AustLit

'Australian born of Irish Protestant parents, William Hughston was a teacher, historian and writer. His achievements include the founding of three schools, the introduction of innovative methods of education and a key role in the founding of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria (RHSV). An intellectual with an enquiring mind, he grasped and implemented new ideas enthusiastically. Tenacity, however, does not seem to have been one of his virtues. Despite his failure to sustain his projects, his contributions were significant, with the RHSV and Fintona Girls' School being his noteworthy legacies.' (Publication abstract)

'The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka is an attractive book with an easy narrative style that readers will generally enjoy. The book comprises twelve chapters in three parts, with an introductory preface, conclusion and epilogue. Part One, ‘Transitions’, provides firsthand descriptions of travelling to the goldfields and concludes with a portrayal of goldfields life in December 1853, one year before Eureka. Part Two, ‘Transformations’, begins with Martha Clendinning who came to Ballarat in 1853, and whose journals have previously been used extensively. It tells of life on the Ballarat diggings and gives a vivid account of the birthing experience of one woman, Sarah Skinner. Part Three, ‘Transgressions’, continues the Eureka story, describing the murder of James Scobie, the subsequent burning of Bentley’s hotel and the Eureka battle itself. The Conclusion, titled ‘A Day at the Races’, suggests that ‘things go on regardless’ and gives an account of the aftermath from 1855 to 1858.' (Introduction)

'‘It is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one,’ Lytton Strachey observed in his Eminent Victorians. ‘Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead—who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design?’ Strachey was a man on a mission from Bloomsbury to puncture the hypocrisy of Victorian forebears. His deadly caricatures of General Gordon and Florence Nightingale almost killed off the doubledecker biography, at least until Michael Holroyd’s biography of Strachey himself miraculously revived it.' (Introduction)

'As the plunging circulation of printed newspapers forces their publishers online in search of profits, the old-style newspaper baron looks increasingly like a figure from a distant past. The Age, once the money-factory on which David Syme’s newspaper fortune depended, now sells something over 100,000 print copies each weekday, around the same number as it did in 1900. If the Age was bought today by the same proportion of Melbourne’s population as in 1900, sales would approach a million copies a day. Things have changed. (Introduction)