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Black Swan Summer tells the extraordinary story of Western
Australia's first season of Sheffield Shield cricket, when an
unheralded group of unknown, unfashionable and inexperienced
players won Australian cricket's biggest prize at their first
attempt. But it's more than just a story of an upset result in a
cricket competition. It's a chronicle of the summer in which Don
Bradman scored his 100th century, India toured Australia for the
first time and the country plunged into political turmoil - which
not everyone noticed, because they were at the cricket. The book
explains the connections between men who returned from war to play
cricket, the fear of communism, Mahatma Gandhi, rationing, Keith
Miller, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Ray Lindwall's back foot
and a boxer called the Alabama Kid. Drawing on the personal
reminiscences of the last three surviving cricketers from the
1947/48 season, it brings that hot, wet summer vividly to life.
Sydney University Cricket Club is one of the oldest cricket clubs
in Australia. Only a few years after the University was founded in
1850, the University fielded a cricket team against the Garrison
Club, and played on what was once called the Garrison Ground, and
is today the Sydney Cricket Ground. Over the next 150 years, the
club fielded players of all levels of ability, and has been
fortunate to have some very talented players on its teams. This
book details the people and events that have shaped the development
of the club: from Tom Garrett, the University's first Test player,
men of prominence such as Edmund Barton and Doc Evatt, through to
today's elite players like Ed Cowan.
The controversial career of John Walpole Willis is re-evaluated in
the first comprehensive study of his legal career. Willis, the
fifth judge to be appointed to the Supreme Court of New South
Wales, served in three colonies, and in each place he wrestled with
the role of the law in a rapidly-changing society. In Upper Canada,
he confronted the colony's transition from an oligarchy into a
nascent democracy; in his next posting, in British Guyana, he was
responsible for helping the colony implement, and absorb the
consequences of, the abolition of slavery. New South Wales, his
final posting, presented unique legal problems as it evolved from a
penal colony into a free settlement, and the new settlement at Port
Phillip began to grow. To these troubled societies, Judge Willis
brought an acute legal mind and a stormy personality aEURO" he was
twice dismissed from his post by the local Governor. Earlier
studies have tended to view him either as a wronged genius or a
vain, deranged misfit. Max Bonnell, an experienced lawyer and
Adjunct Professor of Law at Sydney University, has rediscovered
Willis as a contradictory figure aEURO" Australia's first activist
judge, who was nonetheless a stickler for the letter of the law;
the author of several remarkably humane and enlightened judgments,
who was capable of endorsing appalling cruelty; and a man who
insisted upon decorum and propriety, yet was undone by his own
conspicuous failures of self-control.
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