Cirrus@Austlit

'The Prussian explorer and scientist Ludwig Leichhardt's mysterious disappearance in 1848 after he set out to cross the Australian continent has intrigued, captured imaginations and been appropriated by such diverse groups as Nazi party members during the Third Reich and botanists in nineteenth‐century Australia. What happened to Leichhardt has not been resolved and Andrew Wright Hurley does not attempt to solve the mystery. Rather, the author examines how, why, and where Leichardt's story has endured, by whom the myth has been taken up and how these entanglements have interpenetrated each other.' (Publication summary)

'This book began as a local history commissioned by the Burke Shire Council to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Burketown's foundation, celebrated in 2015. The sprawling Shire, in far North West Queensland, lies on the southern coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria and extends to the Northern Territory.' [Review]  

'Clare Wright seems a born story‐teller. This is a big book that has already won high praise. Much has been written on the breakthroughs with women's suffrage in Australasia and the attempts to export this success to the “home country”, but never as engagingly as here. Wright tells the story through interwoven biographies of the key actors; she excels at setting scenes, keeping the complex plot under control and pushing the story forward. Although the book is well referenced, Wright does not slow down the action by locating her work in relation to existing historiography, at least until the final chapter where she engages with the construction of national narratives. Instead, she begins with her discovery of Dora Meeson's “Trust the Women” banner hanging in Parliament House in Canberra and her determination to unravel “its matted threads”.' (Introduction)

'This is an impressive volume, both in terms of its size and scope, which plugs large gaps in our understanding of newspaper history through a detailed exploration of the rise of Melbourne and Sydney newspaper empires from the nineteenth to the mid‐twentieth century. Paper Emperors makes a major contribution to its field by extending existing knowledge and alerting the reader to the close ongoing connections between Australia's powerful business figures, its press barons and political leaders. Central to its narrative is the Australia‐wide expansion of the Melbourne‐based Herald and Weekly Times group, and the role played by the enigmatic but forceful Keith Murdoch, who figures extensively in Parts Two and Three of the book.'  (Introduction)

'Who are the hidden faces that have contributed to the formation of an Australian identity? In what ways have individuals and groups been “excluded, neglected, or simply forgotten” in the dogged drive to narrate a cohesive story of identity‐making in Australia (p.2)? Such questions are addressed in this timely and comprehensive edited collection. As the volume's editor Paul Longley Arthur notes, the book sets out to uncover the “historical blind spots” that have been persistently concealed in the quest to uphold an “Australian settler dream” (pp.2‐3). Drawing upon a wide array of historical materials and approaches, this volume brings to the page histories of people who have been cast as peripheral to, or at odds with, commonplace Australian identity narratives. The uneasy colonial and gendered politics of the “official” archive, along with the complex interplays that exist between migration, memory, biography and belonging, are explored by an assortment of talented scholars who — when assessed as a whole — reveal the methodological richness of Australian historical inquiry and how it can interact with the conceptually robust disciplines of cultural and literary studies.' (Introduction)

'This is a book that practicing historians are sure to enjoy and that all writers of biography should read. Its twelve chapters cover the practice of autobiography, biographical introductions to Australian and Canadian “national” historians and to Australian female historians; it also includes research on the personal networks that bound the history departments of Australian universities up to the 1980s, those of American female historians in the interwar years, and the origins of that great national resource, the Australian Dictionary of Biography. There are also two chapters on British historians that offer insights into the intellectual histories of their eras, although Raphael Samuel's great contribution was to educational practice through the influential History Workshop Journal. If this seems a strange combination it is a product of the book's origins in an Australian National University workshop in 2015 which resulted in participants then contributing their papers to this edited collection.'  (Introduction)

'There is a fascination for any historian in understanding what motivates their colleagues; why they chose a particular topic, and how they organise their research. Blainey is as big as they get: there is a remarkable list of his monograph publications at the beginning of this book, more than forty titles. He has dominated Australian history for decades with his steadfastly narrative, succinct style, and hardly a mention of theory. He also pioneered light referencing: usually his books have no footnotes, merely annotated notes at the back that mention the main sources. He does occasionally use footnotes very sparingly, which is not the way most academic historians operate. His style, perfected over seventy years, relates to his beginnings as a freelance historian of mining and industry.' (Introduction)