Australian History
The Ice and the Inland by Brigid Hains & Australia’s Flying Doctors by Roger McDonald and Richard Woldendorp
Australia’s Democracy by John Hirst & The Citizens’ Bargain edited by James Walter and Margaret Macleod
Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal possession by Barry Hill
The Commonwealth of Speech: An Argument about Australia’s Past, Present and Future by Alan Atkinson
The arresting cover of James Jupp’s important From White Australia to Woomera features the distraught faces of the children of detained asylum seekers. As the blurb puts it: ‘There never has been a greater need for a sober, historically informed yet critical account of immigration policy in Australia.’ This is indeed a book for the times. The nation’s left/liberal intelligentsia – much-disparaged by the right as ‘the politically correct chattering élite’ – has been in a state of profound shock ever since John Howard and Philip Ruddock swept the government to victory in November 2001 on the back of their hardline policy on asylum seekers. The Tampa episode, the ‘Pacific solution’ and the rising desperation of the families incarcerated and punished at Port Hedland, Maribyrnong and Woomera are surely all too familiar to readers. Labor’s experimentation with temporary protection visas for refugees in 1990, and the introduction of mandatory detention for the ‘boat people’ in 1991, had been followed under Howard, from 1996, by the freezing of humanitarian programme levels, reductions in social security support and an increasingly draconian detention regimen. But none of these developments quite prepared observers for the Howard government’s subsequent demonising and torturing of these wretchedly desperate folk in the final stage of their attempt to find sanctuary from evil Middle Eastern régimes. And nothing, perhaps, was more shocking than the government’s dry-eyed response to the drowning of refugee women and children at sea.
... (read more)Lexical Images: The story of the Australian national dictionary by Bill Ramson
Paper Nation: The story of the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia 1886–1888 by Tony Hughes-d’Aeth
Australia and the British Embrace: The demise of the imperial ideal by Stuart Ward
Death and bereavement come to us all, often as the most challenging experiences of our lives. In the end, we must all confront the inevitability of our own mortality. A study of dying and responses to death takes us to the heart of the history of any culture, and sharpens our understanding of the meaning of our lives. Despite the significance of death in human life, Ken Inglis and other scholars observed in the twentieth century ‘a modern distaste for the physical facts of mortality and a modern aversion to the darkness of mourning’. Only in the last twenty years has the taboo on death begun to lift. Public and academic concern has been stimulated by the AIDS epidemic, by debates about euthanasia, palliative care, and suicide rates, and by medical technology’s increasing interventions to prolong life. However, historians in Australia have been slower to participate in this discussion than colleagues in France, the USA, and Britain, especially for the nineteenth century. My own contribution is a book entitled Australian Ways of Death: A social and cultural history 1840–1918, and this essay tells an essential and distinctively Australian part of that story.
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