Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 19

Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 19
Author: Melanie Nolan
Publisher: ANU Press
Total Pages: 970
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1760464139

Volume 19 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) contains concise biographies of individuals who died between 1991 and 1995. The first of two volumes for the 1990s, it presents a colourful montage of late twentieth-century Australian life, containing the biographies of significant and representative Australians. The volume is still in the shadow of World War II with servicemen and women who enlisted young appearing, but these influences are dimming and there are now increasing numbers of non-white, non-male, non-privileged and non-straight subjects. The 680 individuals recorded in volume 19 of the ADB include Wiradjuri midwife and Ngunnawal Elder Violet Bulger; Aboriginal rights activist, poet, playwright and artist Kevin Gilbert; and Torres Strait Islander community leader and land rights campaigner Eddie Mabo. HIV/AIDS child activists Tony Lovegrove and Eve Van Grafhorst have entries, as does conductor Stuart Challender, ‘the first Australian celebrity to go public’ about his HIV/AIDS condition in 1991. The arts are, as always, well-represented, including writers Frank Hardy, Mary Durack and Nene Gare, actors Frank Thring and Leonard Teale and arts patron Ian Potter. We are beginning to see the effects of the steep rise in postwar immigration flow through to the ADB. Artist Joseph Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski was born in Poland. Pilar Moreno de Otaegui, co-founded the Spanish Club of Sydney. Chinese restaurateur and community leader Ming Poon (Dick) Low migrated to Victoria in 1953. Often we have a dearth of information about the domestic lives of our subjects; politician Olive Zakharov, however, bravely disclosed at the Victorian launch of the federal government’s campaign to Stop Violence Against Women in 1993 that she was a survivor of domestic violence in her second marriage. Take a dip into the many fascinating lives of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

‘True Biographies of Nations?’

‘True Biographies of Nations?’
Author: Karen Fox
Publisher: ANU Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2019-04-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1760462756

Dictionaries of national biography are a long-established and significant genre of biographical and historical writing, existing in many forms across the globe. This book brings together practitioners from around the English‑speaking world to reflect on national biographical dictionary projects’ recent cultural journeys, and the challenges presented to them by such developments as the transition to a digital environment, a new alertness to the need to represent diversity, and the rise of transnationalism. Exploring their paths forward, the chapters of this book collectively make a powerful argument for the continued value and importance of large‑scale collaborative biographical dictionary research.

Douglas Copland

Douglas Copland
Author: Marjorie Harper
Publisher: Melbourne University Press
Total Pages: 548
Release: 2013
Genre: Academics
ISBN: 9780522862843

"In Australia the name Copland is one to be conjured with.' The Canadian ambassador to China was addressing the diplomatic corps gathered to farewell Professor Douglas Copland, Australia's second Minister to China. It was early 1948, and Copland was leaving China to become founding Vice-Chancellor of the new Australian National University in Canberra. The compliment was a reference to Copland's outstanding career in Australia as an academic, applied economist, administrator and public intellectual. His academic writings were numerous and timely, his newspaper articles were widely syndicated and he was constantly in demand as a public speaker and broadcaster. Copland's name is perpetuated by a lecture theatre at the University of Melbourne, a building at ANU, a secondary college in the Canberra suburb of Melba and by a series of lectures sponsored by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia."

Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1981-1990

Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1981-1990
Author: Diane Langmore
Publisher: The Miegunyah Press
Total Pages: 695
Release: 1966
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 052285382X

Volume 17 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography contains 658 biographies of individuals who died between 1981 and 1990. The first of two volumes for the decade, it presents a colourful mosaic of twentieth-century Australian life. It contains biographies of well-known identities such as Sir Henry Bolte, Sir Robert Askin, Sir Reginald Ansett, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Sir Raphael and Lady Cilento, Sir Arthur Coles, Robert Holmes-O-Court, Sir Warwick Fairfax, Sir Edmund Herring, Albert Facey, Donald Friend, Sir Roy Grounds, Sir Bernard Heinze and Sir Robert Helpmann. Eminent Australian women in the volume include Dame Elizabeth Couchman, Dame Kate Campbell, Dame Doris Fitton, Dame Zara Holt and Lady (Maie) Casey. Although many of the women achieved prominence in those professions conventionally regarded as the preserve of women, othersandmdash;such as Ruby Boye-Jones, coast-watcher; Ellen Cashman, union organiser; Elsie Chauvel, film-maker; Dorothy Crawford, radio producer; Ruth Dobson, diplomat; Mary Hodgkin, anthropologist; Margaret Kelly, restaurateur; and Patricia Jarrett, journalistandmdash;demonstrate that some women at least were breaking free of the constraints of traditional expectations. The lives of fifteen Indigenous Australians are included, as are those of a number of immigrants who fled from persecution in Europe to establish a new life in Australia.

