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Beverley Kingston
Beverley Kingston’s publications included A History of New South Wales (2006).
According to Peter Rees’s introduction to The Other Anzacs, ‘at least 2498 nurses’ served overseas with the Australian Army Nursing Service during World War I, with about 720 in other units raised in Britain or privately sponsored. There were ‘at least 610 nurses’ in the New Zealand Army Nursing Service, and perhaps another 100 overseas. The criteria for acceptance were high. Nurses were ... (read more)
In 1881 Charles O’Neill abandoned a career in New Zealand and moved to Sydney, settling in The Rocks, close to the Marist fathers at St Patrick’s on Church Hill. Soon he had gathered about him a group of men keen to do something about the poverty they saw around them under the name of the Society of St Vincent de Paul. O’Neill was then in his early fifties, having been born in 1828 in Dumbar ... (read more)
Written by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, of Macquarie University, this is essentially a text for both students and teachers studying ‘historiography’, which, according to my dictionary, is writing about history, rather than historians ‘making’ history, as is sometimes said here. Enthusiasm for the first edition of Fifty Key Thinkers on History (2000) has brought forth this new edition and shif ... (read more)
In 1995 Robert Birrell gave us an interesting book called A Nation of Our Own: Citizenship and nation-building in federated Australia. It traced the growth of a nationalist consciousness in the 1890s and the translation of that Australian nationalism into the forms of Federation and the early shape of the Australian Commonwealth. He argued that there was something distinctively Australian about th ... (read more)
The cover of Judith Godden’s biography of Lucy Osburn, the founder of modern nursing in Australia, is dominated by a ghostly white statuette of Florence Nightingale. Lucy herself appears in a bottom corner, photographed with a book in hand, an insignificant figure dressed in black silk, with a white cap over a severe hairstyle. At times, it seems as if Nightingale is going to overshadow the book ... (read more)
Over 35,000 copies of the hardback edition of Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop’s war diaries had been sold before they were reissued in paperback. Now Sue Ebury, who edited those diaries for publication, has written an accompanying ‘Life’. An impish picture of the older Weary in a sportscoat looking rather smaller than he really was grins beneath his name written in gold on a red silk background. I ... (read more)
There were no winners in the first round of the Orr Case. Sydney Sparkes Orr lost his job as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania in 1955. Suzanne Kemp, who had accused him of seduction, lost her reputation. Her father, who had supported her accusations, was subjected to all manner of speculation and innuendo. Edwin Tanner, a mature-age student who had complained about Orr’s poo ... (read more)
According to the back cover: ‘This book explores the way common conversation matters … that during the last two hundred years we have been beguiled by reading and writing. Only during the last part of the twentieth century have we begun to remember the importance of speech as a source of truth in human affairs.’ It could also be noted that the seven essays collected here began as lectures, s ... (read more)
An earlier version of this history of Victoria first appeared in 1984 as Our Side of the Country. Though for the past sixteen years Sydney-born politicians Paul Keating and John Howard have usurped Victoria’s former almost constant ‘top position’ in Canberra, the possessive pride reflected in that early title still runs through this modern version. Wondering how such a small state could exer ... (read more)