly Christian societies. Based on research in widely scattered archives, this book not only deals with regional interactions but pays careful attention to developments in microstates, and to the variety of indigenous religious movements, which were earlier regarded as deviations from Christian orthodoxy but are now seen as significant adaptations of Christian teaching. In Australia and New Zealand too, European Christian beginnings have been given local emphases, producing Churches with distinctive identities. Lay leadership is emphasized - not only in the Churches but as part of the Christian presence in the realms of politics, business, and culture. The broad liturgical, theological, constitutional, and pastoral developments of the 19th and 20th centuries are mapped, as a context for the striking changes which have taken place since the 1960s. The dynamics of religious change and conflict, the ambiguities of religious authority, and the destructive effects of Christian colonialism on indigenous communities, especially Australian aborigines, are all frankly dealt with. The decline of the institutional impact of the Churches in Australia and New Zealand is explored, as is the growth of partnership between government and Churches in education, social welfare, and overseas aid and development. Interchange in personnel and ideas is strikingly illustrated in the missionary activities of the regional Churches and their cultural impact. The author's involvement in Church and community leadership, ecumenism, and theological education makes this volume in the Oxford History of the Christian Church a valuable addition to the series, describing both continuities with world Christianity and little-known local developments.

Bernard Smith is widely recognised as one of Australia's leading intellectuals. Yet the recognition of his work has been partial, focused on art history and anthropology. Peter Beilharz argues that Smith's work also contains a social theory, or a way of thinking about Australian culture and identity in the world system. Smith enables us to think matters of place and cultural imperialism through the image of being not Australian so much as antipodean. Australian identities are constructed by the relationship between core and periphery, making them both European and Other at the same time. This 1997 work is a book-length analysis of Bernard Smith's work and is the result of careful and systematic research into Smith's published works and his private papers. It is both an introduction to Smith's thinking and an important interpretive argument about imperialism and the antipodes.

This innovative book marks a new way of looking at convict women. It tells their stories in a powerful and evocative way, drawing out broader themes of gender and sexual disorder and race and class dynamics in a colonial context. It considers the convict past in light of contemporary concerns, looking at the cultural meanings of aspects of life in the colony: on ships, in the factories and in orphanages. Using startlingly original research, Joy Damousi considers such varied topics as headshaving as punishment in the prisons and the subversive nature of laughter and play, as well as analysing the language of pollution, purity and abandonment. She also dicusses the nature of sexual relationships, including evidence of lesbianism. The book shows how understanding about sexual and racial difference was crucial for both the maintenance and disturbance of colonial society, and became a focus for cultural anxiety.

This work throws new light on history, social memory and colonialism. The book charts how films, books and storytelling, public commemoration and instruction have, in a strange ensemble, created something we call Australian history. It considers key moments of historical imagination, including Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal histories of Captain Cook, school-histories and museum exhibitions, and the gendering of events such as the Eureka Stockade and the shipwreck of Eliza Fraser. Chris Healy argues that the way in which the past is constructed in the public imagination raises pressing questions. He describes the predicament of European Australians who imagined a continent without history while themselves being obsessed with history. He asks: what can history mean in a postcolonial society? This book seeks a new sense of remembering. Rather than being content with a culture of amnesia or facile nostalgia, it makes the case for learning to belong in the ruins of colonial histories. Chris Healy's investigation of historical cultures and narratives is a powerful statement for historical imagination in our times.

In April 1941, as Churchill strove to counter the German threat to the Balkans, New Zealand troops were hastily committed to combat in the wake of the German invasion of Greece where they would face off against the German Kradschutzen - motorcycle troops. Examining three major encounters in detail with the help of maps and contemporary photographs, this lively study shows how the New Zealanders used all their courage and ingenuity to counter the mobile and well-trained motorcycle forces opposing them in the mountains and plains of Greece and Crete. Featuring specially commissioned artwork and drawing upon first-hand accounts, this exciting account pits New Zealand's infantrymen against Germany's motorcycle troops at the height of World War II in the Mediterranean theatre, assessing the origins, doctrine and combat performance of both sides.

