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The Giant by the River is a social history spanning 140 years, from the foundation of the Yarraville Sugar Works by Joshua Brothers in 1873 to its present status as Sugar Australia's head office and most productive refinery. For more than a century, Yarraville Sugar Works was owned and run by Colonial Sugar Refining Co. This history explores themes of workplace organisation, welfare, relationship to the wider community, health and safety, paternalism and patriotism.Comments and poems by former and current employees accentuate the camaraderie and challenges of this unique workplace. Connections formed within the works extended into leisure activities. Early on, the company put on works picnic...
Anzac Memories was first published to acclaim in 1994, and has achieved international renown for its pioneering contribution to the study of war memory and mythology. Michael McKernan wrote that the book gave ‘as good a picture of the impact of the Great War on individuals and Australia as we are likely to get in this generation’, and Michael Roper concluded that ‘an immense achievement of this book is that it so clearly illuminates the historical processes that left men like my grandfather forever struggling to fashion myths which they could live by’. In this new edition Alistair Thomson explores how the Anzac legend has transformed over the past quarter century, how a ‘post-memory’ of the Great War creates new challenges and opportunities for making sense of the national past, and how veterans’ war memories can still challenge and complicate national mythologies. He returns to a family war history that he could not write about twenty years ago because of the stigma of war and mental illness, and he uses newly released Repatriation files to question his own earlier account of veterans’ post-war lives and memories and to think afresh about war and memory.
Of skulls, an astonishing hoax, the beginnings of the study of humankind, scientistic racism - and the Australian scientists in the thick of it... The 20th-century anatomists Grafton Elliot Smith, Frederic Wood Jones and Arthur Keith travelled the globe collecting and constructing morphologies of the biological world with the aim of linking humans to their deep past as well as their evolutionary niche. They dissected human bodies and scrutinised the living, explaining for the first time the intricacies of human biology. They placed the body in its environment and gave it a history, thus creating an ecological synthesis in striking contrast to the model of humanity that they inherited as students. Their version of human development and history profoundly influenced public opinion as they wrote prolifically for the press, published bestsellers on human origins and evolution, and spoke eloquently at public meetings and on the radio. By changing popular views of race and environment they moulded attitudes as to what it meant to be human in a post-Darwinian world - thus providing a potent critique of racism.
Over two years, writer Nick Gadd and his wife Lynne circled the city of Melbourne on foot, starting at Williamstown and ending in Port Melbourne. Along the way they uncovered lost buildings, secret places and mysterious signs that told of forgotten stories and curious characters from the past. Soon after they completed the circle, Lynne passed away from cancer. Melbourne Circle is the story of their journey, a memoir, and a stunning meditation on personal loss. ‘What a gem this book is! Oddity, wonderment, weirdness: these splendid essays reveal a marvellous Melbourne most of us have never encountered before. This is a psychogeography dense with vernacular history, humane detail, and from ...
A history of the suburb of Kingsville in the City of Maribyrnong in Melbourne's western suburbs, from its indigenous beginnings until 1930.
Of the many brass bands that have flourished in Britain and Ireland over the last 200 years very few have documented records covering their history. This directory is an attempt to collect together information about such bands and make it available to all. Over 19,600 bands are recorded here, with some 10,600 additional cross references for alternative or previous names. This volume supersedes the earlier “British Brass Bands – a Historical Directory” (2016) and includes some 1,400 bands from the island of Ireland. A separate work is in preparation covering brass bands beyond the British Isles. A separate appendix lists the brass bands in each county
Alfred Felton, a bachelor of definite opinions and benignly eccentric habits, was one of the remarkable group of Melbourne merchants who dominated the economy of the Australian colonies in the decades after the gold rush. In 1904 he left his substantial fortune in trust, the income to be spent by a committee of his friends, half on charities (especially for women and children), and half on works of art for the National Gallery of Victoria, works calculated to 'raise and improve public taste'. The Gallery suddenly gained acquisition funds greater than those of London's National and Tate galleries combined, and between 1904 and 2004 more than 15 000 items were purchased for it by the Felton Be...