AustLit

'Enduring popular narratives posit the 1950s as a time of gendered oppression and conservative stability. While previous historians have pointed to the social and political changes of the period, their work has understood culture as a passive reflector of these transformations. Through analysis of four Australian films, this article argues that the contemporary cultural landscape was a dynamic space that actively negotiated between competing ideals. Exploring the representation of distinct albeit legitimate models of masculinity in these films, this article reveals the complex and unsteady gender order unfolding in the cultural world of the 1950s.'  (Publication abstract)

'Geoffrey Bolton AO (1931–2015) was a self-avowed tortoise whose lengthy career matched the steadfast and ultimately triumphant march of his spirit animal. Long committed – in both life and scholarship – to the temperate ‘middle way’, Bolton left ample evidence of the fruits of moderation. His life in history began amidst the Menzies-led heyday of all things middle, with an Honours thesis on Alexander Forrest that became a first article (1953) and book (1958). His last major work – a biography of Paul Hasluck – was completed in 2014, by which time Menzies’ ‘forgotten people’ had made a comeback as Tony Abbott’s ‘forgotten families’. Over the intervening six decades, Bolton made pioneering forays into regional, environmental, public, northern and imperial history, all the while continuing as a biographer. In addition to several full-length biographies, he contributed a staggering ninety-one entries to the Australian Dictionary of Biography. His employment history was equally wide-ranging. A ‘peripatetic professor’ whose trajectory anticipated today's academic hyper-mobility, Bolton held appointments in London, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and his native Perth, where UWA, Edith Cowan and Murdoch each took advantage of his services. Throughout these relocations, his output remained prodigious: a complete bibliography takes up fourteen pages. But no matter how far he travelled, Bolton held fast to his West Australian roots. Ever the proud ‘sandgroper’, he contested the ‘Hume Highway hegemony’ and showed that Australia had history beyond the southeast. Late in life these services won him an honour rarely bestowed upon historians, when in 2014 the main promenade of Perth's new Elizabeth Quay was named Geoffrey Bolton Avenue. Only icons such as Manning Clark and Sir Keith Hancock, who boast eponymous thoroughfares in Victoria and the ACT, have reached similar heights.' (Introduction)

'The history of romantic love has a long precedent, with the emotion/s and its practices situated as a key development in the production of modernity for the social historians of the 1970s. Since then, scholars in disciplines as diverse as history, literature, politics, sociology, anthropology, geography and the biological sciences have sought to explore, contest and rethink what romantic love is; whether it is a product of nature or nurture, and its cultural dimensions; and its implications for key sociological ideas, including the shape of the family, gender equality, and production of the modern. The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australiaoffers a twofold contribution to this scholarship. First, it seeks to ask whether Australia has its own version of romantic love, and, if so, how is that expressed, contested, and how has it evolved over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Second, it seeks to explicitly consider how romantic love is depicted in a wide variety of popular cultural forms, from Valentine’s Day cards to film and television to novels and comic books to hillbilly music and rock and roll. It seeks to give an account of the cultural practices grouped under the umbrella of ‘romantic love’ and how these might shape what we think it is.'  (Introduction)

'Tim Rowse has a rare talent for making us see things anew. He has done it in earlier books, but his latest takes that talent to new heights. It scrutinises the history of engagements between Indigenous and other Australians from federation through to the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, with particular attentiveness to the recovery of the Indigenous peoples, demographically, culturally, politically and legally.'  (Introduction)

'As Leonie Stevens points out in her introduction, there is already an extensive historiography on the Aboriginal settlement named Wybalenna, on Flinders Island off the coast of Van Diemen's Land (VDL), which lasted from 1832 to 1847. The community, established to hold in one place the remaining and seriously threatened Indigenous population of VDL, was never large. It reached a peak of between 150 and 200 people in 1834, and although the settlement was occasionally augmented by later arrivals, the dramatic excess of deaths over births meant that by 1847, when the settlement closed, its population had dropped to forty-three. This population decline, which continued when the community was removed to Oyster Cove on the VDL mainland, led observers at the time and since to see this as a case of human extinction in the face of colonisation. It has been quite common to see the story of the Aboriginal settlement on Flinders Island, then, as one of demoralisation and despair, of a people awaiting their relentless decline and inevitable demise.' (Introduction)

'How do we come to know the past? That is the key question of this fascinating, moving, and troubling examination of historical consciousness in contemporary Australia. Memory, Place and Aboriginal-Settler History considers the ways in which settler descendants come to understand the past. It does so by looking closely at a particular people and place: non-Indigenous Australians with ‘generational connections’ to the Wirrabara and North-East Highland districts in mid-north South Australia (4). Krichauff is herself part of this group she terms settler descendants, and her own stories, observations, and research journeys are interwoven with those of her interviewees. Together they offer an evocative account of the presence of the past in place in the twenty-first century.'  (Introduction)

'Australian scholars have written some excellent biographies, and Judith Brett's The Enigmatic Mr Deakin is amongst the best of them. It stands tall alongside recent triumphs like Jill Roe's Stella Miles Franklin and Mark McKenna's An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark. Like Roe and McKenna, Brett draws her readers into a sympathetic understanding of a complex and often contradictory subject. And beyond that, to a new appreciation of the society that shaped him and was shaped by him. Not since Allan Martin's Henry Parkes has an Australian biography captured so well the spirit of the age.'  (Introduction)