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Australian History

Australian Catholic Lives by Edmund Campion

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June-July 2015, no. 372
Simon Caterson reviews 'Australian Catholic Lives' by Edmund Campion

‘Most history is simply lost.’ By means of a regular biographical column in the Jesuit magazine Madonna published over the past twenty-five years, Father Edmund Campion has preserved pieces of Australian personal history that might otherwise have been neglected, if not forgotten altogether. In this, the author’s second collection of biographical sketche ...

Trendyville: The Battle for Australia's inner cities by Renate Howe, David Nichols, and Graeme Davison

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June-July 2015, no. 372
Frank Bongiorno reviews 'Trendyville' by Renate Howe, David Nichols, and Graeme Davison

In the Melbourne suburb where I spent my childhood, a café was a place where ethnic men played cards and backgammon, puffed on cigarettes, and looked up from time to time to watch through the window the passing parade on the footpath outside. Now, when I return to Northcote, I am often served in hip cafés by boyish men with Ned Kelly beards and stylishly informal ...

Reading Australia: 'For the Term of His Natural Life' by Marcus Clarke

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Reading Australia

In his essay ‘The Fiction Fields of Australia’ (1856), Frederick Sinnett conducts an inquiry ‘into the feasibility of writing Australian novels; or, to use other words, into the suitability of Australian life and scenery for the novel writers’ purpose and, secondly, into the right manner of their treatment’.

Lost Relations: Fortunes of My Family in Australia's Golden Age by Graeme Davison

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June-July 2015, no. 372
John Thompson reviews 'Lost Relations' by Graeme Davison

Clear-eyed, unsentimental, but compassionate, with a nicely honed flair for story-telling, Graeme Davison is one of Australia’s master historians. Now Emeritus Professor of History at Monash University, his early training was in R.M. Crawford’s so-called Melbourne History School, where it was simply assumed that books would be written. Crawford’s department at ...

Bearing Witness: The Remarkable Life of Charles Bean, Australia's Greatest War Correspondent by Peter Rees

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June-July 2015, no. 372
Geoffrey Blainey reviews 'Bearing Witness' by Peter Rees

Charles Bean is now seen as one of the classiest journalists and historians Australia has produced. Like many talented historians, he had no prior training in his craft, except as a war correspondent during World War I, when he wrote in the face of daily and nightly dangers such as most war journalists no longer have to confront.

I have the strong impression ...

Tony Birch on 'The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith' by Thomas Keneally for Reading Australia

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June-July 2015, no. 372

Thomas Keneally’s novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) is based in part on historical events, particularly the crimes committed by Jimmy Governor, an Aboriginal man from New South Wales. In 1900, Governor was a key figure involved in the killing of nine Europeans, including five women and children. The killings followed Governor’s marriage t ...

Deadline Gallipoli

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14 April 2015

If ever there were to be an exception to Winston Churchill’s military aphorism, ‘History is written by the victors’, the Anzac story would make a promising candidate. One doubts that those on the ground at Gallipoli would consider themselves victors. Yet here we are, one hundred years on, celebrating the Anzac tradition with mo ...

Incognita: The Invention and Discovery of Terra Australis by G.A. Mawer

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April 2015, no. 370
Paul Giles reviews 'Incognita' by G.A. Mawer

As the author explains in his preface, Incognita had its genesis in events to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the voyages of Janszoon and Torres to the Cape York Peninsula in 1606, with the explorations of these Dutch mariners representing the first European sighting of Australia. This book has been several years in the making, and it offers an ...

Mannix by Brenda Niall

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April 2015, no. 370
Simon Caterson reviews 'Mannix' by Brenda Niall

With her long-awaited life of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, Brenda Niall, one of Australia’s leading biographers, has conquered a subject that for decades she regarded as compelling yet ‘intractable’. ‘As a presence (I wouldn’t claim such a remote and magisterial being as a neighbour) Daniel Mannix was part of my childhood,’ Niall recalls. She grew up in the ...

Oddfellows by Nicholas Shakespeare

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March 2015, no. 369
Jane Sullivan reviews 'Oddfellows' by Nicholas Shakespeare

Two aggrieved Islamic men follow a foreign cause and wage jihad on their fellow Australians. Shouting Allahu akbar, they stage an ambush, raise a home-made flag and open fire on hundreds of men, women and children. They escape and die in a final shoot-out. They leave four dead and seven wounded.

It could be ripped from today’s headlines – except it happened a hundred years ago. On New Year’s Day in 1915, Gul Mehmet and Molla Abdullah, denizens of Ghantown, the despised Afghan settlement on the outskirts of Broken Hill, took up arms against the town’s citizens as they rode the train to the annual Oddfellows picnic. They did so in the name of the Turkish Sultan, who was calling for resistance to the Anzac invaders in their home territory.

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