AustLit

'The candid photograph on the cover of this new history of women in Australian broadcasting sums it up eloquently. A woman and a man are shown behind the camera during an ABC film shoot. The woman stands with her arms folded, gazing intently ahead; beside her, the man squints at the same scene through the lens of a camera. The woman sees the bigger picture while he sees only a portion. So it was that many later accounts of the start of broadcast media perpetuated a restricted view that omitted women’s achievements from history.' (Introduction)

'Periodicals of all formats provide insight into the times in which they were produced. This is especially so for long-lived periodicals with similarly long-lived editors whose influence reaches well beyond their editorial desk and into the culture they are compelled to transform. The periodicals shelves of our libraries provide a quiet space in which the long runs of Meanjin and Overland can be found in their physical form, sometimes facing each other across the aisle, or sometimes closer together in smaller libraries like mine. But this silence belies the dynamic and sometimes uncomfortable processes that preceded each issue. Through close personal connections to these processes and supported by a wealth of archival evidence, Jim Davidson’s Emperors in Lilliput brings these two magazines and their founding editors to life in vivid detail.' (Introduction)

'Australia has had its fair share of entrepreneurs. This is the biography of a failed entrepreneur – C.J. (Jack) DeGaris, a household name in the early 1920s and now largely forgotten. Except perhaps in two rural towns: Mildura on the Murray River in Victoria and Kendenup in the Great Southern Region of Western Australia.'(Introduction) 

'Do birds play? When a lyrebird performs its virtuosic mimicry or the bowerbird decorates its bower in brilliant shades of blue, should we perceive a mindless following of evolutionarily ingrained impulses towards procreation, or rather evidence of joy, vivacity and artistic sensibility? The question of bird playfulness was a vexed one in conservationist and ornithological circles in the 1940s and 1950s, but for Alec Chisholm, the answer was a resounding and intransigent yes. He was frustrated by what he saw amongst his scientific peers as the ‘matter-of-fact viewpoint that persists in limiting all bird-motives to a utilitarian basis’ (95). In contrast to these ‘stodgy scientists’, Chisholm depicted birds as perfectly capable of ‘purposeless pleasure’, ‘bird-games’ and ‘zest for life’ (106). Birds who mimicked, like the lyrebird, did so because they were ‘sound-lovers’ brimming with irrepressible ‘joie-de-vivre’ (106). He would steadfastly defend birds’ capacity for play throughout his long and celebrated career.' (Introduction)