Anthem Studies in Australian History - Böcker

'Virtual Voyages' is a fascinating account of the European discovery of the elusive 'great south land' told through the literature of 'imaginary voyages'. Written at the height of the era of European maritime exploration, these bizarre and captivating tales, with their wildly imaginative visions of antipodean inversion and strangeness, reveal a hidden history of attitudes to colonization. By exposing the relationship between myth and reality in the antipodes, this book casts new light on the power of fiction to influence history.

‘Angus & Robertson and the British Trade in Australian Books, 1930–1970’ traces the history of the printed book in Australia, particularly the production and business context that mediated Australia’s literary and cultural ties to Britain for much of the twentieth century. This study focuses on the London operations of one of Australia’s premier book publishers of the twentieth century: Angus & Robertson. The book argues that despite the obvious limitations of a British-dominated market, Australian publishers had room to manoeuvre in it. It questions the ways in which Angus & Robertson replicated, challenged or transformed the often highly criticised commercial practices of British publishers in order to develop an export trade for Australian books in the United Kingdom. This book is the answer to the current void in the literary market for a substantial history of Australia’s largest publisher and its role in the development of Australia’s export book trade.

‘Angus & Robertson and the British Trade in Australian Books, 1930–1970’ traces the history of the printed book in Australia, particularly the production and business context that mediated Australia’s literary and cultural ties to Britain for much of the twentieth century. This study focuses on the London operations of one of Australia’s premier book publishers of the twentieth century: Angus & Robertson. The book argues that despite the obvious limitations of a British-dominated market, Australian publishers had room to manoeuvre in it. It questions the ways in which Angus & Robertson replicated, challenged or transformed the often highly criticised commercial practices of British publishers in order to develop an export trade for Australian books in the United Kingdom. This book is the answer to the current void in the literary market for a substantial history of Australia’s largest publisher and its role in the development of Australia’s export book trade.

Taking the absence of Aboriginal people in South Australian settler descendants’ historical consciousness as a starting point, 'Memory, Place and Aboriginal–Settler History' combines the methodologies and theories of historical enquiry, anthropology and memory studies to investigate the multitudinous and intertwined ways the colonial past is known, represented and made sense of by current generations. Informed by interviews and fieldwork conducted with settler and Aboriginal descendants, oral histories, site visits and personal experience, Skye Krichauff closely examines the diverse but interconnected processes through which the past is understood and narrated. 'Memory, Place and Aboriginal–Settler History' demonstrates how it is possible to unsettle settler descendants’ consciousness of the colonial past in ways that enable a tentative connection with Aboriginal people and their experiences.

Focusing on particular historical blind spots by telling stories of individuals and groups that did not fit the favoured identity mould, the essays in 'Migrant Nation' work within the gap between Australian image and experience and offer fresh insights into the ‘other’ side of identity construction. The volume casts light on the hidden face of Australian identity and remembers the experiences of a wide variety of people who have generally been excluded, neglected or simply forgotten in the long-running quest to tell a unified story of Australian culture and identity. Drawing upon memories, letters, interviews and documentary fragments, as well as rich archives, the authors have in common a commitment to give life to neglected histories and thus to include, in an expanding and open-ended national narrative, people who were cast as strangers in the place that was their home.

Trailblazing women of Australian Public Broadcasting, 1945 – 1975 offers a compelling new perspective of Australian radio and television history. It chronicles how a group of female producers defied the odds and forged remarkable careers in the traditionally male domain of public-affairs production at the ABC in the post-war decades. Kay Kinane, Catherine King, Therése Denny and Joyce Belfrage were ambitious and resourceful producers, part of the vanguard of Australian broadcasters who used mass media as a vehicle for their social and political activism. Fiercely dedicated to their audiences, they wrote, directed and produced ground-breaking documentaries and current affairs programs that celebrated Australian life, while also challenging its cultural complacency, its racism and sexism. They immersed themselves in the ABC’s many networks of collaboration and initiated a range of strategies to expand their agency and authority. With vivid descriptions of life at the ABC, this book traces their careers as they crossed borders and crossed mediums, following them as they worked on location shoots and in production offices, in television studios, control rooms and radio booths. In doing so it highlights the barriers, both official and unofficial, that confronted so many women working in broadcasting after World War II.

Australian Women’s Historical Photography: Other Times, Other Views examines the photographs produced by six talented women photographers against the historical backdrop of settler violence towards Indigenous Australians, the First Women’s Movement, the Great War of 1914–1918, Australia’s imperial occupation of New Guinea, the final years of Chinese Nationalist Party rule in China and debates about photography’s status as an art form. Women’s works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been down-played or even ignored in existing accounts of Australia’s cultural history, and this study is aimed at rectifying this situation. At the same time, the book demonstrates why amateur works are just as important as commercial works to our understanding of the past.● Methodologically, the book draws on scholarship from history, art history, anthropology, sociology, gender studies and cultural studies to create an interdisciplinary critical framework that will be of interest to a broad range of academic and archival researchers. It is also a framework that is critically sensible of its own groundings in the postcolonial and feminist present thereby reflecting what is meaningful at any given historical moment.● Finally, this book responds to the pronounced lack of visibility of Australian realist, documentary and commercial women’s works. The few histories of Australian women’s photography that exist pay more attention to modernist and contemporary works, and when they do mention earlier women photographer’s works, they seldom go into much detail. They also ignore the works of the earliest Indigenous women photographers, women who traveled and made photographs abroad. By presenting a carefully contextualized and detailed study of works by six Australian women photographers who worked in the late colonial era and whose works in all sorts of small and surprising ways chronicled the impacts of some of the periods more disturbing as well as enlightened events, we will not only add to knowledge of Australian women’s photography, we will also broaden and enrich the frames of women’s photography and Australian history more generally.