John Gascoigne

The Vincibles by Gideon Haigh & Over and Out edited by John Gascoigne

April 2003, no. 250

Warwick Hadfield reviews 'Over and Out: Cricket umpires and their stories' edited by John Gascoigne, and 'The Vincibles: A suburban cricket season' by Gideon Haigh

When you bump into people who know Gideon Haigh – and that happens a lot in Geelong – they will tell you about his encyclopedic knowledge of cricket, his dedication to detail, and his casualness with money. I want to add to this list of his idiosyncrasies a delicious ability to turn the mundane into the magnificent. For this is exactly what The Vincibles is to we weekend warriors – a magnificent vindication of our very existence.

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The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia by John Gascoigne

by Wilfrid Prest •

September 2002, no. 244

In the late 1950s, Honours students at Melbourne University could take Geoffrey Serle’s Australian History course only after completing John La Nauze’s full-year subject on Hanoverian and Victorian Britain (aka England). Those who questioned this restriction were informed that, since Australia was a small, derivative society, understanding its history required some knowledge of the culture, ideas and institutions exported here from Britain. While we may have discounted this rationalisation, with all the withering cynicism of late adolescence, at the time it hardly seemed worth making a fuss about.

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Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful knowledge and polite culture by John Gascoigne

by Glyndwr Williams •

September 1994, no. 164

Glyndwr Williams reviews 'Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful knowledge and polite culture' by John Gascoigne

In recent years, scholars have attempted to come to grips with the prodigious range of Sir Joseph Banks’s activities during a public career that lasted more than fifty years. Wherever one turned in the establishment circles of George III’s England there stood, it seemed, the massive figure of Joseph Banks: President of the Royal Society, Privy Councillor, adviser to government, patron of the sciences, Cook’s sailing companion and ‘Father of Australia’ for some, the moving force behind the African Association and ‘Father of African Exploration’ for others.

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