Ida Leeson

Ida Leeson PDF Author: Sylvia Martin
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1741148502
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ida Leeson was no ordinary librarian. At a time when men rose to such positions in the Australian library world, she won an epic struggle to become Mitchell Librarian, a position previously held only by men.

Ida Leeson

Ida Leeson PDF Author: Sylvia Martin
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1741148502
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ida Leeson was no ordinary librarian. At a time when men rose to such positions in the Australian library world, she won an epic struggle to become Mitchell Librarian, a position previously held only by men.

Sky Swimming

Sky Swimming PDF Author: Sylvia Martin
Publisher: UWA Publishing
ISBN: 1760801232
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book Here

Book Description
'Late afternoon. An isolated lagoon, water glassy, teeming with birdlife—black swans, ducks, a pelican. Sunset begins to tint the sky. I point the camera at the water to catch the clouds reflected there just as a solitary duck swims into view. Everything in the photograph is familiar yet the effect is entirely strange. The duck is swimming across the sky...' The reflections in Sky Swimming can be read as meditations on the enigmas of love, family, ageing, memory, home and belonging. At its heart is a mudbrick house built by two women on an ancient lava flow in the Warrumbungle Mountains, circling back to a childhood filled with music in Melbourne and an early career in the theatre. It fans out across the world to a family mystery in The Netherlands of the 1950s and a friendship in Montreal in the 1990s. Reflections on the process of writing feminist biography are included and the women from Martin’s biographies thread their way through the narrative alongside the people who have helped shape her life, often in unexpected directions.

Magnificent Obsession

Magnificent Obsession PDF Author: Brian H. Fletcher
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1741762979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Mitchell Library, Sydney, was established as a result of the magnificent obsession of one man David Scott Mitchell who assembled the premier collection of books, manuscripts, maps and pictures relating to Australia and the Pacific. Mitchell bequeathed his collection to the State Library of New South Wales on his death in July 1907 with an endowment of 70,000 to fund additions. The library that emerged as a result was shaped in part by the richness of its continually expanding collections, the beauty of its buildings and its relationship with the rest of what is now the State Library. Brian Fletcher's engaging narrative has a strong focus on the people who, for over a century, have nurtured and developed the Library, often with an obsession the equal of Mitchell's. HCL Anderson put his career on the line in order to secure the initial bequest and the redoubtable Ida Leeson's appointment as the first female Mitchell Librarian became a cause c l bre. We learn also of the readers, the benefactors, and the behind-the-scenes dramas which inevitably occur between passionate and committed people. Magnificent Obsession: the story of the Mitchell Library, Sydney describes the riveting stories and the thrill of the chase as the accumulation of these world-renowned collections continued. Mitchell's original gift of 40,000 books has now increased to almost 600,000. Not held by the Mitchell Library' is bookseller's code around the world for of the utmost rarity'. Fletcher brings to life not only an invaluable Australian institution but one of the great research libraries of the world in this social and cultural history that all readers interested in Australia's past will find fascinating.

Passionate Friends

Passionate Friends PDF Author: Sylvia Martin
Publisher: Queer Oz Folk
ISBN: 9780645183993
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mary Fullerton (1868-1946) and Mabel Singleton (1877-1965) met in Melbourne as suffrage and peace activists in Vida Goldstein's Women's Political Association. They remained together for thirty-five years as loving friends, raising Mabel's son born in 1911. Through her literary friendship with Miles Franklin (1879-1954), Mary Fullerton's last two volumes of poetry were published in the 1940s. Rescued from near destruction, a box of Mary's manuscripts eventually made its way to the Mitchell Library. It contained poems she never sent to Miles Franklin. These poignant poems, many dedicated to Mabel, trace a love story that sheds light on how women of the early twentieth century may have understood their love for each other.

The Ivory Tower and Beyond

The Ivory Tower and Beyond PDF Author: Susan Cochrane
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443806250
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book Here

Book Description
There is a tradition of “participant history” among historians of the Pacific Islands, unafraid to show their hands on issues of public importance and risking controversy to make their voices heard. This book explores the theme of the participant historian by delving into the lives of J.C. Beaglehole, J.W. Davidson, Richard Gilson, Harry Maude and Brij V. Lal. They lived at the interface of scholarship and practical engagement in such capacities as constitutional advisers, defenders of civil liberties, or upholders of the principles of academic freedom. As well as writing history, they “made” history, and their excursions beyond the ivory tower informed their scholarship. Doug Munro’s sympathetic engagement with these five historians is likewise informed by his own long-term involvement with the sub-discipline of Pacific History.

