Wilfrid Prest

John Tregenza’s 1963 study of Australian Little Magazines noted that neither Meanjin nor its near-contemporary Southerly could be characterised as ‘little’, unlike their predecessors and earlier selves. No longer solely dependent on subscription income from a small local band of devotees, both had attracted a wide following. Indeed on transferring his journal from Brisbane to the University of Melbourne in 1945, Meanjin’s Clem Christesen claimed that it had become ‘a well-established quarterly ... with a circulation of 4,000 copies per issue’.

The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History announced itself in 2001 as ‘a landmark publication, the first such work of reference for any Australian state or territory’. This new edition, which adds entries, updates others, and lands with a thump at almost 200 pages more than the previous volume, is especially timely in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which magnified awareness of the differences between the histories and cultures of the Australian states.

A book written by an English author and published by an English academic press with first-page references to New Labour, Conservative austerity, and Brexit might seem, at first glance, of little interest to or relevance for Australian readers. Yet anyone concerned with or about the state of the arts in this country and further afield will find much stimulus, provocation, and food for thought in the latest work of a prolific academic-activist entrepreneur who has occupied posts in three Australian universities since 2008, besides presenting at conferences and consulting widely with UN agencies and local and national governments throughout Asia, Europe, and the Pacific.

Traditional academic festschrifts often lack coherence and consistency, especially when the honorand’s former students and colleagues, as more or less duty-bound contributors, share little in common beyond that association ...

With the advent of digital technology and the Internet, traditional paper-based scholarship appears increasingly threatened with redundancy, if not total obsolescence. This may help to explain current interest in the various techniques adopted by early modern natural philosophers and scholars who struggled to cope with the diverse and rapidly expanding bodies of data at their disposal.

Notwithstanding occasional media focus on misbehaving students or senior members, the residential colleges and halls dotted around or about most Australian university campuses keep a low profile. Their influence has undoubtedly declined since the early twentieth century, when as many as one quarter of Melbourne’s enrolled undergraduate population, and a much higher proportion of full-time students, were attached to Trinity and Janet Clarke Hall, Ormond or Queen’s. But the collegiate ideal to which all these institutions aspire, more or less, still provides a vital alternative to the regrettably prevailing view of higher education as mere vocational training – especially now, when the future viability of universities themselves is called increasingly into question.

If modern politicians rely excessively on pollsters and spin doctors, what should we say of the trust which their medieval and Renaissance predecessors placed in diviners and soothsayers? Among the most famous of these latter practitioners was ‘Dr’ John Dee, born just six years before Henry VIII’s youngest daughter, who availed herself of his services even before she succeeded to the throne as Queen Elizabeth I. Alchemist, antiquary, astrologer, astronomer, geographer, magician, mathematician, political adviser, seer, spirit-raiser, and theorist of empire: the full dimensions and scope of Dee’s omnidisciplinarity are not easily conveyed. Dee moreover inhabited a world ‘saturated with magic [...] not so much a world that we have lost, but more a strange, unfamiliar place that few modern readers can imagine’, to quote his latest biographer.

Australian universities have long taught early modern (c.1500–1750) English/British and European history, but with Alexandra Walsham’s recent appointment as the first female to occupy a Cambridge history chair, there are now (with Oxford’s Lyndal Roper) two Melbourne-trained early modernist Oxbridge professors ...

The opening sentence of Norman Davies’ blockbuster Europe: A History (1996) notes that ‘History can be written at any magnification’. Yet the superlative asserted in the title of John Hirst’s latest book does bring one up, well, short. Its claim is plainly contestable – how about ‘Plato to NATO’ (the irreverent shorthand for once-fashionable US undergraduate ‘Western Civ.’ survey courses)? Moreover, Hirst makes no pretence of giving us Europe from go to whoa. Commencing with the ‘Ancient Greeks’ (omitting Minoans and Myceneans), he concludes around 1800 with the French Revolution and Napoleon, because the lecture course at La Trobe University from which his book derives went no further. These lectures were first offered ‘to students in Australia who had had too much Australian history and knew too little about the civilisation of which they are a part’. This is a remarkable statement from a distinguished historian of Australia, even granted the growing recognition that what usually passes for ‘Australian history’ cannot in and of itself meet all the cultural, educational and intellectual needs of Australian students.