Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 [Review] Under the Rainbow : The Life and Times of EW Cole
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Many Australians know of E.W. Cole (1832–1918) from Cole's Funny Picture Book, first published in 1879 and followed by new editions, reissues and reprints into the 1990s. But the afterlife of Cole's career amounts to more than memories of childhood reading. Richard Broinowski's Under the Rainbow: The Life and Times of EW Cole takes an expansive view of Cole's life in a thorough and engaging biography which tells the story of Cole's success as a marketer and entrepreneur, and provides insights into the convictions that energised him. Prominent among these was his passionate rejection of the White Australia Policy, which found expression in pamphlets, public addresses and his three-month visit to Japan in 1903. Under the Rainbow is a strikingly handsome book with many judiciously-chosen visual images.'  (Introduction)

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    y separately published work icon Australian Historical Studies vol. 53 no. 4 2022 25494069 2022 periodical issue

    'At the end of the last century, Ann Curthoys outlined the history of ‘two distinct yet connected public and intellectual debates concerning the significance of descent, belonging and culture’ in Australia. The first revolved ‘around the cleavage between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples’, and especially the issue of how to grapple with the lingering effects of past colonialisms. The second centred on immigration and the challenge migrants – particularly non-Anglo migrants – have presented to Australian society at large. Curthoys argued that in public commentary and within numerous scholarly fields, including history, these debates were kept largely separate until the 1988 Bicentenary and its celebration of multicultural Australia, which included Indigenous people amongst the country’s broader diversity. Pauline Hanson’s ascendancy to Federal Parliament in 1996 pushed these debates into ‘uneasy conversation’ with each other as her public rhetoric frequently attacked both Indigenous people and migrants from Asia as groups who, in her view, were unable to assimilate. Curthoys argued that the two debates ‘can neither be conceptualised together nor maintained as fully distinct’, but rather must be situated within an understanding of Australia as a ‘society which is colonising and decolonising at the same time’. ‘All non-Indigenous people, recent immigrants and descendants of immigrants alike’, wrote Curthoys, ‘are beneficiaries of a colonial history. We share the situation of living on someone else’s land’. (Editorial introduction)

    2022
    pg. 661-662
Last amended 1 Dec 2022 11:43:43
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