Mickey Dewar made a profound contribution to the history of the Northern Territory, which she performed across many genres. She produced high‑quality, memorable and multi-sensory histories, including the Cyclone Tracy exhibition at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and the reinterpretation of Fannie Bay Gaol. Informed by a great love of books, her passion for history was infectious. As well as offering three original chapters that appraise her work, this edited volume republishes her first book, In Search of the Never-Never. In Dewar’s comprehensive and incisive appraisal of the literature of the Northern Territory, she provides brilliant, often amusing insights into the ever-changing representations of a region that has featured so large in the Australian popular imagination
Roads and road tourism loom large in the Australian imagination as distance and mobility have shaped the nation’s history and culture, but roads are more than simply transport routes; they embody multiple layers of history, mythology and symbolism. Drawing on Australian travel writing, diaries and manuscripts, tourism literature, fiction, poetry and feature films, this book explores how Australians have experienced and imagined roads and road touring beyond urban settings: from Aboriginal ‘songlines’ to modern-day road trips. It also tells the stories of iconic roads, including the Birdsville Track, Stuart Highway and Great Ocean Road, and suggests alternative approaches to heritage and tourism interpretation of these important routes. The ongoing impact of the colonial past on Indigenous peoples and contemporary Australian society and culture – including representations of the road and road travel – is explored throughout the book. The volume offers a new way of thinking about roads and road tourism as important strands in a nation’s cultural fabric.
Do you know what a Vic-wit is? Have you ever had a nibble pie? Now in it's third edition, The Dinkum Dictionary, is even better than ever. This fascinating book describes the origins and usage of words ranging from 'mulga' to 'anzac', from 'furphy' to 'blue', and this edition includes even more words and terms. Butler reveals little-known facts about our ways of communicating with each other. She examines the diverse range of influences that have coloured our language, indigenous & non-indigenous, revealing the richness of Australia's culture.
Skin Deep looks at the preoccupations of European-Australians in their encounters with Aboriginal women and the tropes, types, and perceptions that seeped into everyday settler-colonial thinking. Early erroneous and uninformed accounts of Aboriginal women and culture were repeated throughout various print forms and imagery, both in Australia and in Europe, with names, dates, and locations erased so that individual women came to be anonymized as 'gins' and 'lubras.' The book identifies and traces the various tropes used to typecast Aboriginal women, contributing to their lasting hold on the colonial imagination even after conflicting records emerged. The colonial archive itself, consisting largely of accounts by white men, is critiqued in the book. Construction of Aboriginal women's gender and sexuality was a form of colonial control, and Skin Deep shows how the industrialization of print was critical to this control, emerging as it did alongside colonial expansion. For nearly all settlers, typecasting Aboriginal women through name-calling and repetition of tropes sufficed to evoke an understanding that was surface-based and half-knowing: only skin deep. *** "Impressively researched, written, organized and presented...highly recommended for community and academic library Aboriginal Studies, Women's Studies, Australian Studies, and Colonial History reference collections." --Midwest Book Review, MBR Bookwatch: October 2016, Helen's Bookshelf [Subject: Cultural History, Aboriginal Studies, Women's Studies, Australian Studies, Colonial Studies]
When Dymphna Stella Rees finds bundles of love letters buried in her parents' archive, she is intrigued by the discovery. Leslie Rees and Coralie Clarke Rees were a power couple of the Australian literary scene in the mid-twentieth century. They took their shared dream of being writers from Perth to London and launched themselves in Fleet Street, interviewing some of the century's literary greats, including James Joyce, AA Milne, and George Bernard Shaw. After settling in Sydney in the 1930s, they embraced the city's vibrant arts scene and established prolific careers. Leslie became an award-winning children's book author and the ABC's national drama editor, while Coralie was one of the country's first female broadcasters. They influenced the development of an authentically Australian arts culture and included among their friends Mary Gilmore, Ruth Park, D'Arcy Niland, Mary Durack and Vance and Nettie Palmer. Drawn from personal notebooks, letters and original transcripts, A Paper Inheritance is the engrossing story of what drove this literary couple to prominence and is a celebration of their love and their passion for words.
Booklist Top of the List Reference Source The heir and successor to Eric Partridge's brilliant magnum opus, The Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, this two-volume New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is the definitive record of post WWII slang. Containing over 60,000 entries, this new edition of the authoritative work on slang details the slang and unconventional English of the English-speaking world since 1945, and through the first decade of the new millennium, with the same thorough, intense, and lively scholarship that characterized Partridge's own work. Unique, exciting and, at times, hilariously shocking, key features include: unprecedented coverage of World English, with equal prominence given to American and British English slang, and entries included from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South Africa, Ireland, and the Caribbean emphasis on post-World War II slang and unconventional English published sources given for each entry, often including an early or significant example of the term’s use in print. hundreds of thousands of citations from popular literature, newspapers, magazines, movies, and songs illustrating usage of the headwords dating information for each headword in the tradition of Partridge, commentary on the term’s origins and meaning New to this edition: A new preface noting slang trends of the last five years Over 1,000 new entries from the US, UK and Australia New terms from the language of social networking Many entries now revised to include new dating, new citations from written sources and new glosses The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is a spectacular resource infused with humour and learning – it’s rude, it’s delightful, and it’s a prize for anyone with a love of language.
This study provides a cultural history of Nuclear Age Australia. The author examines the country’s role as a weapons testing site, its ambition to join the postwar nuclear club of nations, the heated controversies surrounding uranium mining and nuclear power, and the rich complexity of Australian cultural response to the fact and possibility of atomic destruction.
After expressing my doubts and fears about leaving my comfort zone on the Gold Coast, in order to venture the road in an ageing motorhome in unfamiliar territory for an undefined destination, I reflected on that last long journey. We had experienced breakdowns, bad weather, boredom, relentless distance, but also saw breathtaking scenery, interesting people and the delight of the changing panorama day by day. There were times though when I wanted to get the next flight home. After our first adventure nineteen months ago, we felt ready for the road again. On our last journey we never got further than Melbourne, encountering the winter weather down south after a hot journey down the coast of New South Wales, We had scurried back north to the tropics in North Queensland having been too used to the warmer climate of Queensland. This time we decided to do ‘The Big Lap’ by road from Queensland up north through to the Northern Territory and coastal Western Australia, coastal South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and back to Queensland’s Gold Coast - anticlockwise. It is better to travel this direction from east to west to take advantage of prevailing winds, avoid ‘The Big Wet’ monsoon weather up north and get back down south before the onset of the northern Summer. We have included fifty color photos from our collection together with maps and a listing of the road route taken. This diary commences with a short trip to Queensland’s Sunshine Coast with a stop on the Gold Coast. The big journey took us up to Rockhampton and across central Queensland via Longreach and Mt. Isa. We continued down to Tennant Creek in Northern Territory to Uluru, then back up via Katherine to Darwin. From Darwin we travelled back down to Katherine across to Western Australia’s Kununurra, and Broome down the coast to Perth, Margaret River and Bremer Bay on the south coast. This completed the first part of the lap around Australia. Diary 3 completes the second half of ‘The Big Lap’ back to Queensland and exploration of Tasmania. Visit www.gowalkaboutaustralia.com for more information.
