AustLit

'One of the many Australians who campaigned against participation in the Vietnam War was Freda Brown (1919–2009). Among the anti-war groups she worked within, three employed a maternalist approach to many of their campaigns. Mobilising against the prevailing concept of a woman’s role to keep the home fires burning and support the troops, Brown travelled to North Vietnam at the height of the conflict. One remarkable outcome of her activism was the funding of the Hanoi Obstetrics and Gynaecology Hospital. This article explores Brown’s work in these organisations, and examines her work in transnational maternalism.'  (Publication abstract)

'This article uses cultural representations to write refugee history. It examines twenty-first-century picture books about displaced children, alongside published responses to them, to explore how refugee experiences and histories are constructed, both for and about children, in an Australian context. The visual literary form of picture books as political texts is examined as a space for discussion and dialogue. Published responses to them, however, more commonly reveal rigid interpretations of imagined readers, invoking binary divisions between displaced and non-displaced children. Through these sources, questions of humanisation and (de)politicisations in refugee history are considered.'  (Publication abstract)

'Clio’s Lives is a most welcome and highly readable addition to scholarly literature on autobiography and biography. Inspired by ‘the increasing though still-limited body of scholarship connecting the writing of history directly with the lives of those who write it’ (1), it is based on a workshop held in Canberra during 2015. Part of the ANU Lives Series in Biography, the book brings together contributions from 13 highly regarded authors. Eleven of them are associated with Australian universities and two with Canadian universities. They discuss a quite wide variety of historians. Following the editors’ introduction, the four sections focus on historians’ autobiographies, historians who have defined their nation, those who have defined their discipline and collective biography of historians. Barbara Caine provides concluding reflections. Autobiography and biography are linked with intellectual and social developments. Clio’s Lives not only presents the results of its contributors’ research but also illuminates significant historiographical issues.'  (Introduction)

'Martin Ritchie Sharp was born into a wealthy Sydney family in 1942. He was educated at Cranbrook School and went on to study at the East Sydney National Art School. In 1963, Richard Neville, Sharp, Richard Walsh and some of their friends launched the satirical Oz magazine. The first issue carried cartoons by Sharp that lampooned the monarchy and ridiculed sexual taboos. As if this was not enough, another cartoon by Sharp depicted the Christian God as a tycoon smoking a cigar at his desk with trays marked Heaven, Purgatory and Hell. Other subjects avoided by the mainstream press that were now voiced in Oz included suburban customs and habits caricatured in Sharp’s dull and tedious ‘Norman Normal’; misogynistic abuse of women as parodied in his The Word Flashed round the Arms; publication of the names of organised-crime bosses with links to the police; and condemnation of laws against abortion and homosexuality that created opportunities for blackmail and extortion.' (Introduction)