Gillian Dooley
Treasures exhibitions have reached epidemic proportions in Australia since the runaway success of the National Library’s ‘Treasures from the World’s Great Libraries’, which ran from December 2001 to February 2002. Now the National Library has decided to repeat its act, but this time to concentrate on home-grown exhibits. Australia’s ‘great’ libraries, it must be noted, are in this ca ... (read more)
Gerald Walsh’s book is an unabashed celebration of seven young Australians, golden boys who died during the first decades of the twentieth century. Five sporting heroes, one medical researcher and one soldier make up Walsh’s miniature hall of fame, early death being the common thread. The oldest of them was not quite twenty-seven when he died.
... (read more)
In her contribution to Britishness Abroad, ‘Colonial Enclaves and Domestic Spaces in British New Guinea’, Anne Dickson-Waiko writes that ‘the experiences of the colonised Other in relation to empire and colonisation needs [sic] urgent investigation, so that the colonised other can … move on to the post-colonial’. She shows a touching belief in the usefulness of research in the humanities ... (read more)
Margaret Reynolds was a junior minister in the Hawke government. She began her career in special education, developing a passion for advocacy of the marginalised. Providing effective early childhood education for Aboriginal children in race-bound Townsville in the 1960s took not only idealism but ingenuity and guts. Juggling the needs of a young family with work and political activism, she joined ... (read more)
Gillian Dooley reviews 'Life and Death in the Age of Sail: The passage to Australia' by Robin Haines
The Age of Sail might be presumed to cover several centuries, beginning, say, as far back as the great age of European exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and continuing until wind-powered sea travel was gradually replaced, in the late nineteenth century, by steamships.
The euphonious title of Robin Haines’s book is therefore a little misleading. She deals only with British as ... (read more)