I am a Government Man to Mr Scott of Glendon


Book Description

With the judgement of death, for horse theft in Wales, hanging over his head Hugh Hughes is mercifully transported to New South Wales in 1830 for 14 years. His journey to freedom in the Hunter Valley on the Glendon Estate places him in the midst of a tumultuous time in colonial history. Influential squatters, such as the Scott family, wrestle for power and land against indigenous tribes, the scourge of bushrangers and the attempts by the Governor of New South Wales to establish authority and discipline on the colony's boundaries. Hugh Hughes struggles with his own temptations and the lash is not far from his back. Crossing paths with murderous escaped convicts and the infamous Hall family, death and misfortune continue to stalk him.As a ticket of leave holder and well known horse breeder, he meets the indefatigable Frances Fox, an orphaned immigrant girl who made her way to Sydney in the hope of claiming a better life than famine struck Ireland could offer. Together they scratch out an existence and raise a family.




Political Memories and Migration


Book Description

This book explores the relationship between political memories of migration and the politics of migration, following over two hundred years of commemorating Australia Day. References to Europeans’ original migration to the continent have been engaged in social and political conflicts to define who should belong to Australian society, who should gain access, and based on what criteria. These political memories were instrumental in negotiating inherent conflicts in the formation of the Australian Commonwealth from settler colonies to an immigrant society. By the second half of the twentieth century, the Commonwealth employed Australia Day commemorations specifically to incorporate new arrivals, promoting at first citizenship and, later on, multiculturalism. The commemoration has been contested throughout its history based on two distinct forms of political memories providing conflicting modes of civic and communal belonging to Australian politics and policies of migration. Introducing the concept of Political Memories, this book offers a novel understanding of the social and political role of memories, not only in regard to migration.




The Life and Times of Six Australian Pioneers


Book Description

This true life adventure story is the saga of four ordinary Englishmen—a pair of banished, first-time petty thieves and a couple chosen to be settlers—who charted a course that led them to help build and mould an infant country on the remotest continent in the known world. Two of their offspring united to continue the adventure. Vivid first-hand accounts have been pried from the daily, hand-written journals and writings of first-class passengers, crew, and one of the convicts aboard the small wooden sailing ships, as they battled winter storms on the treacherous North Atlantic and Southern Oceans and endured scorching doldrums in the equatorial region. Mutinies, inventions, discoveries, and wars have been chronicled to provide a backdrop of the prevailing international, societal, and interpersonal relationships of the period. Characters from history’s stage weave their way through these pages—figures including James Cook, Horatio Nelson, Robert Emmet, Jonathan Swift, William Bligh, Lachlan Macquarie, Samuel Marsden, Walter Lawry, Alfred Howitt, and some long-forgotten souls like the tragic Margaret Sullivan. Artwork of the period is included to help stimulate the imagination and help place the reader beside the characters as they toiled to eke out an existence. The primary objective of this biography is a quest to achieve a broader, deeper understanding and appreciation of the typical person—including their struggles, challenges, and contributions—in early colonial New South Wales, Victoria, and New Zealand. The goal is to further the development of a robust comprehension of the Life and Times that these Six Australian Pioneers experienced, as well, the millions of other pioneers just like them. This book will also appeal to those with an interest in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Australian, European, and New Zealand history; late eighteenth-century ocean voyages; and those with an interest in artwork of the period.




Black Lives, White Law


Book Description

How and why Australia's legal system fails Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people 'Russell Marks unravels a national tragedy. From the front line he delivers a first-rate, firsthand account of how so many First Nations people end up in jail, again and again.' --Patrick Dodson, Labor Senator for Western Australia Indigenous Australians are the most incarcerated people on the planet. Indigenous men are fifteen times more likely to be locked up than their non-Indigenous counterparts; Indigenous women are twenty-one times more likely. Featuring vivid case studies and drawing on a deep sense of history, Black Lives, White Law explores Australia's extraordinary record of locking up First Nations people. It examines Australia's system of criminal justice -- the web of laws and courts and police and prisons -- and how that system interacts with First Nations people and communities. How is it that so many are locked up? Why have imprisonment rates increased in recent years? Is this situation fair? Almost everyone agrees that it's not. And yet it keeps getting worse. In this groundbreaking book, Russell Marks investigates Australia's incarceration epidemic. What would happen if the institutions of Australian justice received the same scrutiny to which they routinely subject Indigenous Australians? 'How should we tell the story of Indigenous incarceration in Australia? Only part of it is in the numbers. And we can't get very far by looking at the crimes that see Indigenous offenders punished by courts and sentenced to prison ... To really grapple with the problem of Indigenous incarceration requires us to accept the possibility that there might be another way. That the current state of affairs -- where entire families sometimes spend time behind bars -- is not inevitable.' --Russell Marks Shortlisted, Australian Political Book of the Year 2023 Shortlisted, Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2023 'This passionate, timely book shines a critical light on First Nations' incarceration rates in Australia, bringing history into the present with a sense of urgency and purpose ... Powerfully interventionist while avoiding polemic, this book reminds us that frontier violence has a present as well as a past.' --Judges' comments, Prime Minister's Literary Awards




