From innocent criminals to radical revolutionaries, feisty feminists to manly pioneers, egalitarian settlers to violent invaders, Caught on Screen shows how over successive generations the shape-shifting convict emerged on screen as a potent historical symbol.Convicts loom large in Australian history.As transported criminals and the first European settlers, they have shackled the nation to a curious and contested origin story. Historians were largely silen...

Writing Australian History On-screen: Television and Film Period Dramas "Down Under" reveals the depths of Australian history from convict times to the present day. The essays in this book are thematically driven and take a rounded historical-cultural-sociological-psychological approach in analyzing the various selected productions. In their analyses and interpretations of the topic, the contributors interrogate the intricacies in Australian history as represented in Australian filmic peri...

Winner of the 2022 Australian Political Book of the Year Award 'A drily elegant, bracing work from a pained and open heart' —Helen Garner 'Refreshing and original. A unique window on Australia's past and its barbed resonance today … Essential reading for anyone interested in the challenge of truth-telling.' —Mark McKenna 'A graceful, unostentatiously scholarly, wise (and highly readable) book on a subject of overwhelming and enduring significance for all Australians.' —Robert Manne The tal...

A cultural history of Australia told through our fiction.Australia's novels lie at the heart of the country. Capturing everyday lives and exceptional dreams, they have held up a mirror to the nation, reflecting the good and the bad. In this companion book to the ABC TV series, Carl Reinecke looks at the history of Australian culture through the books we have read and the stories we have told.Touching on colonial invasion, the bush myth, world wars, mass mig...

What are the classic works of Australian literature? And what can they tell us about ourselves and the land we live in? Providing a selected overview of Australia's greatest literature, Australian Classics is an accessible companion to our literature and a story of writing in Australia from the nineteenth century to the present.Australian Classics celebrates many of the country's beloved novels, poems, short stories, children's books and seminal works of non-ficti...

In this national bestseller Robert Manne attacks the right-wing campaign against the Bringing them home report that revealed how thousands of Aboriginal children had been taken from their parents.What was the role of Paddy McGuinness as editor of Quadrant? How reliable was the evidence that led newspaper columnists from Piers Akerman in the Sydney Daily Telegraph to Andrew Bolt in the Melbourne Herald Sun to deny the gravity of the injustice done?...

How distinctive is South Australia after all? South Australia has often been represented as "different": free of convicts, more enlightened in its attitudes toward Aboriginal people, established on rational economic principles, and progressive in its social and political development. Some of this is true, some of it is not, but mostly the story is more complex. In this book, eminent historians explore these themes by examining some key "turning points" in South Australi...

Australia has often been said to possess a "larrikin streak," from the Stiffy and Mo cartoons and the true-blue Crocodile Hunter to the characters in the silent film The Sentimental Bloke. When it first emerged around 1870, larrikin was a term of abuse, used to describe teenage, working-class hell-raisers who populated dance halls and cheap theaters, and this account journeys through the street-based youth subculture known as larrikinism between 1870 and 1920, sw...

Bugger, rooted, bloody oath…What is it about Australians and swearing? We've got an international reputation for using bad language and letting rip with a choice swear word or two. From the defiant curses of the convicts to the humour of Kath & Kim, Amanda Laugesen, Chief Editor of the Australian National Dictionary, takes us on an engrossing journey through the tumultuous history of Australia's bad language. Bad language has been used in all sort of ways in our history: to defy authority,...

From the iconic poems of Bonjo Paterson to todays international bestsellers by Peter Carey and Bryce Courtenay, Australian literature has reflected the changes in Australias national development until today it stands proudly on the world stage. At the same time, indigenous writing has come into its own, with authors such as Oodgeroo Noonuccol giving a powerful voice to the Aboriginal experience. AUSTRALIAS WRITERS AND POETS looks at the men and women who have created this rich literary tra...

Based on Kenneth Cook's classic novel, this film about bored schoolteacher John Grant getting caught in an outback nightmare of booze, racism, misogyny and bloodlust was made in 1971 and lost until 2004. In this insightful monograph, Tina Kaufman discusses what lies behind Wake in Fright: the genesis of the film, how it was made, how it was allowed to get lost, and the long path of its rediscovery; how it was restored and received on its re-release. Tina Kaufman recounts how this film that...

The first substantial overview of the British film industry with emphasis on its genres, stars, and socioeconomic context, British National Cinema by Sarah Street is an important title in Routledge's new National Cinemas series. British National Cinema synthesizes years of scholarship on British film while incorporating the author' fresh perspective and research. Street divides the study of British cinema into four sections: the relation between the film industry...