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Sydney Harbour has been a defining feature for the people who have lived around it for millennia: a means of communication, a barrier, a resource to be exploited, a site of commerce and trade, and a place of beauty, spirit and meaning. In this sweeping history of one of the world’s most recognisable landscapes, award-winning historian Ian Hoskins explores the story of this famous waterway, from its importance to the Gameragal and Gadigal people to highly charged contemporary debates about the future of the ‘working harbour’ and the ownership of its foreshores. A beautifully written and compelling book, this new edition of Sydney Harbour surveys the interactions between the glitterin...
Although the decades following World War II stand out as an era of rapid growth and construction in the United States, those years were equally significant for large-scale destruction. In order to clear space for new suburban tract housing, an ambitious system of interstate highways, and extensive urban renewal development, wrecking companies demolished buildings while earthmoving contractors leveled land at an unprecedented pace and scale. In this pioneering history, Francesca Russello Ammon explores how postwar America came to equate this destruction with progress. The bulldozer functioned as both the means and the metaphor for this work. As the machine transformed from a wartime weapon in...
Long before Magellan entered the Pacific in 1521 Westerners entertained ideas of undiscovered oceans, mighty continents, and paradisal islands at the far ends of the earth. First set down by Egyptian storytellers, Greek philosophers, and Latin poets, such ideas would have a long life and a deep impact in both the Pacific and the West. With the discovery of Tahiti in 1767 another powerful myth was added to this collection: the noble savage. For the first time Westerners were confronted by a people who seemed happier than themselves. This revolution in the human sciences was accompanied by one in the natural sciences as the region revealed gaps and anomalies in the "great chain of being" that ...
Antipodean China is a collection of essays drawn from a series of encounters between Australian and Chinese writers, which took place in China and Australia over a ten-year period from 2011. The encounters could be defensive, especially given the need to depend on translators, but as the writers spoke about the places important to them, their influences and their work, resemblances emerged, and the different perspectives contributed to a sense of common understanding, about literature and about the role of the writer in society. In some cases the communication is even more direct, as when the Tibetan author A Lai speaks knowingly about Alexis Wright's novel Carpentaria, and the two winners o...
In 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War occasioned many reflections on the place of science and technology in the conflict. That the war ended with Allied victory in the Pacific theatre, inevitably focussed attention upon the Pacific region, and particularly upon the Manhattan project and its outcome. It was in the Pacific that Western physics and engineering gave birth to the Atomic Age. However, the Pacific war had also proved a testing time, and a testing space, for other disciplines and institutions. Extreme environments and opemtional distances, and the fundamental demands of logistics, required the Allies and the Japanese to innovate many scientific and tec...
From Colonial to Modern examines representations of girls in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand girls' literature to trace how colonial authors transformed British feminine norms to produce transnational ideals and modern, nationalised femininities.