Needlework and Women’s Identity in Colonial Australia


Book Description

In gold-rush Australia, social identity was in flux: gold promised access to fashionable new clothes, a grand home, and the goods to furnish it, but could not buy gentility. Needlework and Women's Identity in Colonial Australia explores how the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters who migrated to the newly formed colony of Victoria used their needle skills as a powerful claim to social standing. Focusing on one of women's most common daily tasks, the book examines how needlework's practice and products were vital in the contest for social position in the turmoil of the first two decades of the Victorian rush from 1851. Placing women firmly at the center of colonial history, it explores how the needle became a tool for stitching together identity. From decorative needlework to household making and mending, women's sewing was a vehicle for establishing, asserting, and maintaining social status. Interdisciplinary in scope, Needlework and Women's Identity in Colonial Australia draws on material culture, written primary sources, and pictorial evidence, to create a rich portrait of the objects and manners that defined genteel goldfields living. Giving voice to women's experiences and positioning them as key players in the fabric of gold-rush society, this volume offers a fresh critical perspective on gender and textile history.




Black Convicts


Book Description

The story of Australia’s Black convicts has been all but erased from our history. In this deeply researched and illuminating book, Santilla Chingaipe offers a fresh understanding of this fatal shore, showing how empire, slavery, race and memory have shaped this nation. On the First Fleet of 1788, at least 15 convicts were of African descent. By 1840 the number of Black transportees had risen to over 500. Among them were John Caesar, who became Australia’s first bushranger, and Billy Blue – the stylishly dressed ferryman who gave his name to Sydney’s Blues Point. There was also David Stuurman, a revered South African chief transported for anti-colonial insurrection, and William Cuffay – a prominent London Chartist who led the development of Australia’s labour movement. Two of the youngest were cousins from Mauritius – girls aged just 9 and 12 – sentenced over a failed attempt to poison their mistress. But although some of these lives were documented and their likenesses depicted (including in the National Portrait Gallery and a sketch of those acquitted of treason after the Eureka stockade), their stories have been erased from history: even their descendants are often unaware of their ancestry. In these stories spanning Africa, the Americas and Europe, Black Convicts also uncovers Australia’s hidden links to slavery, which both powered the British Empire and inspired the convict system itself. Situating European settlement in its global context, Chingaipe shows the injustice of dispossession was powered by the engine of labour exploitation. By uncovering lives whitewashed out of our story, Black Convicts will change the way we think about who we are.




1930s Annandale


Book Description

1930s Annandale: A Short Walk is the fifth book in a series. Annandale is a small inner city suburb of Sydney. It is squeezed between a Bay of Sydney Harbour and Parramatta Road. The book concentrates on the 1930s, when Annandale's pubs had Art Deco makeovers. Annandale's factories were producing radios, pianos, lollies, jams, saws and gun sights. Amy Hudson started playing cricket in Trafalgar Street and went on to play for Australia. This book also covers 1830s, when Annandale was the estate of the second generation of Johnstones in the expanding colony of New South Wales. Then, Parramatta Road was the High Road to Parramatta.




The First Wave


Book Description

The European maritime explorers who first visited the bays and beaches of Australia brought with them diverse assumptions about the inhabitants of the country, most of them based on sketchy or non-existent knowledge, contemporary theories like the idea of the noble savage, and an automatic belief in the superiority of European civilisation. Mutual misunderstanding was almost universal, whether it resulted in violence or apparently friendly transactions. Written for a general audience, The First Wave brings together a variety of contributions from thought-provoking writers, including both original research and creative work. Our contributors explore the dynamics of these early encounters, from Indigenous cosmological perspectives and European history of ideas, from representations in art and literature to the role of animals, food and fire in mediating first contact encounters, and Indigenous agency in exploration and shipwrecks. The First Wave includes poetry by Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal poet Ali Cobby Eckermann, fiction by Miles Franklin award-winning Noongar author Kim Scott and Danielle Clode, and an account of the arrival of Christian missionaries in the Torres Strait Islands by Torres Strait political leader George Mye.




The Highland Furies


Book Description

As the oldest of the Highland Regiments, The Black Watch has an enviable roster of Battle Honors and a mystique born of repeated service on behalf of King, Queen and country. On the strength of her acclaimed biography of Field Marshal Earl Wavell, the regimental trustees commissioned Victoria Schofield to write this, the first volume of her magisterial history of The Black Watch, and have fully cooperated with her as she traces the story of the Regiment from its early 18th-century beginnings through to the eve of the South African War at the end of the 19th-century. Originating as companies of highland men raised to keep a watch over the Highlands of Scotland, they were formed into a regiment in 1739. Its soldiers would go on to fight with extraordinary bravery and elan in almost every major engagement fought by the British Army during this period, from the American War of Independence, the Peninsular Wars, Waterloo, the Crimea, Indian Mutiny to Egypt and the Sudan. Drawing on diaries, letters and memoirs, Victoria Schofield skillfully weaves the multiple strands of this story into an epic narrative of a valiant body of officers and men over one-and-a-half centuries. In her sure hands, the story of The Black Watch is no arid recitation of campaigns, dates and battle honors, but is instead a rich and compelling record of the soldier's experience under fire and on campaign. It is also a celebration of the deeds of a regiment that has played a unique role in British history and a vivid insight into the lives of the many remarkable figures who have marched and fought so proudly under its Colors. It is supported by more than 170 pages of appendices, bibliography, maps, and notes, as well as a brilliant array of illustrations' Military History Monthly.