Cirrus@Austlit

'Emeritus Professor Maurice French has made a major contribution to our historical understanding of the Darling Downs and its unofficial capital, Toowoomba. Through reading French’s work, the keen student of Queensland politics realises the extent to which Toowoomba has produced more than its share of influential politicians, including such figures as W.H. Groom, Littleton Groom, Gordon Chalk and the subject of the author’s latest book, Queensland parliamentarian Jack Duggan (1910–93).'  (Introduction)

'James Colman makes clear in the opening pages of this new work on the life of Australian unionist and conservationist Jack Mundey that what follows is not a “Life of Mundey”. Instead Coleman’s book, published with the assistance of the City of Sydney’s History Publication Sponsorship Program and the former Communist Party of Australia’s Search Foundation, pays “tribute” to Mundey’s contribution to the emergence of heritage consciousness and legislation in New South Wales.'  (Introduction)

'Tom Hughes is a highly successful barrister, former federal Liberal Attorney-General, and President of the New South Wales Bar Association who has been variously described during his career as “a top silk”, “the leader of the Australian Bar” and “the venerable lion of the Sydney bar” (p.303). Hughes is also notable for being the brother of the late art critic Robert Hughes and the father-in-law of the current Prime Minister.' (Introduction)

'Whether the product of the economics of Australia’s small book-buying market or a self-deprecating national temperament, there is something of an inhibition towards examining lives that have already received biographical treatment. H.V. Evatt defies that convention. John Murphy’s is the fourth full-scale biography of him. In the introduction, Murphy suggests that, despite those previous studies, Evatt has mostly remained “out of focus, evading capture or only being captured in fragments”.'  (Introduction)

'Illuminating the economic position of women in the colonial urban landscape has long been a challenging task for historians. Those engaged in the “oldest profession” have had their fair share of scholarly attention, and twentieth-century feminist historians have aptly addressed the economic significance of women’s roles as household managers and mothers. But for women engaged in a “respectable” living outside of the domestic sphere, their presence in historical scholarship is comparatively diminutive. Where’s the scandal and intrigue in a woman successfully avoiding “moral ruin”? What is there to excite the reader in the stories of steady trades and economic success — of those flying under the radar of both the law and high society? A tendency to treat the history of women’s employment in colonial Australia as one of economic imperative and survival, rather than one of desire, ambition and achievement, has left a vacuum in historical scholarship that is only now being filled.' (Introduction)

'The connected radical lives of Tom Mann and Bob Ross allow the British labour biographer-historian, Neville Kirk, to take his readers on a tour of many of the countries of settler empire, and occasionally beyond it. Mann was a much-admired and much-travelled British labour leader who lived for much of the first decade of the twentieth century in Australia and New Zealand, playing a formative role in political and industrial mobilisation and organisation. The Australian-born Ross was less peripatetic, moving between paid gigs, usually in radical journalism, in Brisbane, Melbourne, Broken Hill and New Zealand.'  (Introduction)