Canberra is Australia's capital city. Developed according to the detailed plans produced by Walter Burley Griffin, Canberra's wide avenues and long vistas were designed to give prominence to the city's important government buildings and showcase the dignity of the nation's capital. Although it was a very quiet place for the first few decades of its existence, Canberra has now developed into a vibrant city, with business, shopping and entertainment precincts. Most visitors to Canberra are unaware that it could have been called Eureka or Britannia, or that sheep farming continued within the city's boundaries for many years after the first Parliament House was built. This book includes these stories as well as many others from the history of Canberra, and there is also a chapter on the Westminster System of government.
Camping is perhaps the quintessential American activity. We camp to escape, to retreat, to "find" ourselves. The camp serves as a home-away-from-home where we might rethink a deliberate life. We also camp to find a new collective space where family and society converge. Many of us attended summer camps, and the legacies of these childhood havens form part of American culture. In Campsite, Charlie Hailey provides a highly original and artfully composed interpretation of the cultural significance and inherently paradoxical nature of camps and camping in contemporary American society. Offering a new understanding of the complex relationship between place, time, and architecture in an increasingly mobile culture, Hailey explores campsites as places that necessitate a unique combination of contrasting qualities, such as locality and foreignness, mobility and fixity, temporality and permanence, and public domesticity. Camping methods reflect the rigid flexibility of the process: leaving home, arriving at a site, clearing an area, making and then finally breaking camp. The phases of this sequence are both separate and indistinct. To understand this paradox, Hailey emphasizes the role of process. He constructs a philosophical framework to elucidate the "placefulness" -- or sense of place -- of such temporary constructions and provides alternative understandings of how we think of the home and of public versus private dwelling spaces.Historically, camps have been used as places for scouting out future towns, for clearing provisional spaces, and for making semipermanent homes-away-from-home. To understand how "cultures of camping" develop and accommodate this dynamic mix of permanence and flexibility, Hailey looks at three basic qualities of the camp: as a site for place-making, as a populist precursor for modern built environments, and as a "method." Hailey's creative and philosophical approach to camps and camping allows him to construct links between such diverse projects as the "philosophers' camps" of the mid-nineteenth century, the idiosyncratic camping clubs that arose with the automobile culture in the early 1920s, and more recent uses of campsites as temporary housing for those displaced by Hurricane Katrina.In Campsite, Hailey makes a singular and significant contribution to current studies of place and vernacular architecture while also reconfiguring methods of research in cultural studies, architectural theory, and geography.
The students of Mount Mayhem Primary are on their school trip to Canberra. Their teacher, Ms Sparks says they will visit places of National Significance and learn about Australian History and Government. Who knew Canberra could be so interesting!
An innovative account of prisoners of war and internment camps around the Pacific basin during the Second World War. In this comparative and global study, Anoma Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi offer an architectural and urban understanding of the Pacific War approached through spatial, physical and material analyses of incarceration camp environments.
Generosity and Refugees: The Kosovars in Exile is a work of history studying the social and political context encountered by Kosovar refugees fleeing their homeland to Australia at the height of the NATO-led war against Serbian forces in 1999. The flight of the Kosovar refugees changed Australia's asylum seeker policy forever, and a new test for international humanitarianism had begun. Today refugee crises globally beg the international community to embrace a generosity of spirit. A question this book asks is whether there are limits to generosity, inhibited by nationally contextual and historical perspectives. Generosity and Refugees examines the role of the media in framing public understandings of refugees with intriguing parallels for understanding the contemporary political climate internationally.
'The thing that haunts me most to this day is that blokes were dying and I could do bugger all about it - do you look after the bloke who you know is going to die or the bloke who's got a chance?' - Australian ex-POW doctor, 1999 During World War II, 22 000 Australian military personnel became prisoners of war under the Japanese military. Over three and a half years, 8000 died in captivity, in desperate conditions of forced labour, disease and starvation. Many of those who returned home after the war attributed their survival to the 106 Australian medical officers imprisoned alongside them. These doctors varied in age, background and experience, but they were united in their unfailing dedication to keeping as many of the men alive as possible. This is the story of those 106 doctors - their compassion, bravery and ingenuity - and their efforts in bringing back the 14 000 survivors. 'You are unfortunate in being prisoners of a country whose living standards are much lower than yours. You will often consider yourselves mistreated, while we think of you as being treated well.' - Japanese officer to Australian POWs, 1943
Panoramas, whether painted or photographed, were the nineteenth-century equivalent of IMAX or Google maps. These wide-angled views of landscapes and cities fascinated viewers, who had never before seen such far-reaching perspectives on the world around them. Based on the National Library of Australia¿s extensive collections, Capturing Time: Panoramas of Old Australia looks back on our nation through the magic of panoramas to the streets of Sydney when it was the convict capital, to the gold rushes of Melbourne and to Perth, struggling to establish a toehold on the continent¿s western frontier. Dating from 1810 to the 1920s, the paintings and photographs include historic views of all of Australia¿s capital cities, plus some country towns. Not only can readers imagine what it might have been like to stand on Sydney¿s Observatory Hill in 1820, for example, but also what it would have been like to stand there with a companion able to point out landmarks and tell the sorts of interesting stories that only locals know.
