Graeme Davison

'I did not look for skeletons in my family's cupboard, but once the cupboard was open, they simply fell out.' A widow and her eight older children are uprooted from their Hampshire farm in 1850, and thrown together on an emigrant ship with 38 distressed needlewomen from London. How they came to be on the boat, and what happened on the high seas and afterwards in Australia, is a vivid tale of family ambitions and fears, successes and catastrophes. In Lost Relations, historian Graeme Davison follows in his family's footsteps, from the picture-postcard village of Newnham to a prison cell in Maitland, from a London slum to a miner's tent in Castlemaine. He takes us back into worlds now largely forgotten, of water-powered mills, free selectors and Methodist evangelists. The Hewetts were not famous or distinguished, but their story reveals much about the foundations of Australia. 'a quiet masterpiece' - Janet McCalman, University of Melbourne 'How to produce a good family history? Get a master historian to write about his own. History and family history are combined in this fascinating book' - John Hirst, La Trobe University

Fortunes of my family in Australia's Golden Age

Lost Relations

A history of time and time-keeping in Australia.

How Australia Learned to Tell the Time

The Unforgiving Minute

Kate Murphy

From its beginnings Monash has been a 'university in a hurry.' Born on the suburban fringe of Melbourne, it reached outwards rather than gazing inwards. Over its five decades it embraced the challenges of the age of Sputnik, became a hotbed of student radicalism, then took an equally radical turn towards market capitalism to become Australia's largest and most international university, with branches in Italy, Malaysia and South Africa. Its movers and shakers included visionary vice-chancellor Louis Matheson, biologist and stirrer Jock Marshall, Australia's third woman professor Maureen Brunt, historian Ian Turner, student politicians Albert Langer and Peter Costello, writers Don Watson and David Williamson, IVF pioneer Carl Wood, philosopher Peter Singer, broadcaster Jon Faine, buccaneering vice-chancellor Mal Logan and his ill-fated successor, David Robinson. The Monash story shows how universities have transformed Australia since the 1960s. Based on extensive interviews with staff and students, and heavily illustrated, this is an engaging and candid portrait of a great Australian institution.

The Monash story

University Unlimited

Chris McConville

David Dunstan

Behind the glittering image of 'Marvellous Melbourne' there existed in the popular imagination another, very different, picture of the colonial metropolis. This was the city of 'low life', of crowded slums, poverty, disease and vice. The nine essays in The Outcasts of Melbourne attempt to reveal the social realities behind this picture. They include new accounts of the forces which created the city's physical environment. They show how perceptions of a city can be shaped by campaigning journalists, artists and writers. They present collective portraits of the poor and the 'criminal classes' - and of those who set out to save them. They describe how the city's guardians - the police, public health authorities and charity workers - responded to the challenge of the slums. By imaginative use of the rich deposits in the public records, these explorations in social history present new ways of documenting the lives of people whose daily activities were seldom reported in the popular press. In doing so, they also map the chains of causation which link the actions of individuals - appearing before a committee of a benevolent society, getting arrested, evangelising at a Salvation Army rally - to the social forces which have shaped the cities in which we live.

Graeme Davison

About

Books

Join the club