Cirrus@Austlit

'Rage and roar are two words commonly used to describe the events of Monday 15 March, when tens of thousands joined the March4Justice: the emotional rage fuelling the protests; the roar of angry shouting voices raised against the treatment of women.' (Introduction)

'Bob Hawke once said that Don Dunstan was Australia's most influential Australian politician. This is the first comprehensive biography of Dunstan, the transformative and muchloved former Premier of South Australia from 1967–68 and 1970–79. He was a larger than life character and, unlike most state premiers, had a huge national profile. People still remember Dunstan for his pink shorts and championing of sexual rights, but his impact was much wider than this. Against stiff opposition from Adelaide's conservative establishment, he pioneered legislation of Aboriginal land rights and consumer protection laws, abolished the death penalty, relaxed censorship and drinking laws, and decriminalised homosexuality. He is recognised for his role in reinvigorating the social, artistic and cultural life of South Australia during his nine years in office, remembered as the 'Dunstan Decade'.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'When Gough Whitlam appointed Elizabeth Reid in 1973, she was the first Women’s Adviser to a head of government anywhere. But the idea took off quickly across Australia. Between 1976 and 1986 all seven Australian states and territories appointed women’s advisers. In South Australia, in April 1976 the influential, reforming ALP Premier Don Dunstan appointed Deborah McCulloch as his Women’s Adviser; the third appointed at the state level following Victoria and Tasmania. This article draws on oral history interviews with McCulloch to assess what being South Australia’s first Women’s Adviser meant; and what both McCulloch and Dunstan considered her (and his) major achievements. It also looks briefly at several key women in Dunstan’s life who influenced his views. If Dunstan was slow to prioritize women’s rights, in some areas, such as the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, SA led the way and the Commonwealth followed in 1984. Dunstan came to see women’s rights as ‘the challenge of social democracy,’ whereas McCulloch took great satisfaction in improving women’s lives. McCulloch went beyond her brief to focus on the public service, to provide innovative social services to all women. We can see too the significance of networking amongst femocrats, particularly among women’s advisers.' (Introduction)

'The 1820s to the 1860s were a foundational period in Australian history, arguably at least as important as Federation. Industrialization was transforming Britain, but the southern colonies were pre-industrial, with economies driven by pastoralism, agriculture, mining, whaling and sealing, commerce, and the construction trades. Convict transportation provided the labour on which the first settlements depended before it was brought to a staggered end, first in New South Wales in 1840 and last in Western Australia in 1868.

'The numbers of free settlers rose dramatically, surging from the 1820s and again during the 1850s gold rushes. The convict system increasingly included assignment to private masters and mistresses, thus offering settlers the inducement of unpaid labourers as well as the availability of land on a scale that both defied and excited the British imagination. By the 1830s schemes for new kinds of colonies, based on Edward Gibbon Wakefield's systematic colonization, gained attention and support. The pivotal development of the 1840s-1850s, and the political events which form the backbone of this story were the Australian colonies' gradual attainment of representative and then responsible government.

'Through political struggle and negotiation, in which Australians looked to Canada for their model of political progress, settlers slowly became self-governing. But these political developments were linked to the frontier violence that shaped settlers' lives and became accepted as part of respectable manhood. With narratives of individual lives, Settler Society shows that women's exclusion from political citizenship was vigorously debated, and that settlers were well aware of their place in an empire based on racial hierarchies and threatened by revolts. Angela Woollacott particularly focuses on settlers' dependence in these decades on intertwined categories of unfree labour, including poorly-compensated Aborigines and indentured Indian and Chinese labourers, alongside convicts.' [publisher's summary]

'Annette Kellerman, Rose Quong and Merle Oberon were internationally successful 'Australian' performers of the first half of the twentieth century.

'Kellerman was a swimmer, diver, lecturer, and silent-film star, Quong an actor, lecturer and writer who forged a career in London and New York, and Oberon one of the most celebrated film stars of the 1930s and 1940s, first in London and then Hollywood.

'Through her international vaudeville performances and film roles, Kellerman played with the quasi-racial identity of South Sea Islander. Quong built a career based on her own body, through a careful appropriation of Orientalism. Her body was the signifier of her Chinese authenticity, the essentialist foundation for her constructed, diasporic Chinese identity. The official story of Oberon's origins was that she was Tasmanian. However, this was a publicity story concocted at the beginning of her film career to mask her lower-class, Anglo-Indian birth. Despite anxious undercurrents about her exoticism, Australians were thrilled to claim a true Hollywood star as one of their own.

'These three women performers created newly modern, racially ambiguous Australian femininities. Racial thinking was at the core of White Australian culture: far from being oblivious to racial hierarchies and constructions, Australians engaged with them on an everyday basis. Around the world, "Australian" stars represented a white-settler nation, a culture in which white privilege was entrenched, during a period replete with legal forms of discrimination based on race.

'The complex meanings attached to three successful "Australian" performers in this period of highly articulated racism thus become a popular cultural archive we can investigate to learn more about contemporary connections between race, exoticism and gender on the global stage and screen.' (From the publisher's website.)

Australian lives are intricately enmeshed with the world, bound by ties of allegiance and affinity, intellect and imagination. In Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, an eclectic mix of scholars—historians, literary critics, and museologists—trace the flow of people that helped shape Australia’s distinctive character and the flow of ideas that connected Australians to a global community of thought. It shows how biography, and the study of life stories, can contribute greatly to our understanding of such patterns of connection and explores how transnationalism can test biography’s limits as an intellectual, professional and commercial practice.' (Publisher's blurb)

'I suspect that there are many questions that could be posed about the significance of the 1950s as context for Ward's conceptualisation of the 'noble bushman'. As others have noted, the idea of an 'Australian legend' percolated across the decade, and Ward was not the first to use the term. Max Crawford first coined the term 'Australian legend' in 1952, and in 1954 Vance Palmer published The Legend of the Nineties.3 Ward's great contribution was to articulate the mythology so movingly and to seek to ground it in nineteenthcentury Australian history. There are multiple aspects of the 1950s that could be explored as relevant from the post-1942 realignment of Australia's military alliance; the developing Cold War; the hegemony of political Conservatism here; the economic significance of the wool industry; and the quest to understand Australian culture in a post-war world. How did these aspects of the political context feed into Ward's thinking, beyond the perhaps obvious influence of his Marxism?'

Source: Article abstract.

'The story of Rose Quong (1879-1972) reveals how an Australian learned to use the pervasive Orientalism of the early twentieth century to her own ends. Quong claimed an essential ability to interpret Chinese culture, forging a career out of lecturing and writing on Chinese literature and traditions, and performing her own Chineseness. She juggled her mixed Australian, British and Chinese heritage in both London and New York, showing the plasticity and transportability of ethnic identities. Quong's story points to the role of London as imperial metropolis in the staging of an Australian's transnational career, even for an Australian whose imaginary homeland was China. The fact that Quong was embraced by the Australian community in London adds a new perspective on White Australia, even though that community was instrumental in steering her towards Chineseness and Orientalism.'

Source: Abstract.