Australian History – serie

The frontiersmen who came to the Victoria River District of Australia’s Northern Territory included cattle and horse thieves, outlaws, capitalists, dreamers, drunks, madmen and others, from the explorers of the 1830s and 1850s to the founders of the big stations in the 1880s and 1890s, and the cattle duffers in the early 1900s. This book looks at them all. Drawing on painstaking research into obscure and rich documentary sources, Aboriginal oral traditions, and firsthand investigations conducted in the region over thirtyfive years, Darrell Lewis pieces together the complex interactions between the environment, the powerful and warlike Aboriginal tribes and the settlers and their cattle, which produced what truly became A Wild History.

When Australian Opposition Leader Gough Whitlam left Sydney in June 1971, the People’s Republic of China was a forbidding unknown in Australia – the subject of heated debate, charged imagination and Cold War paranoia. When he returned from his tour of Asia, the debate had irrevocably changed. On the fortieth anniversary of Australia-China diplomatic relations, The China Breakthrough reflects on the political adventure story that propelled this relationship into being. It follows Whitlam’s daring visit to China in 1971 and explores the dramatic international events and acts of secret diplomacy that underlie this key episode of diplomatic history. The China Breakthrough unpacks the theatre of the Whitlam visit, its political intrigue, and its long-lasting cultural, political and diplomatic implications. It argues that this was a pivotal moment in Australia’s relations with Asia, a revealing test of the Australia-America alliance, and a remarkable case of foreign policy engineered from Opposition.

Across most of the world, an entire generation has lived free from the spectre of polio, but for fifty years during the twentieth century that fear was overwhelming. Polio became every parent’s worst nightmare, and panic drove people to do bizarre things to protect their children. Survivors of the disease and treatment often found that they faced a world unfriendly to their disability.In pre-Second World War Australia, how best to treat polio survivors was fiercely debated and generated a rift between the medical community and those advocating alternative therapies. Two women symbolised this rift. In Victoria, Dr Jean Macnamara used splints, plaster casts and braces to immobilise patients, an approach that, by the 1950s, most Western countries had abandoned. In her clinics in Australia, and later in the United States, Sister Elizabeth Kenny championed and practised a different approach involving little or no constraint on the paralysed body, the application of gentle exercise of the muscles in the early, acute stage of the disease, and the use of hot packs to relieve pain and muscle spasm and tightness.Dancing in My Dreams describes the disease of polio and its treatment, the scientific endeavour that led to the discovery of the poliovirus, and the studies in virology and immunology that culminated in the production of a polio vaccine. It highlights the experiences of patients and the voices of survivors, revealing how ethnicity, class, age and gender all mediated individual’s reactions to the disease, which included fear, rejection, denial and anger. Despite the vaccination programs initiated by the World Health Organization, the polio­virus has not been eliminated globally. In three countries, Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the wild poliovirus remains endemic. The striking 50-year decline in the incidence of polio has stalled, leading to falling levels of immunity in populations. As the frequency of polio epidemics has declined, so too has the collective memory of the experience of the disease, with the growth of anti-vaccine sentiment in many societies a complicating issue. There is no cure for polio. The treatment for polio today remains the same as it was forty years ago. The only way to prevent future epidemics of polio is by vaccinating the population. If the poliovirus cannot find an unvaccinated individual to infect, it will die out. But the success of a vaccination program depends on the cooperation of all individuals to ensure the common good. As long as a single person remains infected with polio, all unvaccinated children throughout the world are at risk.

Beyond the generalisations of national and colonial history, what can we know about how Aboriginal nations interacted with the British settlers who invaded their country, the men appointed by the imperial and colonial governments to protect them, and each other? Bain Attwood makes a major contribution to our knowledge of this period with his superbly researched, finely grained local history of the Djadja Wurrung people of Central Victoria. The story tells of destruction, decimation and dispossession, but it is not one of unceasing conflict. Concepts such as the frontier and resistance emerge as inadequate in this context. Drawing on an unusually rich historical record, Attwood explores the modus vivendi the Djadja Wurrung reached with sympathetic protectors, pastoralists and gold diggers, showing how they both adopted and adapted to these intruders in their own country, at least for a time. Finally, drawing past and present together, Attwood relates the remarkable story of the revival of the Djadja Wurrung in recent times as they have sought to become their own historians.

Antipodes: In Search of the Southern Continent is a new history of an ancient geography. It reassesses the evidence for why Europeans believed a massive southern continent existed, and why they advocated for its discovery. When ships were equal to ambitions, explorers set out to find and claim Terra Australis—said to be as large, rich and varied as all the northern lands combined.Antipodes charts these voyages—voyages both through the imagination and across the High Seas—in pursuit of the mythical Terra Australis. In doing so, the question is asked: how could so many fail to see the realities they encountered? And how is it a mythical land held the gaze of an era famed for breaking free the shackles of superstition?That Terra Australis did not exist didn’t stop explorers pursuing the continent to its Antarctic obsolescence, unwilling to abandon the promise of such a rich and magnificent land till it was stripped of every ounce of value it had ever promised. In the process, the southern continent—an imaginary land—became one of the shaping forces of early modern history.

