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While the Great War raged, Australians were twice asked to vote on the question of military conscription for overseas service. The recourse to popular referendum on such an issue at such a time was without precedent anywhere in the world. The campaigns precipitated mass mobilisation, bitter argument, a split in the Labor Party, and the fall of a government. The defeat of the proposals was hailed by some as a victory of democracy over militarism, mourned by others as an expression of political disloyalty or a symptom of failed self-government. But while the memory of the conscription campaigns once loomed large, it has increasingly been overshadowed by a preoccupation with the sacrifice and heroism of Australian soldiers -- a preoccupation that has been reinforced during the centennial commemorations. This volume redresses the balance. Across nine chapters, distinguished scholars consider the origins, unfolding, and consequences of the conscription campaigns, comparing local events with experiences in Britain, the United States, and other countries. A corrective to the militarisation of Australian history, it is also a major new exploration of a unique and defining episode in Australias past.

At a time when the labour-market is failing as a source of security and identity for many, domestic tinkering is emerging as a legitimate occupation in a way we have not seen since pre-industrial times. In Australia, practices of repair, invention, building, improvising and crafting, that take place in sheds, back-yards, paddocks, kitchens and home-workshops, are becoming an important part of the informal economy and social cohesion, complicating distinctions between work and leisure, amateur and professional, production and consumption. Building on the work of historians, sociologists, psychologists and economists, but with a journalists impulse for the currency of her story, Katherine Wilson documents domestic tinkering as an undervalued form of material creativity, social connection, psychological sanctuary, personal identity and even political activism. This book mounts a surprising case for the profound value of domestic tinkering in contemporary Australia.

How Australians fund schooling has been a source of bitter political, social and religious division for almost two hundred years. And it remains so. The latest attempt to resolve the issue has been the Gonski Review, a 2012 report urging all jurisdictions to move towards consensus on a needs-based and socially just education system. The review almost immediately encountered forms of political obstruction that, in their class-based character, have their origins in the Menzies era. By examining the principles, the motives and the means of those who, since Menzies, have fought to develop and maintain a class-based education system at the expense of a broader view of social justice, this book explains how and why Australian education policy remains mired in political controversy.

Barry Hill is a multi-award winning writer of poetry, essays, biography, history, criticism, novels, short stories, libretti and reportage. His major works include Sitting In (1992), a landmark memoir in Labour History; Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (2002), a literary biography and essay in Aboriginal and frontier poetics; and Peacemongers (2014), a pilgrimage book set in India and Japan, and a meditation on 'peace thinking' by the likes of Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi in the years leading up to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Each book has been groundbreaking in different ways: deeply, originally researched, crossing genres, multi-disciplinary, combining the personal with the generically philosophical. As a writer Hills voice is informed by his Australian working-class and militant union background, which has been distilled by his higher education in history and philosophy at the Universities of Melbourne and London. After a decade working as a teacher, educational psychologist and a journalist in Melbourne and London, he has been writing full-time since 1976mainly based in Queenscliff, Victoria, but with stints at the Australia Council flat in Rome, where he finished poetic/dramatic works on Lucian Freud and Antonio Gramsci, and returns to Central Australia. In recent decades he has deepened his studies In Chinese and Japanese, which is in keeping with his long-term interest in Buddhism. Hills voice is unique, and his insight both profoundly important and capable of taking the reader to places not glimpsed before or imagined visible. This collection of essays, reviews and reportage amply demonstrates the quality and enduring importance of Hills contribution, in these genres, to Australian literary and intellectual life.

Australian life has never had a chronicler quite like the Vagabond. Renowned as journalist and eminently unconventional character'', he suffered extremes of poverty and prosperity. These enabled him to record first-hand experiences revealing the degradation of life in the festering slums of the Victorian era. They also enabled him to write convincingly about the emergence of a well-off middle class in the fast-developing colonies. The Vagabond repeatedly shocked newly respectable citizens with his lively reporting of scandalous situations baby farming, harsh conditions in prisons and asylums, savage sporting events, the life of the demi-monde, and pathetic pauper funerals. This selection of the Vagabond''s best work includes a lengthy introduction to the 1969 edition, which attempted to explain the mysteries of his origins and adventures, and the reasons he always used pseudonyms after fleeing from the USA to Australia. Additional material in this edition reveals for the first time the details of his earlier life in Virginia, USA. Here he married the widow of a rich planter, used her money to build a delightful Southern mansion, became a leading light in society, took control of the local bank, and absconded when things went wrong. The rascal managed to redeem himself with his unique work for Australian newspapers, where no-one realised his true identity. A further addition to this volume is a scholarly examination of the Vagabond''s pioneering technique of immersion journalism'', where the reporter becomes part of the story and gives his own observations and opinions.

