'Several articles in this issue focus on cities – in particular Melbourne and Sydney, the two largest capitals. That cities may be considered as gendered spaces is Shurlee Swain’s starting point. In both cities, female workers – mistresses of boarding houses, midwives and nurses – made places (‘gynocentric zones’) in which to dispose of ‘the unwanted products of women’s bodies’. Swain’s study ingeniously brings together two databases: about babies born at Melbourne’s Women’s Hospital (compiled by Janet McCalman), and about newspaper advertisements for adoption (compiled by Swain herself). As she shows, by locating their work close to public maternity hospitals, and yet remaining ‘invisible, unacknowledged’, these working women contributed to each city’s aura of ‘respectability’.' (Editorial introduction)
'Black, White and Exempt is an edited collection of insightful and innovative chapters, examining an underexplored aspect of the system that controlled Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for much of the twentieth century. Beginning with Queensland in 1897, state-based Protection regimes introduced exemption clauses into the Acts which enabled segregation and micro-management of Indigenous life. Under these clauses, Indigenous people could appeal to authorities to obtain a formal legal status which, in theory, allowed them to escape from racist prohibitions on access to public spaces and citizenship rights.' (Introduction)
'A successful biography gives the reader much more than an insight into the life of the protagonist. The subject of Too Much Jesus Christ and Cabbage: Australia’s ‘Mission Girl’ Annie Lock is an intriguing character, a missionary who works alone in the desert ministering to impoverished, displaced Aboriginal people. What we learn from Catherine Bishop’s biography about early twentieth-century central Australian society is at least as important as what we learn about the protagonist.'(Introduction)
'Eleanor Hogan’s Into the Loneliness is a detailed and engaging biographical work. It will be of great interest to academic and professional historians – and members of the wider public – concerned with twentieth-century Australian cultural history and the settler-colonial inheritance in (and beyond) Australia. As well as being an important addition to the literature on Daisy Bates, Hogan’s book makes two other, major contributions: it represents the most comprehensive piece of biographical research on journalist and travel writer, Ernestine Hill; it is also the most thoroughgoing appraisal of the nature, circumstances and products of the collaboration between Bates and Hill (which produced the ‘My Natives and I’ articles and The Passing of the Aborigines).' (Introduction)
'William Cooper is an icon in the Koorie and Victorian communities. However, while Cooper wrote much in a public way in his later life, he left few private papers. Arthur Phillip, iconic in settler history, was the same, writing much official correspondence but leaving few private writings to assist a biographer. Just as Alan Frost did in Arthur Phillip, 1738–1814: His Voyaging (1987), Bain Attwood in this engaging life story writes about Cooper through the contexts in which he moved, particularly when few other traces of his life remain. Attwood also argues this is more appropriate for an Aboriginal story, of a life so lived in a community.'(Introduction)
'Collectors are particular kinds of people; Sir Russell Grimwade (1879–1955) was no exception. For twenty-five years, he carried a handwritten list in his wallet: ‘West Engravings 1813–14 Missing Numbers’, referring to an obscure print series, Absalom West’s Views of Sydney and Surrounds. These are the first landscape engravings produced in the colony of New South Wales in 1813–14. Grimwade’s list (May 1930) is of thirteen of the twenty-four prints, known by number, still to be collected. As each one was acquired, it was crossed off. This small archival fragment gives an insight into how Grimwade, a collector of Australiana, operated. He was Melbourne’s version of Sydney’s famed David Scott Mitchell and William Dixon. Grimwade’s extraordinary collection is of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books, prints, watercolours, drawings, photographs, maps and other objects amassed between c.1920 and 1955. His wife Mab (Lady Grimwade) added a few contemporary paintings after he died, and in 1973, following Lady Grimwade’s death, their home Miegunyah and its contents were bequeathed to the University of Melbourne. This is what is known as the Grimwade collection. It is vast and includes 100 volumes held in Special Collections and 700 artworks in the University’s Art Collection. Pride of Place: Exploring the Grimwade Collection turns the microscope on selected items in this collection.' (Introduction)
'The examination of the history of economic thought is a critical element in building our understanding of history as well as of prospective policy prescriptions. Not only does this understanding allow us to appreciate the intent and rationality of economic prescriptions in times gone by, but it also allows us assess their efficacy and relevance today. This is a common and logical defence of the study of history generally, to be sure, but no less relevant for being so.' (Introduction)
'This edited work is a welcome exploration of one of the most prominent developments of late-Victorian Christian liberalism in Australia prior to the disintegration of liberalism’s optimism about human potentiality in the suffering and slaughter of World War I. Within the Protestant churches of continental Europe, Britain and the United States, theological liberalism placed an emphasis on Christianity as an ethical and social justice religion, and downplayed the importance of doctrine and creeds, in an optimism about human potential created by the discoveries of empirical science. During the period covered by the book, Melbourne had a good claim to be the intellectual centre of a burgeoning Australia, which included the advent of Protestant Liberalism in the foundation of the Australian Church in 1885 through its instigator and theologian, the Reverend Charles Strong. The name chosen for this breakaway congregation from Victorian Presbyterianism – the Australian Church – also points to the influence of a new Australian nationalism following federation of the Australian colonies in 1901. These themes – Protestant Liberalism and nationalism – are explored in various ways in contributions to the book.' (Introduction)
