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South Australia has often been represented as different: convict free, more enlightened in its attitudes toward Aboriginal people, established on rational economic principles, progressive in its social/political development. Some of this is true, some not, but mostly the story is more complex. In this book, eminent historians explore these themes.
In this lively, provocative collection, some of Australia's leading historians - and a Miles Franklin shortlisted historical novelist - challenge established myths, narratives and 'beautiful lies' about South Australia's past. Some are unmasked as false stories that mask brutal realities, like colonial violence - while others are revealed as simplistic versions of more complex truths. 'Each generation writes history that speaks to its own interests and concerns,' write historians Paul Ashton and Anna Clark. In Foundational Fictions in South Australian History, which grew out of a series of public lectures at the University of Adelaide, an impressive range of contributors suggest different wa...
In this landmark book, Stuart Macintyre explains how a country traumatised by World War I, hammered by the Depression and overstretched by World War II became a prosperous, successful and growing society by the 1950s. An extraordinary group of individuals, notably John Curtin, Ben Chifley, Nugget Coombs, John Dedman and Robert Menzies, re-made the country, planning its reconstruction against a background of wartime sacrifice and austerity. The other part of this triumphant story shows Australia on the world stage, seeking to fashion a new world order that would bring peace and prosperity. This book shows the 1940s to be a pivotal decade in Australia. At the height of his powers, Macintyre reminds us that key components of the society we take for granted – work, welfare, health, education, immigration, housing – are not the result of military endeavour but policy, planning, politics and popular resolve.
A History of South Australia investigates the state's history from before the arrival of the first European explorers to today.
Cities, Citizens and Environmental Reform tells a story of community involvement in the development of Australian town planning from the early 20th century - from the first wave of enthusiasm for modern town planning ideals before the Great War onto the more challenging social and political environment for the original town planning associations in the post-Second World War era. Meticulously researched and peppered with archival illustrations, the book reveals common threads and local differences in community planning movements across the nation and contributes to our understanding of modern urban planning in Australia.
National human rights institutions—state agencies charged with protecting and promoting human rights domestically—have proliferated dramatically since the 1990s; today more than a hundred countries have NHRIs, with dozens more seeking to join the global trend. These institutions are found in states of all sizes—from the Maldives and Barbados to South Africa, Mexico, and India; they exist in conflict zones and comparatively stable democracies alike. In Chains of Justice, Sonia Cardenas offers a sweeping historical and global account of the emergence of NHRIs, linking their growing prominence to the contradictions and possibilities of the modern state. As human rights norms gained visibi...
South Australia and Federation presents a lively and lucid account of what was happening in South Australia at a vital turning point in its history. The federation era was the highwater mark of South Australian's interaction with people in the rest of Australia. Elected representatives of the central colony/state played a key role in creating and shaping the new Australian nation in its formative years. Peter Howell tells this story in the context of fresh examination of the ways in which South Australians were developing their own community.
At any given moment in our history Australia has been in the middle of a mining boom. This timely book is a history of the iconic Australian towns that arose with these booms over a century: Broken Hill, Mount Isa, Queenstown, Mount Morgan, Port Pirie and Kambalda. Mining Towns shows the rich cultural and historical legacy these towns helped create as townspeople – those working below the ground and those above – sought to make their lives in them. The current ‘fly-in-fly-out’ mining culture means we may not see the likes of them again, which, as this book shows, will be a great loss.
In the early 1960s the board of governors of the Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia rejected two Patrick White plays, The Ham Funeral in 1962 and Night on Bald Mountain in 1964. Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White documents the scandal that followed the board’s rejections of White’s plays, especially as it acted against the advice of its own drama committee and artistic director on both occasions. Denise Varney and Sandra D’Urso analyze the two events by drawing on the performative behaviour of the board of governors to focus on the question of governance. They shed new light on the cultural politics that surrounded the rejections, arguing that it represents an instance of executive governance of cultural production, in this case theatre and performance. The central argument of the book is that aesthetic modernism in theatre and drama struggled to achieve visibility and acceptability, and posed a threat to the norms and values of early to mid-twentieth-century Australia. The recent productions indicate that despite the Adelaide Festival’s early hostile rejections, White’s plays endure.
Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780–1940, Revised Edition is a sociohistorical tour de force that examines the entwined formation of racial theory and sexual constructs within settler colonialism in the United States and Australia from the Age of Revolution to the Great Depression. Gregory D. Smithers historicizes the dissemination and application of scientific and social-scientific ideas within the process of nation building in two countries with large Indigenous populations and shows how intellectual constructs of race and sexuality were mobilized to subdue Aboriginal peoples. Building on the comparative settler-colonial and imperial histories that appeared after the book’s original publication, this completely revised edition includes two new chapters. In this singular contribution to the study of transnational and comparative settler colonialism, Smithers expands on recent scholarship to illuminate both the subject of the scientific study of race and sexuality and the national and interrelated histories of the United States and Australia.