Fortunate Voyager

Fortunate Voyager
Author: Philip Ayres
Publisher: Melbourne University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2013
Genre: Australia
ISBN: 9780522862072

"One life, many roles- soldier, brilliant barrister, High Court judge, Governor-General, Australian diplomat, mediator in Northern Ireland, member of the first war crimes tribunal since Nuremburg and Tokyo, head of UN and Commonwealth missions to crisis zones from Cambodia to Burma to Bangladesh, Sir Ninian Stephen is the recipient of five knighthoods and the most honoured Australian in history--and yet precisely because so much of his work was international it has rarely received the notice it deserves in his home country. In this, the first whole-of-life biography of the subject, Philip Ayres traces Stephen's early life in Scotland, England and around continental Europe, from Edinburgh and the Highlands to the spa towns of France and Germany, from the ski runs above Montreux to the Nuremberg Rally of 1938, including the details of his education at outstanding British and Swiss schools and his highly unorthodox 'family' life as an only child with an absent father, the details of which, like so much here, have never previously been revealed. All this constitutes the unknown Ninian Stephen, and yet so much else in this book is new- the wartime Stephen, the barrister S

Fortunate Life

Fortunate Life
Author: A.B. Facey
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2018-04-21
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1925591417

Albert Facey’s story is the story of Australia.Born in 1894, and first sent to work at the age of eight, Facey lived the rough frontier life of a labourer and farmer and jackaroo, becoming lost and then rescued by Indigenous trackers, then gaining a hard-won literacy, surviving Gallipoli, raising a family through the Depression, losing a son in the Second World War, and meeting his beloved Evelyn with whom he shared nearly sixty years of marriage.Despite enduring unimaginable hardships, Facey always saw his life as a fortunate one.A true classic of Australian literature, Facey’s simply penned story offers a unique window onto the history of Australian life through the greater part of the twentieth century – the extraordinary journey of an ordinary man.

More Than Words: The Making of the Macquarie Dictionary

More Than Words: The Making of the Macquarie Dictionary
Author: Pat Manser
Publisher: Macquarie
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-02-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1760981095

'The Editorial Committee of the dictionary of Australian English, led by Arthur Delbridge, were adamant that their dictionary was to be descriptive. It was an important point of difference from traditional dictionary policy. This dictionary would give an account of Australian English as it was heard and written. We wanted it all: spoken, written, technical, polite, rude. The speech of labourers, the jargon of merchants, swearwords, Australianisms, as well as the basic core of English vocabulary.' The idea for a dictionary of Australian English was conceived in the 1960s, but it wasn't until 1981 that the first edition of the Macquarie Dictionary was published. More Than Words tells the story of how the dictionary was brought to life during this period -- from identifying the need for a genuinely Australian dictionary to the long road towards publication -- and explores how the dictionary has evolved over the years since then.

Courtesan and Countess

Courtesan and Countess
Author: comtesse Céleste Vénard de Chabrillan
Publisher: Melbourne University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780522868838

Text in English; unpublished memoirs originally written in French.

John Monash

John Monash
Author: Geoffrey Serle
Publisher: Melbourne Univ. Publishing
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2013-06-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0522863647

A major Australian university and a great Victorian freeway are named after Sir John Monash, but many people—especially younger generations—know little about him. Monash was one of Australia's greatest men, and probably the greatest of its soldiers. The son of Jewish immigrants from Prussia, he graduated from the University of Melbourne in three faculties—Arts, Law and Engineering. He was a man of wide-ranging intellect, and especially devoted to literature, music, theatre, languages and Jewish scholarship. He achieved fame as a soldier—a citizen-soldier—in World War I. His baptism of fire occurred at Gallipoli, and he was almost the only senior allied general to emerge from the agony of the Western Front with his reputation virtually unspotted. Before the war, Monash pioneered the Australian use of reinforced concrete, then a revolutionary construction material. On his return, he became the first chairman of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, putting his gift for leadership to harnessing Gippsland's huge brown coal deposits. Monash spent his energies lavishly on the public affairs of his native Australia and placed his immense prestige at the service of many great causes. Geoffrey Serle's award-winning and best-selling biography of John Monash is much more than a military study. It offers a revealing portrait of a confident leader and public figure, and of an intensely inward-dwelling and sensitive private person.