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In the 1880s, a generation after the gold rushes, Melbourne rose to become Australia's most populous, modern and self-consciously 'metropolitan' city. Its offices and warehouses leapt skyward, its suburbs sprawled and the tentacles of its commerce reached across the continent. In the 1890s, the housing boom burst, depression struck and Melbourne's population and influence declined. In this classic work of Australian social history, Graeme Davison explores the economic, political, social and cultural consequences of the meteoric rise, and calamitous fall, of the city dubbed ‘Marvellous Melbourne’. Twenty-six years after this much-acclaimed book was first published, Davison offers a reappraisal of his original ideas in a new preface and epilogue. The book has also been enhanced by a series of picture essays exploring the response of contemporary artists and photographers to the transformation of city and suburbs.
This collection of engaging and vigorous essays examine what makes the 'history business' tick. Davison demonstrates that Australia's history can be relevant to the issues we confront everyday at the governmental level, at work, and in our communities.
This is the story of our love affair with the car and how it changed a city.
A great-aunt’s bequest — a 200-year-old grandfather clock — sends historian Graeme Davison on a journey deep into his father’s family’s past. From their tribal homeland in the Scottish Borders he follows them to the garrison town of Carlisle, from industrial Birmingham to Edwardian Australia, and from the Great War to his own suburban childhood. This is the story of an ordinary family’s journey from frontier warfare and dispossession through economic turmoil and emigration to modest prosperity. At each step, we are led to reflect on the puzzles of personal identity and the mystery of time. Based on a lifetime of creative scholarship, My Grandfather’s Clock is a moving testament to the power of family history to illuminate the present.
'I did not look for skeletons in my family's cupboard, but once the cupboard was open, they simply fell out.' A widow and her eight older children are uprooted from their Hampshire farm in 1850, and thrown together on an emigrant ship with 38 distressed needlewomen from London. How they came to be on the boat, and what happened on the high seas and afterwards in Australia, is a vivid tale of family ambitions and fears, successes and catastrophes. In Lost Relations, historian Graeme Davison follows in his family's footsteps, from the picture-postcard village of Newnham to a prison cell in Maitland, from a London slum to a miner's tent in Castlemaine. He takes us back into worlds now largely forgotten, of water-powered mills, free selectors and Methodist evangelists. The Hewetts were not famous or distinguished, but their story reveals much about the foundations of Australia. 'a quiet masterpiece' - Janet McCalman, University of Melbourne 'How to produce a good family history? Get a master historian to write about his own. History and family history are combined in this fascinating book' - John Hirst, La Trobe University
This is the story of our love affair with the car and how it changed a city.
I became an urban historian because I believed that our cities deserved more of our curiosity and idealism. In City Dreamers Graeme Davison restores Australian cities, and those who created them, to their rightful place in the national imagination. Building on a lifetime’s work, Davison views Australian history, from 1788 to the present day, through the eyes of city dreamers – such as Henry Lawson, Charles Bean and Hugh Stretton – and others who have helped make the cities we inhabit. Davison looks at significant individuals or groups that he calls snobs, slummers, pessimists, exodists, suburbans and anti-suburbans – and argues that there’s a particular twist to the ways in which Australians think about cities. And the ways we live in them. This extraordinary book excavates the cultural history of the Australian city by focusing on ‘dreamers’, those who battle to make and re-make our cities. It reminds us that for most of us the city is home, and it is there that we find belonging.
A Bridge Between is the first account of the Benedictine women who worked at New Norcia and the first book-length exploration of twentieth-century life in the Western Australian mission town. From the founding of a grand school intended for ‘nativas’, through links to Mexico and Paraguay then Ireland, India and Belgium, as well as to their house in the Kimberley, and a network of villages near Burgos in the north of Spain, this is a complex international history. A Bridge Between gathers a powerful, fragmented story from the margins of the archive, recalling the Aboriginal women who joined the community in the 1950s and the compelling reunion of missionaries and former students in 2001. ...
Struggle Country revitalises the field of rural history, bringing a nuanced approach to studies of the bush that distinguishes between farmers and country town dwellers and their different experiences and beliefs.
This book is an in-depth examination of the causes and consequences of urban protest in a democracy. It shows how it changed the built environment as well as its participants, and resonated in many of our institutions including politics, media and multiculturalism. Davison, Monash Uni; Howe, Deakin & Monash Uni; Nichols, Uni of.