Bob Reece

Bob Reece was Professor in History at Murdoch University, Western Australia, and co-author (with Rob Pascoe) of A Place of Consequence: A Pictorial History of Fremantle (1982).

Bob Reece reviews ‘Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, normalise, exit Aboriginal Australia’ edited by Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson

March 2008, no. 299 • 01 March 2008

A remarkable feature of this book is that its thirty essays were commissioned, written, edited and printed for distribution within four months of the Howard government’s declaration on 21 June 2007 of an emergency in the Northern Territory. Seldom can there have been such a rapid and comprehensive set of responses to a major federal government policy initiative, bearing as it did all the signs o ... (read more)

Bob Reece reviews 'First Fleet to Federation: Irish supremacy in colonial Australia' by Jarlath Ronayne

December 2002-January 2003, no. 247 • 01 December 2002

It was inevitable, sooner or later, someone would write a book celebrating the achievements of the Protestant Irish in Australia. Books commemorating the part played by the Catholic Irish culminated in Patrick O’Farrell’s ambit claim that they were responsible for just about everything we like to think of (or used to think of) as being distinctively Australian. Now Professor Jarlath Ronayne ha ... (read more)

'How Fremantle's first newspaper was hoaxed' by Bob Reece

October 2006, no. 285 • 01 October 2006

Fremantle’s first real newspaper, The Herald, saw the light of day in a building on the corner of Cliff and High Streets on Saturday, 2 February 1867. The brainchild of two ex-convicts, James Pearce and William Beresford, it soon became the main voice of opposition to colonial autocracy, as well as the voice of Fremantle itself. William de la Poer Beresford (to give him his full aristocratic nam ... (read more)