Australian Rare Books 1788-1900


Book Description

This book is a demonstration of the richness, worth and vitality of Australian documentary record. At the same time, it is an introduction to collecting Australiana for those who, if not already bitten by the book bug, have been dangerously exposed to it. Readers who are immune to the attractions of collecting but who value our past and its books will also find something to interest them in the following pages.




Everywhen


Book Description

Everywhen is a groundbreaking collection about diverse ways of conceiving, knowing, and narrating time and deep history. Looking beyond the linear documentary past of Western or academic history, this collection asks how knowledge systems of Australia’s Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders can broaden our understandings of the past and of historical practice. Indigenous embodied practices for knowing, narrating, and reenacting the past in the present blur the distinctions of linear time, making all history now. Ultimately, questions of time and language are questions of Indigenous sovereignty. The Australian case is especially pertinent because Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are among the few Native peoples without a treaty with their colonizers. Appreciating First Nations’ time concepts embedded in languages and practices, as Everywhen does, is a route to recognizing diverse forms of Indigenous sovereignties. Everywhen makes three major contributions. The first is a concentration on language, both as a means of knowing and transmitting the past across generations and as a vital, albeit long-overlooked source material for historical investigation, to reveal how many Native people maintained and continue to maintain ancient traditions and identities through language. Everywhen also considers Indigenous practices of history, or knowing the past, that stretch back more than sixty thousand years; these Indigenous epistemologies might indeed challenge those of the academy. Finally, the volume explores ways of conceiving time across disciplinary boundaries and across cultures, revealing how the experience of time itself is mediated by embodied practices and disciplinary norms. Everywhen brings Indigenous knowledges to bear on the study and meaning of the past and of history itself. It seeks to draw attention to every when, arguing that Native time concepts and practices are vital to understanding Native histories and, further, that they may offer a new framework for history as practiced in the Western academy.




The First Fleet Piano: Volume One


Book Description

During the late eighteenth century, a musical–cultural phenomenon swept the globe. The English square piano—invented in the early 1760s by an entrepreneurial German guitar maker in London—not only became an indispensable part of social life, but also inspired the creation of an expressive and scintillating repertoire. Square pianos reinforced music as life’s counterpoint, and were played by royalty, by musicians of the highest calibre and by aspiring amateurs alike. On Sunday, 13 May 1787, a square piano departed from Portsmouth on board the Sirius, the flagship of the First Fleet, bound for Botany Bay. Who made the First Fleet piano, and when was it made? Who owned it? Who played it, and who listened? What music did the instrument sound out, and within what contexts was its voice heard? What became of the First Fleet piano after its arrival on antipodean soil, and who played a part in the instrument’s subsequent history? Two extant instruments contend for the title ‘First Fleet piano’; which of these made the epic journey to Botany Bay in 1787–88? The First Fleet Piano: A Musician’s View answers these questions, and provides tantalising glimpses of social and cultural life both in Georgian England and in the early colony at Sydney Cove. The First Fleet piano is placed within the musical and social contexts for which it was created, and narratives of the individuals whose lives have been touched by the instrument are woven together into an account of the First Fleet piano’s conjunction with the forces of history. View ‘The First Fleet Piano: Volume Two Appendices’. Note: Volume 1 and 2 are sold as a set ($180 for both) and cannot be purchased separately.




The Australian Zoologist


Book Description

Vols. 1-7 and 16 include reports and proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales for 1913-1932/33 and 1969/70.




The Sounds of Aurora Australis


Book Description

Entrenched until recently in Western aesthetics, Australian composers are now developing a functional cultural identity expressed through a distinctly nationalistic musical idiom. Its ongoing formation, inspired by Australias Aboriginal heritage and unique natural environment, seeks to distance the nations artistic developments from the geographically remote Occidental regions and emphasize its native cultures. Presently, however, mounting sociopolitical and ethical concerns surrounding the cultural borrowing between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are problematizing the developing nationalistic idiom, as composers must determine whether the two groups share any legitimate connection beyond mere occupation of the same land, given their tense post-colonial history. Musicologist Beatrice Dalov traces the formation of the Southern Lands cultural identity while simultaneously considering its complex relationship with the nations First Peoples. She illuminates the origins, influences, and developments of Australian art music, from colonization (late eighteenth century) to the present day, interweaving the social, cultural, political, and economic forces that shaped (and often determined) its evolution. The history demonstrates that the complex processes of articulating a unique cultural identity began almost immediately after arrival of the first colonists and continues uninterrupted through today. Drawing on newly available archival material, key works, and personally conducted interviews with numerous contemporary composers, Dalov traces the history of the lands music, from scattered convict settlements and eventful contacts with Aboriginal peoples, to the formation of a national musical infrastructure, to todays thriving musical independence. She brings forward not only the most prominent composers and musicians of the last century, but also those who laid a crucial foundation and offered the first contributions toward a national idiom. A comprehensive history of the music of the Great Southern Land has been too long neglected by social historians and musicologists worldwide. Beatrice Dalov sets the record straight.




