Canberra
Cathy Goes to Canberra: Doing politics differently by Cathy McGowan
The Insider: The scoops, the scandals and the serious business within the Canberra bubble by Christopher Pyne
Canberra by Paul Daley & The Invisible Thread: One Hundred Years of Words edited by Irma Gold
Canberry Tales: An Informal History by Granville Allen Mawer
Every day for the past few months, the Sydney linguist Michael Walsh has been sitting in the Mitchell Library poring over old manuscripts. He is extracting old wordlists of Aboriginal languages from the library’s rich collection of early British settler diaries, missionary field notes, and unpublished historical documents for a project funded by the State Library of New South Wales and Rio Tinto. This week, Michael sent me twelve scanned pages of a leather-bound diary he discovered which belonged to Richard Tester, who had recorded his daily adventures in 1860, travelling overland from Kerkaraboo on the Wakefield River to Melbourne and the goldfields.
... (read more)In his Canberra 1913–1950 Jim Gibbney summarises the indecisions which accompanied the establishment of a site for Canberra around the turn of the century. When finally, in December 1908, Yass-Canberra was decreed the Seat of Government, it brought to a close nearly two decades of hesitation – at least Australia knew where the Federal Capital was to be situated, if not what kind of city it was to be.
... (read more)I saw an elderly, quite famous poet sitting all forlorn on a large boulder, neither quite inside a lecture room nor quite outside on the leafy lawn.
Her location, and the droop of her shoulders said, See, I am alone. I knew her, I had taken her once on a short publicity round in Sydney, years ago: should I stop and say, Remember me? Remember that book you wrote, how we thought it might change things, and perhaps it has.
... (read more)