'An exploration of the work and legacy of one of Australia's most distinguished historians

'Stuart Macintyre was an eminent figure within the world of Australian history scholarship for 45 years. This collection of essays and responses revisits and extends this extraordinary life of achievement and engagement. Leading scholars write here of Macintyre's contribution to understanding radicalism and communism, postwar reconstruction, education and civics, universities, liberalism, historiography and the history wars. They also tell us about collegiality and friendship.

'The practice of history writing and telling has long been central to the narrative of the nation in Australia. The Work of History connects us to that past. It raises the question of what comes next, and re-values Macintyre's contribution, serving both as a snapshot of the state of the historian's art, and an introduction to those who come more recently to this highly contested field.' (Publication summary)

'Who was Eve Langley? Those who know the name will associate it with a remarkable novel, The Pea Pickers, first published in 1942. It is an exotic tale, set in Gippsland, Victoria where the two main female characters dress up as male farm workers, in order to find work, and survive.' (Introduction)

'In 1956, Bernard Smith wrote that the people of Australia were migratory birds. This was to become a leading motif of his own thinking, and a significant inspiration for author Peter Beilharz. Beilharz came to argue that the idea of the antipodes made sense less in its geographical form than in its cultural form, viewed as a relation rather than a place. Australians had one foot here and one foot there, whichever 'there' this was. This way of thinking with and after Bernard Smith makes up one current of Beilharz's best Australian essays. Two other streams contribute to this collection of Beilharz's essays. The second recovers and publicizes antipodean intellectuals - from Childe to Evatt to Stretton to Jean Martin - who have often been overshadowed by the reception given to metropolitan celebrity thinkers. This second stream also examines others, like Hughes and Carey, who have been celebrated as writers more than as interpreters of the antipodean condition. The third stream engages with mainstream views of Australian writing, and with the limits of these views. When thinking in terms of cultural traffic, then the stories told about Australia will also be global and regional in a broader sense.' (Publication summary)

'Jean Martin was a pioneer of sociology, inventing a version of the discipline that was uniquely suited to Australia in the post-war period. Jean Isobel Martin (1923–79) made herself a sociologist before the discipline was established in Australia. Regarded as a founder of Australian sociology, her writing, teaching and policy helped shape Australia in the period of economic growth and social development that followed World War II. The Martin Presence is a biography that examines her life and her work across the concerns of the time and explores her far-reaching influence on the social sciences in Australia.' (Publication summary)

'Bernard Smith is widely recognised as one of Australia's leading intellectuals. Yet the recognition of his work has been partial, focused on art history and anthropology. Peter Beilharz argues that Smith's work also contains a social theory, or a way of thinking about Australian culture and identity in the world system. Smith enables us to think matters of place and cultural imperialism through the image of being not Australian so much as antipodean. Australian identities are constructed by the relationship between core and periphery, making them both European and Other at the same time. This 1997 work is a book-length analysis of Bernard Smith's work and is the result of careful and systematic research into Smith's published works and his private papers. It is both an introduction to Smith's thinking and an important interpretive argument about imperialism and the antipodes.' (Publication summary)