The only large-scale comprehensive account of an intriguing part of Australia's past.In 1920, 26 men and women met in a dingy hall in Sydney to create a new political party. They expected the overthrow of capitalism and the emancipation of humanity - here, and all around the world.Two decades later, when Australia joined the Second World War, the Commonwealth government suppressed the Communist Party of Australia. The handful of idealists and dissidents had...

Stuart Macintyre, one of Australia's most highly regarded historians, revisits A Concise History of Australia to provoke readers to reconsider Australia's past and its relationship to the present. Integrating new scholarship with the historical record, the fifth edition of A Concise History of Australia brings together the long narrative of Australia's First Nations' peoples; the arrival of Europeans and the era of colonies, convicts, gold and free settlers; the foundation of a nation stat...

The long awaited second volume in Stuart Macintyre's definitive history of the Communist Party of Australia.Communism was unlike any other political movement Australia has ever seen. At its peak in the 1940s, unions led by communists could call a strike that paralysed the nation, and communists influenced the highest level of government, and commanded the unswerving loyalty of thousands. It showed working men and women they could have a better life, and gave them t...

What is a fair wage? Is there a right to work? Is there a right to shelter or to good health? What are the entitlements of those who cannot work? Can opportunities be equal? For women? For Aborigines?For more than a century, Australians have addressed expectations of social justice to their governments and have had to live with the consequences.This book looks at how changing circumstances have generated changing popular aspirations, and how these in turn have been translat...

Geoffrey Bolton was the most versatile and widely travelled of his generation of Australian historians. As a scholar, teacher and commentator he enriched understanding of the country's regional mosaic, some of its notable figures and others who were just as revealing, the natural environment, social patterns and political life. He was also unflagging in his encouragement of others. The contributors to this volume take his work as a departure point for original essays on a variety of themes...

Civil liberties are central to the freedoms that Australians value. They affirm the rights of all to protection from arbitrary authority and enable minorities to flourish; but they have also frequently been disputed. From arguments over censorship in the 1930s to present-day debates on mandatory sentencing, the concept of civil liberties and its impact on our everyday lives is a recurring motif of public life. Liberty is packed with new insights into the way civil liberties have b...

**Winner of the 2014 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for the Best Work of History"Brilliant…the most challenging and intelligent book on the Great War and our perceptions of it that any of us will read." —John Charley, The Times [London]**One of the most violent conflicts in the history of civilization, World War I has been strangely forgotten in American culture. It has become a ghostly war fought in a haze of memory, often seen merely as a distant preamble to World War...

170,000 Displaced Persons arrived in Australia between 1947 and 1952 the first non-Anglo-Celtic mass migrants.Australia's first immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, scoured post-war Europe for refugees, Displaced Persons he characterised as 'Beautiful Balts'. Amid the hierarchies of the White Australia Policy, the tensions of the Cold War and the national need for labour, these people would transform not only Australia's immigration policy, but the country itself.Beaut...

Raise a glass for an Anzac. Run for an Anzac. Camp under the stars for an Anzac. Is there anything Australians won't do to keep the Anzac legend at the centre of our national story?But standing firm on the other side of the Anzac enthusiasts is a chorus of critics claiming that the appetite for Anzac is militarising our history and indoctrinating our children. So how are we to make sense of this struggle over how we remember the Great War?Anzac, the Una...

'If only', 'what if' and 'why didn't we' are phrases that often come to mind when we look back to the past. This exciting and stimulating book looks backat turning points and crucial moments in Australian history. Rather than arguing that there have been forks on a pre-determined road, the book challenges us to think about other paths or better paths that might have led to different outcomes. It shows that a decisive event often becomes so only in retrospect and that what seemed like a maj...

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...

The Cold War was a turbulent time to grow up in. Family ties were tested, friendships were torn apart and new beliefs forged out of the ruins of old loyalties. In this book, through twelve evocative stories of childhood and early adulthood in Australia during the Cold War years, writers from vastly different backgrounds explore how global political events affected the intimate space of home, family life and friendships.Some writers were barely in their teens when they felt the firs...