For much of the twentieth century, the National Council of Women of Australia was the peak body representing women to government in Australia, and through the International Council of Women, to the world. This history of NCWA tells the story of mainstream feminism in Australia, of the long struggle for equality at home and at work which is still far from achieved. In these days when women can no longer be imagined as speaking with one voice, and women as a group have no ready access to government, we still need something of the optimistic vision of the leaders of NCWA. Respectable in hat and gloves to the 1970s and beyond, they politely persisted with the truly radical idea that women the world over should be equal with men.

Not many can boast of careers that lasted successfully for nearly seventy years, but that is what both Googie Withers and John McCallum achieved. Googie portrayed everything from brazen murderesses to Lady Bracknell, taking in blonde nitwits, wartime Resistance workers, lady farmers and Shakespeare along the way. John not only performed memorably in all the acting media but also was a pioneer producer in Australian television sending Skippy into the far corners of the earth the managing director of a huge theatrical firm, and a film director, playwright and author. Just as remarkable was their 62-year marriage, not all that common in the entertainment world, and the way this worked is as fascinating as their varied and prolific careers. There were plenty of disagreements along the way but underlying all was their profound respect for each others work and a kind of love that was essentially complementary. Together, in professional and personal matters alike, an unbeatable combination. Brian McFarlanes biography does justice to this remarkable pair and reads as an absorbing story.

1860. An Aboriginal labourer named Jim Crow is led to the scaffold of the Maitland Gaol in colonial New South Wales. Among the onlookers is the Scotsman AS Hamilton, who will take bizarre steps in the aftermath of the execution to exhume this young man''s skull. Hamilton is a lecturer who travels the Australian colonies teaching phrenology, a popular science that claims character and intellect can be judged from a person''s head. For Hamilton, Jim Crow is an important prize. A century and a half later, researchers at Museum Victoria want to repatriate Jim Crow and other Aboriginal people from Hamilton''s collection of human remains to their respective communities. But their only clues are damaged labels and skulls. With each new find, more questions emerge. Who was Jim Crow? Why was he executed? And how did he end up so far south in Melbourne? In a compelling and original work of history, Alexandra Roginski leads the reader through her extensive research aimed at finding the person within the museum piece. Reconstructing the narrative of a life and a theft, she crafts a case study that elegantly navigates between legal and Aboriginal history, heritage studies and biography. Searching for Jim Crow is a nuanced story about phrenology, a biased legal system, the aspirations of a new museum, and the dilemmas of a theatrical third wife. It is most importantly a tale of two very different men, collector and collected, one of whom can now return home.

Many domains are black and cruelly white. In this book Colin Tatz, a world authority on racial conflict and abuse, a key figure in Indigenous Studies in Australia and an author of major works on genocide, Aboriginal youth suicide, and Aboriginal and Islander sporting achievements, tells his personal story. Born and educated in South Africa, Tatz worked to expose and oppose that nation''s centuries-old apartheid regimes before leaving for what he thought would be a more enlightened nation, only to find in Australia striking parallels of that other dismal universe. As a researcher, writer and activist he has dedicated his life to confronting what people do to other people on the basis of their race or ethnicity, but relates here also how alienation, his Jewishness and an intriguing problem with food have been, for him, propelling forces. Tatz''s story, ranging from Southern Africa to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Israel, is an important one for anyone genuinely interested in the struggle to achieve social justice for minorities and marginalised peoples.

Minor parties have come a long way in Australia. From an era where there were no minor parties in the national parliament, they have become crucial players in shaping government policy and the political debate. This book charts the rise of minor parties in the Australian Senate since the end of the Second World War and constructs an analytical framework to explain how they became the powerful actors they are today. It shows that there has been a change in the type of minor party elected. Rather than be created as a result of a split in a major party, newer minor parties have been mobilised by broad social movements with the aim of advancing specific policy agendas. By shedding light on these parties, the book shows how minor parties have impacted the Australian political system and how they look set to remain an important component of governance in the future.