Cirrus@Austlit

'Four Centuries of a British-Australian Family

'A great-aunt's bequest - a 200-year-old grandfather clock - sends historian Graeme Davison on a journey deep into his father's family's past. From their tribal homeland in the Scottish Borders he follows them to the garrison town of Carlisle, from industrial Birmingham to Edwardian Australia, and from the Great War to his own suburban childhood. This is the story of an ordinary family's journey from frontier warfare and dispossession through economic turmoil and emigration to modest prosperity. At each step, we are led to reflect on the puzzles of personal identity and the mystery of time. Based on a lifetime of creative scholarship, My Grandfather's Clock is a moving testament to the power of family history to illuminate the present.' (Publication summary)

'Why should we read Hugh Stretton in the twenty-first century?'

'A public intellectual known for his deeply humane approach to social, economic and urban issues, Hugh Stretton was an Australian original.

'His Political Sciences was described by The Times Literary Supplement as 'a work of near genius'. His groundbreaking Ideas for Australian Cities became the manifesto for a generation awakening to the distinctive features of our cities and suburbs.

'In this selection, leading historian Graeme Davison includes highlights from these and other published and unpublished works, showcasing Stretton's bravura intellectual style, grounded analysis, literary flair and the remarkable range of his thinking on history, politics, urban planning, and progressive social and economic development. Davison also provides a substantial and valuable introduction, setting the work in context.

'Stretton saw the dangers of the neoliberal orthodoxy that took hold in the Anglophone world from the early 1980s. With subtlety, imagination and rigour, his work offers an alternative vision of a good and fair society.' (Publication summary)

'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)

'These words, spoken by an old Aboriginal man to the anthropologist WEH Stanner more than six decades ago, still resonate in the Australian imagination. There is pity in the speaker's words and wistfulness in Stanner's as he recalls them. In following his own road, the white man has missed a better way: the mysterious Aboriginal man's knowledge he called 'Dreaming'. Dreaming, Stanner explains in his famous essay of the same name, is not just a mythical world located in a distant past, but a living force that operates in the here and now. It defies the pervasive binaries of Western thought -present/ past, nature/culture, sacred/profane - testifying instead to a deep 'abidingness' manifest in the intimate relationship between Indigenous people and their land. 'No English words are good enough to give a sense of the link between an Aboriginal group and its homeland,' Stanner later wrote in 'The Dreaming and Other Essays' (Black Inc., 2009). The Dreaming expresses a belonging beyond the white man's ability to understand or attain.' (Publication abstract)

'Published fifty years ago, The Tyranny of Distance changed the way we see Australia, writes Graeme Davison'

'I became an urban historian because I believed that our cities deserved more of our curiosity and idealism.

'City Dreamers restores Australian cities, and those who created them, to their rightful place in the national imagination. Building on a lifetime’s work, Graeme Davison views Australian history, from 1788 to the present day, through the eyes of city dreamers – such as Henry Lawson, Charles Bean and 'Hugh Stretton – and others who have helped make the cities we inhabit. Davison looks at significant individuals or groups that he calls snobs, slummers, pessimists, exodists, suburbans and anti-suburbans – and argues that there’s a particular twist to the ways in which Australians think about cities. And the way we live in them.

'This extraordinary book excavates the cultural history of the Australian city by focusing on ‘dreamers’, those who battle to make and re-make our cities. It reminds us that for most of us the city is home, and it is there that we find belonging.' (Publication summary)

'Through the lives of two generations of his forebears, one of Australia's most respected historians tells the story of English free settlers arriving in the mid-19th century: the miners, millers, storekeepers, free selectors and railwaymen who built the Australia we know today.

''I did not look for skeletons in my family's cupboard, but once the cupboard was open, they simply fell out.'

'A widow and her eight older children are uprooted from their Hampshire farm in 1850, and thrown together on an emigrant ship with 38 distressed needlewomen from London. How they came to be on the boat, and what happened on the high seas and afterwards in Australia, is a vivid tale of family ambitions and fears, successes and catastrophes.

'In Lost Relations, historian Graeme Davison follows in his family's footsteps, from the picture-postcard village of Newnham to a prison cell in Maitland, from a London slum to a miner's tent in Castlemaine. He takes us back into worlds now largely forgotten, of water-powered mills, free selectors and Methodist evangelists. The Hewetts were not famous or distinguished, but their story reveals much about the foundations of Australia.' (Publication summary)

'From its beginnings, Monash has been a "university in a hurry". Born on the suburban fringe of Melbourne, it reached outwards rather than gazed inwards. Over its five decades it embraced the challenges of the age of Sputnik, became a hotbed of student radicalism, then took an equally radical turn towards market capitalism to become Australia's largest and most international university, with branches in Italy, Malaysia and South Africa.

'Its movers and shakers included visionary vice-chancellor Louis Matheson, biologist and stirrer Jock Marshall, Australia's third woman professor Maureen Brunt, historian Ian Turner, student politicians Albert Langer and Peter Costello, writers Don Watson and David Williamson, IVF pioneer Carl Wood, philosopher Peter Singer, broadcaster Jon Faine, buccaneering vice-chancellor Mal Logan and his ill-fated successor, David Robinson.

'The Monash story shows how universities have transformed Australia since the 1960s. Based on extensive interviews with staff and students, and heavily illustrated, this is a warts-and-all portrait of a great Australian institution.' (From the publisher's website.)

'With a new preface and epilogue and a collection of picture essays by contemporary writers, this updated edition explores the economic, political, social, and cultural consequences of the economic rise and fall of Melbourne during the 1880s.' (Publication summary, 2005 edition)