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Aviation extended the horizon of international touring across Asia and the Pacific in the 1950s and 1960s. Nightclubs in Hong Kong, Manila, Melbourne, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, and Taipei presented an international array of touring acts. This book investigates how this happened. It explores the post-war formation of the Asia Pacific region through international touring and the transformation of entertainment during the ‘jet age’ of aviation. Drawing on archival research across the region, Bollen investigates how touring variety forged new relations between artists, audiences, and nations. Mapping tours and tracing networks by connecting fragments, he reveals how versatile artists translated repertoire in circulation as they toured, and how entrepreneurial endeavours harnessed the production of national distinction to government agendas. He argues that touring variety on commercial circuits diversified the repertoire in regional circulation, anticipating the diversity emerging in state-sanctioned multiculturalisms, and driving the government-construction of national theatres for cultural diplomacy.
Catherine Helen Spence, an unparalleled advocate of women's rights in Australia and the world, is now recognized as an important predecessor to the Feminist movement. Her autobiography, composed while on her deathbed and enhanced with scholarly annotation from two Spence scholars, reveals a woman both in and ahead of her time.
My Darling Mick is an engaging biography of a colourful Australian personality, General Sir Granville Ryrie. Much of Ryrie's story is told through a series of candid letters, written to his wife, Mary, whom he affectionately called Mick, which describing the gruelling conditions endured by Australian troops during the Boer War and the First World War.
The ‘Great War for Civilisation’ was more than a European conflict. It was a global war spanning Asia, Africa and beyond. Drawing on original archival research in several languages and employing multidisciplinary frames of analysis, this innovative volume explores how race and empire were commemorated during the First World War Centenary.
Following on from the highly acclaimed Facing Armageddon and Passchendaele in Perspective, At the Eleventh Hour recognises that a world was ending in November 1918, and by international collaboration on the 80th Anniversary we learn through this book, what it was like to experience the transition from war to peace. Distinguished historians brilliantly convey a sense of immediacy as the Armistice is recreated and analysed. The reader will not just acquire new areas of information, he will have some of the existing knowledge which he thought was soundly held, strikingly challenged in the pages of this superbly illustrated book.
"Naturalist and Assistant Director of the Museum of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, Jack Ashby shares his love for the platypus and other Australian mammals, including wombats, echidnas, and kangaroos. Informed by stories of his experiences meeting living marsupials and egg-laying mammals on fieldwork in Tasmania and mainland Australia and his close contact with thousands of zoological specimens collected for museums over the last 200 years, Ashby's book explains historical mysteries and debunks myths about these mammals and especially the platypus-which lays eggs, feeds its young on milk, has venom spurs, and sports a bill that can detect electricity. In evaluating how humans have considered these special mammals, he makes clear that calling these animals "weird" or "primitive"- or incorrectly implying that Australia is an "evolutionary backwater"-has only added to the challenges for their conservation. One outcome of these descriptions is that Australia now has the worst mammal extinction rate of anywhere on Earth. Ashby argues that many of the ways that the world thinks about Australia's mammals can be traced back to the country's colonial history"--
At a time when China is being seen as the next superpower, both sweatshop and powerhouse for the global economy, political courtship on the part of interested governments is accompanied by grassroots hostility. Such ambivalence is not new.
Radio Australia - the multilingual overseas radio service of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation - is little known in Australia, but is heard by millions of listeners in the Asia-Pacific region and others throughout the world. Radio Wars, first published in 1995, was the first book to tell the story of this important but unexplored aspect of Australia's international presence. Launched in 1939 as a propaganda tool, the service was for three decades caught uncomfortably between those who would use it as an instrument of foreign policy and those who would have it an icon of journalistic integrity. But the author argues that by the time of the Dili massacre, propaganda had given way to forthright and factual reporting. Spiced with anecdotal detail, Radio Wars traces a struggle that ranges from personal pettiness to events with significant political ramifications.
The National Library's major public contribution to the Australian Bicentenary was the travelling exhibition, People, Print & Paper. Celebrating two hundred years of Australian books, this exhibition and the accompanying catalogue bring together a collection of books which gives a fascinating insight into an aspect of Australian life and character which is often overlooked.
The present volume is a highly comprehensive assessment of the postcolonial short story since the thirty-six contributions cover most geographical areas concerned. Another important feature is that it deals not only with exclusive practitioners of the genre (Mansfield, Munro), but also with well-known novelists (Achebe, Armah, Atwood, Carey, Rushdie), so that stimulating comparisons are suggested between shorter and longer works by the same authors. In addition, the volume is of interest for the study of aspects of orality (dialect, dance rhythms, circularity and trickster figure for instance) and of the more or less conflictual relationships between the individual (character or implied auth...