The A to Z of the Discovery and Exploration of Australia


Book Description

This engaging reference examines the history of, the search for, and the discovery of Australia, taking full account of the evidence for and the speculation surrounding possible earlier contacts by the Ancient Egyptians, Arabs, and Chinese seamen. Day brings the expeditions to life, expressing the desires that drove great sea captains deeper into turbulent waters searching for caches of spice, silks, and precious metals. Covers a wide variety of topics, including _ Seamen from eight nations _ The recovery of storm wrecked ships _ Diplomatic treaties _ Priority of discovery disputes _ Military and civil explorers and surveyors _ Topographical features _ Geographical terms and places _ Rivers and river system




European Discovery and Exploration of Australia


Book Description

The map of Australia abounds with fascinating geographical place-names, the origins of which have, for long, been hidden in the journals of our early explorers. Now after nine years of research, Erwin Feeken, a highly qualified cartographer, and his wife, Gerda, have finalised the first complete record of Australian geographical place-names and the most comprehensive general reference work on Australian exploration ever published. In European Discovery and Exploration of Australia, there are twenty-three beautifully drawn four-colour maps plus index showing the routes of more than 120 explorers with the locality of their named features numbered to accord with a Key to the Maps. The place-names in the Key have been numbered approximately in chronological order of their naming, though places found during a single expedition have been grouped together. There is also a gazetteer containing over four thousand place-names alphabetically arranged with notes on their origins. The map reference numbers (in brackets) form a cross-reference with the Key to the Maps. The work is introduced by a foreword from Lord Casey and an essay on the nature of Australian exploration by Professor O. H. K. Spate, director of the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. The text, comprising a survey of Australian exploration, is arranged in the form of biographies of the explorers (describing, for the first time, several almost unknown figures) with emphasis on their expeditions and under the following headings: “The Approach to Australia”; “Exploration before Settlement, 1606–1788”; “From Botany Bay to the Blue Mountains, 1788–1813”; “Land and Sea Expeditions, 1813–1901.” This section of the book is very fully illustrated with 18 full-colour plates and some 150 black-and-white photographs, mostly reproductions of early prints. Concluding the book are bibliographies of sources and references, a list of illustrations, and an index of explorers and ships. The comprehensive nature of this work will ensure that it becomes a valuable reference book for students, while the text and illustrations will appeal to all who are interested in our history. Collectors of Australiana will welcome this most attractive addition to the ever-increasing number of available publications.




Bibliography of Natural History Travel Narratives


Book Description

Anne Troelstra’s fine bibliography is an outstanding and ground-breaking work. He has provided the academic world with a long-needed bibliographical record of human endeavour in the field of the natural sciences. The travel narratives listed here encompass all aspects of the natural world in every part of the globe, but are especially concerned with its fauna, flora and fossil remains. Such eyewitness accounts have always fascinated their readers, but they were never written solely for entertainment: fragmentary though they often are, these narratives of travel and exploration are of immense importance for our scientific understanding of life on earth, providing us with a window on an ever changing, and often vanishing, natural world. Without such records of the past we could not track, document or understand the significance of changes that are so important for the study of zoogeography. With this book Troelstra gives us a superb overview of natural history travel narratives. The well over four thousand detailed entries, ranging over four centuries and all major western European languages, are drawn from a wide range of sources and include both printed books and periodical contributions. While no subject bibliography by a single author can attain absolute completeness, Troelstra’s work is comprehensive to a truly remarkable degree. The entries are arranged alphabetically by author and chronologically, by the year of first publication, under the author’s name. A brief biography, with the scope and range of their work, is given for each author; every title is set in context, the contents – including illustrations – are described and all known editions and translations are cited. In addition, there is a geographical index that cross refers between authors and the regions visited, and a full list of the bibliographical and biographical sources used in compiling the bibliography.




Gardens of History and Imagination


Book Description

Whether on the ground or in the mind gardens carry meaning. They reflect social and aesthetic values and may express hope, anticipation or grief. Throughout history they have provided a means of physical survival. In creating and maintaining gardens people construe and construct a relationship with their environment. But there is no single meaning carried in the word ‘garden’: as idea and practice it reflects cultural differences in beliefs, values and social organisation. It embodies personal, community even national ways of seeing and being in the world. There are ten essays in Gardens of History and Imagination, each of which examines the role of gardens and gardening in the settlement of New South Wales and in growing a colony and a state. They explore the significance of gardens for the health of the colony, for its economy, for the construction of social order and moral worth. No less do they reveal the significance of forming and reforming personal identities in this process. For the immigrants gardening was an act of settlement; it was also a statement of possession for individuals and for Britain. For a long time it was with memories of ‘home’, often selective and idealised, that settlers made gardens but as the colony developed its own character so did gardening possibilities and practices.