While the Great War raged, Australians were twice asked to vote on the question of military conscription for overseas service. The recourse to popular referendum on such an issue at such a time was without precedent anywhere in the world. The campaigns precipitated mass mobilisation, bitter argument, a split in the Labor Party, and the fall of a government. The defeat of the proposals was hailed by some as a victory of democracy over militarism, mourned by others as an expression of political disloyalty or a symptom of failed self-government.But while the memory of the conscription campaigns once loomed large, it has increasingly been overshadowed by a preoccupation with the sacrifice and heroism of Australian soldiers – a preoccupation that has been reinforced during the centennial commemorations.This volume redresses the balance. Across nine chapters, distinguished scholars consider the origins, unfolding, and consequences of the conscription campaigns, comparing local events with experiences in Britain, the United States, and other countries. A corrective to the ‘militarisation’ of Australian history, it is also a major new exploration of a unique and defining episode in Australia’s past.

Living with drought is one of the biggest issues of our times. Climate change scenarios suggest that in the next fifty years global warming will increase both the frequency and severity of these phenomena. Stories of drought are familiar to us, accompanied by images of dead sheep, dry dams, cracked earth, farmers leaving their lands, and rural economic stagnation. Drought is indeed a catastrophe, played out slowly. But as Rebecca Jones reveals in this sensitive account of families living on the Australian land, the story of drought in this driest continent is as much about resilience, adaptation, strength of community, ingenious planning for, and creative responses to, persistent absences of rainfall. The histories of eight farming families, stretching from the 1870s to the 1950s, are related, with a focus on private lives and inner thoughts, revealed by personal diaries. The story is brought up to the present with the author’s discussions with contemporary farmers and pastoralists. In greatly enriching our understanding of the human dimensions of drought, Slow Catastrophes provides us with vital resources to face our ecological future.

Geoffrey Bolton was the most versatile and widely travelled of his generation of Australian historians. As a scholar, teacher and commentator he enriched understanding of the country’s regional mosaic, some of its notable figures and others who were just as revealing, the natural environment, social patterns and political life. He was also unflagging in his encouragement of others. The contributors to this volume take his work as a departure point for original essays on a variety of themes in Australian history.Contributors include Stuart Macintyre, Jenny Gregory, Lenore Layman, Carol Bolton, Mark McKenna, Graeme Davison, Carl Bridge, Alan Atkinson, Andrea Gaynor, Tom Griffiths, Tim Rowse, Lizzy Watt, Mary Anne Jebb and Pat Jalland.

Beyond the generalisations of national and colonial history, what can we know about how Aboriginal nations interacted with the British settlers who invaded their country, the men appointed by the imperial and colonial governments to protect them, and each other? Bain Attwood makes a major contribution to our knowledge of this period with his superbly researched, finely grained local history of the Djadja Wurrung people of Central Victoria. The story tells of destruction, decimation and dispossession, but it is not one of unceasing conflict. Concepts such as the frontier and resistance emerge as inadequate in this context. Drawing on an unusually rich historical record, Attwood explores the modus vivendi the Djadja Wurrung reached with sympathetic protectors, pastoralists and gold diggers, showing how they both adopted and adapted to these intruders in their own country, at least for a time. Finally, drawing past and present together, Attwood relates the remarkable story of the revival of the Djadja Wurrung in recent times as they have sought to become their own historians.

The Victorian bushfires of February 2009 captured the attention of all Australians and made headlines around the world. One hundred and seventy-three people lost their lives, the greatest number from any bushfire event in this nation’s history. In the wake of this tragedy much media and public commentary emphasised recovery, resilience, community, self-sufficiency and renewed determination. Peg Fraser, working as a Museum Victoria curator with survivors in the small settlement of Strathewen, listened to these stories but also to other, more challenging narratives. The memories and thoughts that Fraser heard, and gives voice to in this book, complicate much of what we thought we knew about the experience of catastrophic natural events. Although all members of a particular community, Strathewen’s survivors lived through Black Saturday and its aftermath in ways that were often very different from each other. This is historical truth of the most vital, affecting and powerful kind.

Asbestos in Australia presents for the first time a multi-dimensional view of Australia’s asbestos story featuring contributions from experts in the disciplines of history, journalism, medicine, law and public health. It also includes first-hand accounts of those whose lives have been touched by the mineral, as workers, asbestos disease sufferers, and lawyers and campaigners directly engaged in the struggle to ban its use. The writers track the history of asbestos from the early 20th century, when asbestos was mined in Australia, to the post-war housing boom which saw asbestos become the material of choice in cities and suburbs around the country. They then deal with its controversial legacy: the dire medical consequences from exposure, the cover-ups and the protracted legal battles for compensation, and the ongoing risks to public health from the asbestos that remains in our workplaces, schools and homes to this day.