'As the last issue of Australian Historical Studies for 2017, this November volume begins by showcasing new work in legal history with two articles analysing the penal past in New South Wales. In his close focus on transportation within the colony during its foundation years, David Andrew Roberts argues that Judge Advocates such as David Collins, Richard Dore and Richard Atkins chose to go beyond the punishments strictly available to them, regardless of formal English legal restrictions. He demonstrates that while transportation was not intended to be within the sentencing jurisdiction of the New South Wales Court, it was nevertheless adopted and practised. Revealing the pragmatic and pluralist nature of the reception and rejection of English law in the colony, Roberts shows the ways that Judge Advocates took a pragmatic approach to the adoption of English law; performing exile in a land of exiles could be messy and incongruous.' (Introduction)
'The Australian Generations Oral History Project, a collaboration between historians at La Trobe and Monash Universities, the National Library and the Australian Broadcasting Commission ran from 2011 to 2014. By collecting the life stories of 300 volunteers born between the 1920s and the 1980s it aimed to write into history’s big picture the ‘ordinary people’ whose experiences have been too often ignored. The full archive of this project is held by the National Library, accessible either now or later according to the wishes of those interviewed. In Australian Lives: An Intimate History, Anisa Puri and Alistair Thomson draw on fifty of these life histories to bring the outcomes of the project to those who prefer the printed word, and perhaps to tempt them to dip into the larger collection.' (Introduction)
'Geoffrey Blainey is Australia’s happy historian. ‘Blame’ is not in his vocabulary and his hindsight points no fingers at the past. Thus our nation’s story is told congenially, in large typeface, without footnotes to trouble the ‘general reader’ to whom it is directed – the author’s trademark generalisations come with the authority of his age and his achievements. They are nicely, sometimes lyrically, expressed, as he tells two stories – triumphal (how the progeny of British convicts built a prosperous nation) and tragic (the despoliation and degradation of our indigenous people) without bothering too much about how they may have been causally related.' (Introduction)
'Arrow, Baker and Monagle begin Small Screens: Essays on Contemporary Australian Television with a suggestion that engaging with television operates as a type of ‘cultural duty’ for citizens (vii), and they have brought together a group of historians who demonstrate the change and continuity associated with this duty. Nick Herd kicks off the collection with a fantastic overview chapter on local television. He presents the data alongside effective summaries of key incidents in television history around technological change, advertising and censorship. The chapters that follow demonstrate that these changes have not ‘killed’ television culture, but transformed it into a series of subcultural communities, and they produce snapshots of many of these communities alongside a comprehensive argument for the continued importance of television.' (Introduction)
