The Australian Historical Association
The site for and about historians working in or on Australia.
In Kin: A Real People’s History of Our Nation (Hardie Grant) Nick Brodie traces his family tree back to some of the earliest white arrivals in the Australia to uncover a series of stories of hardship and travail, of revival and treasured memory, of individual hope, and of social, economic and cultural achievement. It was Read more …
Tanya Evans’s Fractured Families: Life on the Margins in Colonial New South Wales (NewSouth Books) uses the extensive archives of The Benevolent Society, Australia’s first charity founded in 1813, to reclaim unknown lives and consider the often random nature of betterment and progress.
Marian Quartly, Shurlee Swain and Denise Cuthbert, in The Market in Babies: Stories of Australian Adoption (Monash Unversity Publishing), tell the history of adoption in Australia from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to its decline at the beginning of the twenty-first. As the rate of adoptions in Australia falls to a historic low, and parliaments Read more …