AustLit

'Diversity in Leadership: Australian women, past and present provides a new understanding of the historical and contemporary aspects of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women's leadership in a range of local, national and international contexts. It brings interdisciplinary expertise to the topic from leading scholars in a range of fields and diverse backgrounds. The aims of the essays in the collection document the extent and diverse nature of women's social and political leadership across various pursuits and endeavours within democratic political structures. ' (Source: TROVE)

'The Cold War was a turbulent time to grow up in. Family ties were tested, friendships were torn apart and new beliefs forged out of the ruins of old loyalties. In this book, through twelve evocative stories of childhood and early adulthood in Australia during the Cold War years, writers from vastly different backgrounds explore how global political events affected the intimate space of home, family life and friendships.

'Some writers were barely in their teens when they felt the first touches of their parents’ political lives, both on the Left and the Right. Others grew up in households well attuned to activism across the spectrum, including anti-communism, workers’ rights, anti-Vietnam War, anti-apartheid and women’s rights. Sifting through the key political and social developments in Australia from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, including the referendum to ban the Communist Party of Australia, the rise of ‘the Movement’ and the Labor split, and post-war migration, this book is a powerful and poignant telling of the ways in which the political is personal. ' (Publication summary)

'Salary caps, drunken escapades, sponsorship deals, and teams enjoying victory and surviving defeat dominate coverage of football. Meanwhile fans agonise over line-ups, sweat over results, and look forward to the weekly football ritual. With each new season, having hibernated over the long, hot summer, the team emerges as if revived and raises hopes anew. The keen supporter is hooked back into a revived ritual of precarious pleasures that is played out within quasi-tribal cheer squads, intense friendship networks and, at least momentarily, united nuclear families. What hooks fans back in and why do they care so much? In this riveting and moving book, AFL fans talk about the emotions associated with the game and how it gives meaning to their lives, showing that football is more than just a game. ' (Source: TROVE)

'In his 1960 review of "The Australian Legend", Norman Harper identified one of the strengths of Russel Ward's examination of the Australian national character as its "indefatigable research into folk lore, folk songs and literature". The book's focus on speech, slang and folk expression was also welcomed by John Greenway who commended Ward's use of folksong as historical evidence of an "otherwise voiceless people", and hoped such analysis would "guide everything that will be done in this field in the future". I wish to explore the way in which speech and language is considered in "The Australian Legend" and then to broaden the discussion to examine the possible methodological uses of such social historical evidence. Greenway was clearly overly optimistic that Ward's speech focus would guide further research. In 1958, the use of speech and language as the basis for historical argument was uncharacteristic for historians, and some fifty years later it remains an under-explored aspect of historical research. In alerting us to the importance of speech and to the evolving Australian intonation, and to the sound of speech and the significance of the auditory to understanding an emerging culture, Ward's work made a significant intervention in exploring the phenomenon of the history of linguistic formation. In recent scholarship, the importance of the auditory and listening to sound, often electronically conveyed, has become pivotal to the ways in which historians have begun to discuss the culture of everyday life.'

Source: Article abstract.