A great-aunt's bequest - a 200-year-old grandfather clock - sends historian Graeme Davison on a journey deep into his father's family's past. From their tribal homeland in the Scottish Borders he follows them to the garrison town of Carlisle, from industrial Birmingham to Edwardian Australia, and from the Great War to his own suburban childhood. This is the story of an ordinary family's journey from frontier warfare and dispossession through economic turmoil and emigration to modest prospe...

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 campaign...

Body and Mind pays tribute to one of Australia's most outstanding and influential historians, F. B. (Barry) Smith. Barry has made pioneering contributions to the political, social and cultural histories of Britain and Australia, and these essays range across the fields he made his own, especially the interconnected histories of medicine (body) and ideas (mind). The editors bring together several generations of Barry's admirers, colleagues, friends and pupils, including Joanna Bour...

This is the story of how the car changed a society.Graeme Davison, Australia's leading urban historian, explores the Melbourne he knows so well to show us how the car entered our consciousness - as an object of desire, a symbol of status, a creator of freedoms, a shaper of sexual mores. His is a fascinating journey through landscapes changed and cities redesigned by the car, of mayhem on the road and influence in the world of politics, of communities challenged and the environment ...

'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 Relation...

A public intellectual known for his deeply humane approach to social and urban issues, Hugh Stretton’s thinking has influenced Australian public debates for many decades. Fundamentally, Stretton wanted to make Australia fairer.His book The Political Sciences was hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as a work of near genius. His Ideas for Australian Cities was a groundbreaking intervention in urban studies and progressive thinking on social reform. This...

In the 1880s, a generation after the gold rushes, Melbourne rose to become Australia's most populous, modern and self-consciously 'metropolitan' city. Its offices and warehouses leapt skyward, its suburbs sprawled and the tentacles of its commerce reached across the continent.In the 1890s, the housing boom burst, depression struck and Melbourne's population and influence declined. In this classic work of Australian social history, Graeme Davison explores the economic, political, soc...

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-...

This is the first volume of Witi Ihimaera's enthralling, award-winning memoir, packed with stories from the formative years of this much-loved writer. Witi Ihimaera is a consummate storyteller — one critic calling him one of our ‘finest and most memorable’. Some of his best stories, however, are about his own life. This honest, stirring work tells of the family and community into which Ihimaera was born, of his early life in rural New Zealand, of family secrets, of facing ...

A stunning novel of terror, love and survival in the greatest wilderness on earth. A lyrical, heartbreaking epic debut.An isolated property in the middle of Western Australia, just after the Great War. An English heiress has just given birth and unleashed hell. Weakened and grieving, she realises her life is in danger, and flees into the desert with her Aboriginal maid. One of them is running from a murderer; the other is accused of murder.Soon the women are being hunted ac...

A captivating true story that will speak to generations of Australians, from the author of Mezza Italiana.'Nonno Anni gives me a nudge. "You know, when I first came to Australia, I knew that my life would change forever."'Leaving the small village of Fossa in Italy in 1939 to meet a father he barely remembered in a place that was far from everything he knew, fifteen-year-old Annibale Boccabella arrived in Australia determined to make a go of it. It was a ti...

In the tradition of Zoe Heller’s What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal, The New Neighbor is “a chilling page-turner” (People) with “simple, elegant language” (The New York Times Book Review) about an old woman’s curiosity turned into a dangerous obsession as she becomes involved in her mysterious new neighbor’s complicated life.How much can you really know about the woman next door?Ninety-year-old Ma...