Patricia Grimshaw

Perhaps no other social attitude has changed so markedly in this century as the prevailing public reaction towards the question of the limitation of population growth and the use of birth control devices. In my childhood, the large families of our working-class neighbourhood were subjected to the derision of smug and usually protestant parents of neat, small families who viewed such unrestrained ... (read more)

Historians of the left have frequently adopted a highly sceptical, if not outright hostile, stance towards that pursuit of working-class interests through parliamentary politics which resulted in some form of ‘welfare state’ in most western industrial democracies. Historical interpretation has tended to polarise. On the one hand, liberal scholars have heralded the progress of governments towar ... (read more)

John Hirst faced a challenging task when he set out to write Australia’s Democracy: A short history. In a single monograph, he has traced the story of political rights and practices of citizenship, assessed within a context of social change. Not only does such writing place considerable demands on a historian’s range, but any prominent historian who attempts a short history attracts the sharp ... (read more)