This volume is about the mythologies of land exploration, and about space and the colonial enterprise in particular. It is an investigation of the presumptions, aesthetics and politics of Australian explorers texts that looks at the journals of John Oxley, Thomas Mitchell, Charles Sturt and Ludwig Leichhardt, and shows that they are not the simple, unadorned observations the authors would have us believe, but, rather, complex networks of tropes. The text argues that contact with Aborigines and the virgin land are occasions of discursive contest, and that, however much explorers construct themselves as monarchs of all they survey, this monarchy is not absolute. This book intention is to scrutinize and undermine the scientific and literary methodology of exploration.

This volume is about the mythologies of land exploration, and about space and the colonial enterprise in particular. It is an investigation of the presumptions, aesthetics and politics of Australian explorers texts that looks at the journals of John Oxley, Thomas Mitchell, Charles Sturt and Ludwig Leichhardt, and shows that they are not the simple, unadorned observations the authors would have us believe, but, rather, complex networks of tropes. The text argues that contact with Aborigines and the virgin land are occasions of discursive contest, and that, however much explorers construct themselves as monarchs of all they survey, this monarchy is not absolute. This book intention is to scrutinize and undermine the scientific and literary methodology of exploration.

An account of the true story which inspired the film Paradise Road. In 1942, a group of Australian Army nursing sisters was evacuated from Malaya a few days before the fall of Singapore. two days later their ship was bombed and sunk by the Japanese. Of the fifty-three survivors who scrambled ashore, twenty-one were murdered and the remainder taken prisoner. this engrossing record was kept by one of the surviving sisters, Betty Jeffrey, during the three-and-a-half gruelling years of imprisonment that followed.

The Australian Workers Union (AWU) has been one of the most influential unions in Australia's political and industrial history. From its beginnings as a sheep shearers union, it became known as a champion of compulsory arbitration, fighting for improvements in wages and conditions through the industrial courts. In the first part of the 20th century it expanded by amalgamating with other unions, its aim being the creation of one big union. Indeed the AWU became Australia's largest union, operating in all Australian states and across a wide range of industries. The book shows that the union has been a player in key events and crises in Australian history, including the great strikes of the 1890s, the 1916-17 conscription crisis, Labor's splits in the 1950s and the 1956 shearers' strike. The book features vivid portraits of the unique individuals who matched these great issues.

Knowing Women is a comprehensive study of female education in nineteenth-century Australia, placed in international perspective. It covers a wide range of topics, including the evolution of the teaching profession; the private ladies' academies and their proprietors; the entry of women to the universities and the professions; the establishment of academic secondary schools, both Church and state; girls' experience of compulsory state elementary schooling; and the schooling of outcast girls. The study is rich in narrative and biographical interest, based, where possible, on the experiences of individual girls and women. Knowing Women explores the ambiguities of its material, showing how education could both open and restrict opportunities for women. The author's perspective allows her to contribute to current historical debates on women, culture, education, sexuality and the state.

First published in 1996, Australia's China explores the multifaceted and dynamic Australian encounter with China from the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 through the Cold War to the Australian recognition of the PRC in 1972. Going beyond conventional policy studies, it traces the patterns in Australian reactions to China from the grass-roots to official circles, highlighting the centrality of images concerning the exotic, disease, sexuality, the frontier, and China as a paradise/anti-paradise. In responding to China, Australians revealed something of themselves, and this book maps the formation of Australian conceptions of identity in the context of a cross-cultural encounter which was variously cooperative, enriching, baffling, and antagonistic. But there was no single Australian conception of China. Rather, competing perceptions jostled in a shifting dialogue.