An Historian's Life

An Historian's Life PDF Author: Fay Anderson
Publisher: Academic Monographs
ISBN: 0522851533
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Get Book Here

Book Description
Max Crawford was one of Australia's pre-eminent historians. As both a participant in and observer of many decisive episodes of the era; Europe in the midst of the Depression, America and Russia at the height of World War II, post-war reconstruction and the Cold War in Australia, Crawford was regarded as a radicalandsbquo; and outspoken defender of intellectual autonomy. This biography considers Crawford as an historian and a public intellectual. It relates his experiences as a student at Sydney and Oxford, a struggling teacher during the Depression, as the head of the History School at the University of Melbourne, a diplomat in wartime Russia, and a Cold War victim and accuser. The study of Crawford's life provides insight into one man's experience in the midst of political turmoil and the limits of intellectual autonomy on Australian campuses, as well as the suspicion of liberal intellectuals in Australian public life, the repression of academic radicals and ASIO's attempts to stifle dissident voices. Spanning his life (1906 -1991), Crawford's political and intellectual journey suggests the changing nature of Australian progressive liberalism and the precarious state of academic freedom.

History Wars

History Wars PDF Author: Doug Munro
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1760464775
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
‘In 1993, Manning Clark came under severe (posthumous) attack in the pages of Quadrant by none other than Peter Ryan, who had published five of the six volumes of Clark’s epic A History of Australia. In applying what he called “an overdue axe to a tall poppy”, Ryan lambasted the History as “an imposition on Australian credulity” and declared its author a fraud, both as a historian and a person. This unprecedented public assault by a publisher on his best-selling author was a sensation at the time and remains lodged in the public memory. In History Wars, Doug Munro forensically examines the right and wrongs of Ryan’s allegations, concluding that Clark was more sinned against than sinning and that Ryan repeatedly misrepresented the situation. More than just telling a story, Munro places the Ryan-Clark controversy within the context of Australia’s History Wars. This book is an illuminating saga of that ongoing contest.’ — James Curran, University of Sydney ‘The Ryan-Clark controversy … speaks to the place of Manning Clark in Australia’s national imagination. Had Ryan taken his axe to another historian, it’s unlikely that we would be still talking about it 30 years later. But Clark was the author and keeper of Australia’s national story, however imperfect his scholarship and however blinkered that story. Few, if any, historians in the Anglo-American world have occupied the space that Clark occupied by dint of will, force of personality, and felicity of pen.’ — Donald Wright, University of New Brunswick

A Life of J.C. Beaglehole

A Life of J.C. Beaglehole PDF Author: T. H. Beaglehole
Publisher: Victoria University Press
ISBN: 9780864735355
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 608

Get Book Here

Book Description
"But this scholarly achievement was in many ways matched by the part he played in the intellectual and cultural life of New Zealand in his time. A prolific writer and critic he became committed to making New Zealand a more lively and civilised place to live, and through his work at Victoria University, his teaching, his involvement with the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties and the New Zealand Historic Places Trust - among many such organisations - his influence was far reaching." "Drawing on J.C. Beaglehole's own writing, especially his sparkling unpublished letters, the author has woven together all the aspects of his father's life into an immensely readable narrative. The two chapters on Beaglehole's work on James Cook create a picture of the historical scholar at work, and give the book an international significance."--BOOK JACKET.

Run for Your Life

Run for Your Life PDF Author: Jill Jolliffe
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1922213403
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book Here

Book Description
Unwillingly given up by her birth mother and adopted into a violent household, Jill Jolliffe found the course of her life set before she even had time to choose. She ran away as a teenager and has been running ever since. Jolliffe became a thorn in the establishment’s side and earned herself a hefty ASIO file. Following her instincts, she became a foreign correspondent – risking her life to report on Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, exposing sex-trafficking rackets in Portugal and ducking bullets while covering a war in Angola. Over time she realises that the recurring pattern of her career has been reporting the stories of young women in distress, as though trying to free her younger self from the chains of being a ‘Forgotten Australian’. In the course of writing her memoir, an unexpected meeting with her birth mother takes her life full circle.

Unnamed Desires

Unnamed Desires PDF Author: Rebecca Jennings
Publisher: Monash University Publishing
ISBN: 1922235709
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first in-depth study of female same-sex desire in twentieth century Australia, Unnamed Desires explores the compelling stories of ordinary women who struggled to build lives and express their love for other women in a hostile society. Focusing on Sydney and country New South Wales in the mid-twentieth century (1930–1978), it traces the development of lesbian culture, identities and material spaces from the interwar period to the first Mardi Gras. This book offers fascinating new insights into the social and cultural history of mid-twentieth century NSW. ‘Elegantly written, Unnamed Desires … tells stories of sadness and persecution, but also accounts of bravery, ingenuity and fun … It is a very welcome and important addition to the scholarship on sexuality in Australian history.’ — Jill Julius Matthews