AustLit

'Australian Women War Reporters traverses the field of conflict reporting by Australasian women beginning with Agnes Macready in South Africa 1901, writing for the Catholic Press about a hospital being prepared for the wounded: “Of course I see with a woman’s eyes and my point of view is limited”' (Publication introduction)

'One of the delights of working in the field of Gender Sexuality and Diversity Studies is that I sometimes get to review awesome books. Colouring the Rainbow: Blak Queer and Trans Perspectives. Life Stories and Essays by First Nations People of Australia is such a book. Through singular stories, oral histories, interviews and academic essays, this collection of work offers much needed perspectives of Blak Queer and Trans voices as they engage with how gender and sexuality intersect with Indigeneity and colonisation. The variety of the twenty-two contributors, the scope of issues and time-span covered, and reflections on the complicity between settler colonialism and homonormativity, all pave a much needed path for how we can begin to make sense of decolonising queer politics and “Queering Aboriginality” (8). There is no other collection like this, which enables non-Indigenous academics like myself an opportunity to read and learn how to open ways for decolonising both thought and politics in professional and personal contexts.' (Publication abstract)

'Phrenology is going through a resurgence, in interest, if not (thankfully) in practice. The supposed ability to assess character and propensity towards deviance though the physical qualities of the skull was a nineteenth-century phenomenon; one of a variety of pseudo-scientific practices that emerged, flourished briefly and disappeared. Unlike many of these experimental knowledge systems, however, its adherents left behind a range of material culture objects including plaster death masks, porcelain heads and human skulls. Having sat on the back shelves of museum collections for over a century, phrenology objects are returning to display across a host of institutions. In the past 12 months alone, phrenological death masks appeared in “Sideshow Alley” at the National Portrait Gallery (Australia), cases at the Old Melbourne Gaol, “My Learned Object” at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, “The Crime Museum Uncovered” at the Museum of London, and a case on phrenology at the Science Museum (UK). Frederick Bailey Deeming had the dubious honour earlier this year of having copies of his death mask on display in both Canberra and London concurrently. Given this current museological interest, Alexandra Roginski's book, The Hanged Man and the Body Thief, is timely. Using the collections of Museum Victoria as both a starting and end point, Roginski relates the intersection of the lives of Scottish phrenologist A.S. Hamilton and executed Aboriginal Australian Jim Crow, whose skull Hamilton illegally exhumed.' (Introduction)