In Australia until the early 1970s, women were assumed to have husbands who were breadwinners and expected to be housewives and to raise children themselves. If a woman had children but no male provider, she was likely to be economically deprived. If she had never been married she would be stigmatised by society as well. This book, the first comprehensive history of the treatment of single mothers and their children in Australia, is the story of these women and their children and the lives they constructed. Starting in the 1850s when abandonment and infanticide were not uncommon, the book's main focus ends in 1975 when the legal status of illegitimacy was abolished. While the book traces profound changes from a time when single mothers were locked in gaol for discarding their babies to the point when their situation was recognised in the form of state benefits, the authors find a good deal of continuity over the period. The book covers issues of baby farming, infanticide, abortion, sex education, birth control, adoption and marriage, in effect becoming a history of sexual practice in Australia. It uses a broad range of published and oral sources, drawn from interviews, diaries, court records and the problem pages of women's magazines. Shurlee Swain and Renate Howe tell a powerful if painful and often moving story of women who were forced to dispose of their babies and punished for sexual transgression. They also show the ways in which these women, and their illegitimate children, survived. This long-awaited book makes an important contribution to social, welfare and women's history in Australia. It will also resonate with many who have experienced single motherhood directly orindirectly.

The unknown and mysterious Great Southland, or Terra Australis, captured the European imagination for centuries before it became a documented fact. This book traces the history of pictorial imagery associated with the 'Fifth Continent'. It discusses and presents imagery from all parts of the southern continent: Java, Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, the South Pacific Islands and Tierra del Fuego as it evolved up to the Enlightenment. Many European explorers had a passionate interest in depicting the plants, animals and native inhabitants of the southern world. The images associated with the search for the southern continent - paintings, handcolored maps, drawings, tapestries and artefacts - are discussed in the context of the link between art and exploration. Beautifully illustrated with Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and English images, this book is an exciting visual account of the construction of Terra Australis in the European imagination and as scientific fact.

War has been a key part of the Australian experience and central to many national mythologies. Yet more than most activities, war polarises femininity and masculinity. This exciting collection of essays explores the inter-relationship of gender and war in Australia for the first time. Traditional images of Australians during wartime show the 'digger' making history in battle, while women play a supportive role as nurses, or wives and mothers on the home front. Yet as this book shows, war offers opportunities that erode gender boundaries. Women may be empowered economically, politically and sexually, while the trauma of war can leave men emasculated. First published in 1995, Gender and War focuses on women's and men's experiences in WWI, WWII and the Vietnam War. This interdisciplinary collection addresses a wide range of subjects, and promises to change the way we think about women, men and war in the twentieth century.

In 1913 the Australian press displayed a cosmopolitan openness to the culture of the modern world. By 1919, however, Australia had become an inward-looking society bent on keeping the outside world out - a quarantined culture. This book looks at the impact of the First World War on Australian culture, focussing on reactions to modernist art. John Williams argues that the creation of the Anzac legend, the back-to-the-land movement, notions of racial superiority and the mythology of the masculine nation were reactionary and anti-modern. Reflecting this, Australian pioneers of post-impressionism were ignored in favour of more traditional artists. This engaging book outlines the forces - social, economic, cultural, political - which led to the stagnation of Australian culture between the wars. John Williams' original and provocative work will make an important contribution to Australian cultural history.

The 1950s' undeniable prosperity has become synonymous with conservatism, and inertia seen as its hallmark. This book offers a fresh and challenging interpretation of the 1950s in Australia. Nicholas Brown presents the decade as a time of great change, brought about by affluence. Society became increasingly complex, mass consumption reached new heights and Australia's role in the world and the region was re-cast. The book looks at the ways in which those overseeing society responded to these post-war changes; in short, how they governed prosperity. A history of ideas as well as cultural, intellectual and institutional history, Governing Prosperity is a major reassessment of the 1950s. It will be particularly important for its analysis of the significance of the decade in the development of Australian society.

This book reclaims Cultural Liberalism as an important part of Australian intellectual heritage. Arguing that the tradition is central to the Australian experience of modernity, Gregory Melleuish traces the impact of cultural liberalism from its emergence around the time of Federation to its demise during the 1960s. Part collective biography, part intellectual and cultural history, the book describes the development of cultural liberalism, founded on rationalism and humanism, by university-educated intellectuals. Dr Melleuish argues that a religious and spiritual dimension was also central to the tradition. He draws attention to the intellectual similarities of thinkers not usually grouped together, and also considers those who inherited the tradition but repudiated it. This provocative book will make an important contribution to debates about culture, identity and citizenship in post-modern Australia.