Anthem Studies in Australian History – serie

'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.

'Travelling Home' provides a detailed analysis of the contribution that the mid twentieth-century 'Walkabout' magazine made to Australia’s cultural history. Spanning five central decades of the twentieth century (1934-1974), 'Walkabout' was integral to Australia’s sense of itself as a nation. By advocating travel—both vicarious and actual—'Walkabout' encouraged settler Australians to broaden their image of the nation and its place in the Pacific region. In this way, 'Walkabout' explicitly aimed to make its readers feel at home in their country, as well as including a diverse picture of Aboriginal and Pacific cultures. Given its wide availability and distribution, together with its accessible and entertaining content, 'Walkabout' changed how Australia was perceived, and the magazine is recalled with nostalgic fondness by most if not all of its former readers. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, 'Travelling Home' engages with key questions in literary, cultural, and Australian studies about national identity and modernity. The book’s diverse topics demonstrate how 'Walkabout' canvassed subtle and shifting fields of representation; as a result, this analysis produces complex and nuanced readings of Australian literary and cultural history.

'Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)' newly locates the story of the genesis of the iconic 1955 film ‘Jedda’ (dir. Chauvel) and, in turn, ‘Jedda’ becomes a cultural context and point of reference for the history of race relations it tells. It spans the period 1930–1960 but is focused on the 1950s, the decade when Charles Chauvel looked to the ample resources of his friends in the rich pastoral Ngunnawal country of the Yass Valley to make his film. This book has four locations. The homesteads of the wealthy graziers in the Yass Valley and the Hollywood Mission in Yass town are its primary sites. Also relevant are the Sydney of the cultural and moneyed elites, and the Northern Territory where ‘Jedda’ was made. Its narrative weaves together stories of race relations at these four sites, illuminating the film’s motifs as they are played out in the Yass Valley, against a backdrop of Sydney and looking North towards the Territory. It is a reflection on family history and the ways in which the intricacies of race relations can be revealed and concealed by family memory, identity and myth-making. The story of the author, as the great granddaughter, great-niece and cousin of some of those who poured resources into the film, both disrupts and elaborates previously ingrained versions of her family history.

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.

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.

What did Australians read? This book answers this question in terms of books rather than newspapers and considers the long nineteenth century, interpreted as running from 1788 to 1901. In the wake of this primary question, several others arise: how did Australians acquire the books they read, and how did readers in the outback overcome the handicaps of distance and remoteness? Did they read for pleasure, instruction, self-edification, or spiritual sustenance? More importantly, how did Australian readers respond to the books they read? The evidence is drawn from autobiographical sources, in which individual readers related their personal reading experiences and responses.At the same time, the book pursues a second and related question: What did Australians write? Reference is made here not to the kind of writing we know as ‘literature’, but to the non-literary writing which cultural historians call ‘ordinary writings’. These are the writings of everyday life, represented in this book by diaries, journals, hand-written newspapers and correspondence. The focus is wide enough to include the everyday cultural practices of people of low social status and little education. The writing practices of the partially literate, including writing delegated to a third party, have their place here.In this double investigation, the book draws on evidence from a cohort of 101 nineteenth-century readers and writers. They are a heterogeneous group of autobiographers, coming from Melbourne and Sydney to rural Queensland and Western Australia. They come from the city and the bush, from coastal towns and the interior, from sheep stations, gold diggings and city offices. They show us the perennial importance of Shakespeare and the Bible, the popularity of the English canon, the prestige of poetry and the importance of religious reading. Books held the Empire together but, as they travelled, their meanings changed according to the local cultural environment. This book registers such nuances in the Australian context. The writing of this group is represented by some prolific diarists and correspondents. In the late-nineteenth century, the eastern colonies became world leaders in sending letters. The postal environment which made this possible is also examined.