AustLit

'I distinctly remember my first visit to the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (ALGA) in 2014. I had long been an ALGA follower on Facebook and knew members of its executive committee. Yet I was a little nervous that first visit because I was only beginning my foray into the field of LGBTI history. Like so many other academics starting new projects, I felt almost like a phony, moving into well-established turf occupied by other historians – professional, academic and those independent scholars who research out of sheer passion.' (Introduction)

'This is a compelling book, not only because of its lucid prose and deep research, but because of the intensely personal story threaded through its pages.' (Introduction)

'Entering a crowded and contested field of history requires the type of pluck and vision demonstrated by Leonie Stevens in Me Write Myself. This compelling intervention in Indigenous Australian history recounts the exile experience of Van Diemen’s Land First Nations Peoples at Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island in Bass Strait, 1832–47. Focusing upon the years immediately after the frontier wars, Stevens brings voice to ‘documents and perspectives which were previously all but silenced’ (xxxiv). This approach revises a canonical historical narrative characterised by ‘Eurocentrism and hierarchical thinking’ (252). Stevens illuminates the writings, world views and hopes of the exiles. In doing so, she critiques and corrects a historiographical record that has focused on the actions and accounts of Europeans from James Bonwick’s (1870) The Last of the Tasmanians through to Brian Plomley’s (1987) Weep in Silence and beyond.' (Introduction)

'Reel Men is an excursion into a realm of Australian cinematic history many might have considered quite barren. Against the celebrated colour and belligerence of the cinema of the 1970s, the productions of the 1950s have come to be seen as stultified and dreary affairs, but Barnett’s book is a lively overturning of any such assumption. It offers a rich analysis of 14 feature films made during the period to achieve this, looking at the content and consumption of movies such as Sons of Matthew (1949), The Shiralee (1957), Smiley (1956), King of the Coral Sea (1954), Jedda (1955) and On the Beach (1959). Reel Men is primarily concerned to show the way in which this catalogue reveals the multiplicity of and tensions within masculine identity, and each chapter details the ways in which these dynamics were implicated in the broader social, cultural and political concerns of 1950s Australia: the national character, the responsibilities of breadwinning, the strength of family life and the role of the father within it, the imperatives of White Australia, and the maintenance of (hetero)sexuality.'  (Introduction)

'During the Second World War, some 30,000 Australians became POWs. Of the more than 22,000 prisoners held by the Japanese, around 8000 died. This equated to a death toll of 36 per cent, an extraordinary figure when compared with the much lower death toll of 3 per cent suffered by those taken prisoner in the European and North African theatres. The wartime suffering of these men and their experiences of captivity has been the subject of much scholarship. But in The Battle Within: POWs in Post-war Australia, Christina Twomey takes up the narrative of POWs of the Japanese after the ‘camp gates were thrown open’ (5). She eloquently traces both the individual and collective responses of these men and small number of women to the effect of captivity on their lives in the decades following liberation.'  (Introduction)