Cirrus@Austlit

'Ken Inglis is one of Australia’s most creative, versatile and influential historians. This article assesses his influence, relying on memory, reading and reflection. It traces the origins and impact of his most enduring historical interest, the study of Anzac as a ‘civil religion’. Like Charles Bean, the first historian of Anzac, Inglis has been keenly interested in how national history is made and communicated to a popular audience. As general editor of the Australian Bicentennial History Project, he led one of the largest and most ambitious ventures in collaborative national history-writing anywhere.' (Introduction)

'This article examines Ken Inglis’s journey to Gallipoli in 1965, marking the 50th anniversary of the Landing. It involves a detailed consideration of his earliest writings on this subject, drawing on unpublished manuscripts held by the National Library. The article uses this study as an opportunity to examine the character and method of Inglis’s historical writing and situate this early work within the corpus of a larger body of scholarship. It contrasts Inglis’s nuanced and carefully argued account – his ethnographic approach to the gathering of testimony, close observance of ritual and language and the bold sweep of his writing – with the less searching and more reductionist approach taken by some subsequent critics of Gallipoli pilgrimage. One of the article’s key concerns is to consider how the character of commemoration has changed over time: it compares and contrasts this first large-scale return to Gallipoli (over 300 World War One veterans embarked on the ‘Jubilee Pilgrimage’) with more recent journeys to Anzac. It argues that with the passing of the generation that witnessed the Great War, ‘Anzac’ has lost much of its historical specificity and that the increasingly performative aspects of commemoration have served to overwhelm its original meanings.' (Introduction)

'Leonhard Adam (1891–1960) was among the most distinguished internees despatched from England to Australia in 1940 on the infamous HMT Dunera.Penguin Books had lately published his Primitive Art, which was on the way to becoming a standard work. In 1942 he was released in order to study Aboriginal stone artefacts under the supervision of the University of Melbourne’s Professor R.M. Crawford, who secured resources for the making and sustenance of a small ethnological museum attached to the university’s history department. By canny exchange, Adam built a precious collection. He gave sparsely attended lectures, and with some cause believed that Australian colleagues did not greatly value his work. It has been receiving more attention and respect in recent years.' (Abstract)

'Simone de Beauvoir noted that you don’t often make new friends after age 60. But Jill and I enjoyed what you could call a late friendship. Jill came to the ANU as a visitor after she retired in 2003 and we immediately fell into an easy friendship. We were born just a year apart – Jill in 1940 and me a year later. We were both country girls, Jill a farm girl from Eyre Peninsula and me a small-town girl from southern Queensland. We had both fled rural life in the late 1950s and been the first in our families to go to university in the early 1960s. When Jill was writing her final book, Our Fathers Cleared the Bush – her memoir of her childhood in that remote corner of South Australia – we found that we shared many experiences, despite the distance between South Australia and Queensland and their different histories.¹ ' (Introduction)

'I arrived at Macquarie University in January 1972 in order to get some clear air by taking work as a tutor in history while struggling to finish a postgraduate thesis at the Australian National University. I knew nobody at Macquarie and, as a relatively recent migrant from Central Africa, next to nothing about the history department. I’d been hired to tutor there in a large compulsory first year history course called ‘The West in Early Modern Times’, and also in a third year subject on ‘Victorian Social History’ taught by a Dr Jill Roe.' (Introduction)

'A biography of Australian Muriel Matters is long overdue and Robert Wainwright’s book leaves us in no doubt that Miss Muriel does indeed matter. She was involved prominently in the British suffrage movement, flying in a hot air balloon to drop pamphlets over London and chaining herself to the grille in British parliament, becoming the first woman to give a speech, albeit uninvited, in the chamber. She also toured the English provinces in a horse-drawn caravan speaking to welcoming and unwelcoming audiences on behalf of the Women’s Freedom League. These spectacular exploits, however, are barely known in Australia, and her more serious achievements have been lost entirely. Muriel Matters, as Wainwright’s book reveals, was not just a suffrage activist. She also involved herself in child welfare, joining Sylvia Pankhurst at the Mothers’ Arms in the East End. Matters trained with Maria Montessori in Europe and was a pioneer of the Montessori education system in London.' (Introduction)

'During an address to American soldiers at Fort Knox, the British general Sir William Slim outlined his now-famous views on leadership. He mused that ‘leadership is the most intensely personal thing there is in the world, because leadership is just plain you … leadership is the projection of your personality, so it is not much good starting off to be a leader unless you have got a personality’. 1 Slim’s maxims have a timeless quality, referred to by modern business and militaries alike. William Westerman’s Soldiers and Gentlemen highlights the importance of personality and personal leadership to the successful performance of Australian battalion commanders during the First World War. In both British and Australian popular memory of the First World War, command is traditionally viewed in a negative manner, callously responsible for the blooding of the ‘Poor Bloody Infantry’ at the front. Yet, as Westerman rightly points out, Australia’s fixation with the humble ‘digger’ on the front line and ‘Great Captains’ such as John Monash, Thomas Blamey and Gordon Bennett has obscured our understanding of the important mid- and low-level commands that sit in the gulf between. A welcome addition to the canon of First World War military history, then, Westerman’s Soldiers and Gentlemen breathes life into the experiences of the 183 substantive Australian battalion commanders (or COs [Commanding Officers]), who were both the great captains and the men in the trenches (5), tracing their fortunes from the raising of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in 1914 to the final Hundred Days offensive in 1918. Aligning Australian battalion command’s expansion and improvement to the well-worn concept of the ‘learning curve’, Westerman provides us with a solid, well-researched piece of historical recovery.' (Introduction)

'Not a lot is known about James Chisholm, possibly just enough to fill a small entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, though he has not entered those portals. He became a self-made wealthy merchant and landowner in early Sydney. Born in Mid Calder in lowland Scotland in 1772 in modest circumstances, with some local patronage he joined the 29th Regiment of Foot aged sixteen, and in 1790 transferred to the New South Wales Corps, sailing with the Third Fleet to Sydney Cove in 1791. He then led a quiet career in the regiment for two decades, but garnered his income until he was able to start private trading, in liquor and property. He left the regiment and stayed on in the colony, accumulating assets steadily, got married and expanded his commercial interests. There was not much drama in his life, but he built up a nice position in commercial circles, buying land and property. He was connected with the formation of the Savings Bank of New South Wales, and involved in education and linked with J.D. Lang and W.C. Wentworth. He sustained a certain nostalgia for his Scottish roots; he died wealthy, providing a platform upon which his family was able to expand the fortune spectacularly in the following generations.' (Introduction)