Australian History

Richard Broinowski, a retired senior diplomat who has served in seven legations, three as ambassador, has long been interested in matters nuclear, as this excellent work demonstrates. Broinowski traces Australian nuclear developments from the early days of World War II to the most recent developments under Prime Minister John Howard. In the process, he chronicles Australian nuclear ambitions, from the early flirtations with acquiring a nuclear weapon and its related strike capability, to the later development of uranium exports.

Yves Rees’s accessible, entertaining study blends personal experience with rich archival research into a group of disparate women who followed their passion from Australia to the United States at a time when it was relatively easy for a white woman with talent and a few connections to just show up in Hollywood or New York and get to work. They are very different women – a surfer, a dentist, a concert pianist, a nurse, a decorator, an artist, a lawyer, and a writer – all fiercely courageous trailblazers in their own way. Travelling to Tomorrow weaves their stories together in a loosely chronological shape, using deep research to ground Rees’s imagining of these women’s hopes, dreams, achievements, and disappointments.

Near the beginning of Wifedom, Anna Funder describes a disappearing trick whereby a male magician conjures away his female assistant. She uses this as a trope for history’s tendency to make women vanish: ‘Where has she gone?’ Funder asks. This invisibility is especially the case in relation to women and war. Not only are women’s roles in wars downplayed or ignored, but women’s writing on war is seldom regarded as ‘war literature’. As Donna Coates, the author of this newly published study, Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend: Australian women’s war fictions, notes, the bookshelves at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra contain numerous books ‘by and about men at war’ and very few examples of women’s war writing. 

The story of the extended encounter between Eora Aboriginal man Bennelong and Arthur Phillip, first governor of the British colony at Sydney, has often been told as both emblematic and predictive of the history of British possession of Australia, and of Aboriginal dispossession. Historians such as Grace Karskens and Keith Vincent Smith have peeled back the layers of this narrative to find ways of telling more complex, contextualised, and open-ended stories. Fullagar reaches a new stage in this journey, and the journey of Australian history more generally. She offers a fresh perspective on Bennelong and Phillip, on the nature of their exchange and the broader currents in which they swam.

With My Grandfather’s Clock: Four centuries of a British-Australian family, historian Graeme Davison has offered his readers and bequeathed to his grandchildren a very special book, at once genealogy, travelogue, memoir, broad social history, and a meditation on the sources of personal identity. It is a book to be treasured. 

Forty-three years ago, David Marr – journalist, broadcaster, biographer, political commentator, and public intellectual – published his first book, a sharp, memorable biography of Garfield Barwick, former Liberal attorney-general and chief justice of the High Court. After the appearance of Patrick White: A life in 1991, long considered one of the best biographies ever written in Australia, he might well have followed the more predictable path of the serial biographer. But Marr’s trajectory has proved to be anything but predictable.

Literary study tends to be characterised by bipolar episodes, swinging between enjoyment and judgement. There is reading for pleasure and learning to be critical, or making up your mind about how good, bad, or indifferent a literary work is. This way of thinking about literature still pervades all levels of the cultural and social scenes where readers talk to one another. We discuss with our friends or communities whether we like a work of literature or not, but when things get formal or seminar-serious the conversation shifts to whether we think that work is any good – a different thing. The Saturday review pages wobble between these two modes, between chat about whether readers will like a book or film, and whether it’s any good or not. Some texts that have become good over time, canonical in other words, we might not like. ‘Like’, here, of course, is a very fuzzy notion, although you would have to be delusional to think a book is automatically good because you like it. And liking certain texts, Ern Malley’s poetry or Stephenie Meyer’s fiction for example, might be evidence, in some people’s view, of a lack of taste, or bad judgement. But as we say, there’s no accounting for that.

Islands, as recent histories of immigration detention and quarantine show, offer unique things to human societies. Rimmed by a watery bulwark, they have more surveyable borders than do mainlands. Their status as sublands suggest that they exist outside the conventions and temporal dimensions of larger, mainland societies. What happens on an island stays on an island; at least, island prison warders and sojourners imagined this to be the case.