Vol 17 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography is the first of the two to deal with the period 1981-1990, recording the lives of Australians whom many of us remember from the recent past.

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.

Vol 17 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography is the first of the two to deal with the period 1981-1990, recording the lives of Australians whom many of us remember from the recent past.

THE ADB'S STORY is a detailed history of the eminent publication THE AUSTRALIAN DICTIONARY OF BIOGRAPHY. Published as part of the ANU Lives series, the National Centre of Biography has produced this comprehensive profile of the ADB's origins, processes and people. Edited by Melanie Nolan and Christine Fernon, this is a fantastic book for scholars of Australian history and biography.

The fascinating biography of a brilliant man who captured the nation's imagination and boldly showed Australians who we were and how we could change In the 1960s, Donald Horne offered Australians a compelling reinterpretation of the Menzies years as a period of social and political inertia and mediocrity. His book The Lucky Country was profoundly influential and, without doubt, one of the most significant shots ever fired in Australia's endless culture war. Ryan Cropp's landmark biography positions Horne as an antipodean Orwell, a lively, independent and distinct literary voice 'searching for the temper of the people, accepting it, and moving on from there'. Through the eyes – and unforgettable words – of this preternaturally observant and articulate man, we see a recognisable modern Australia emerge. Shortlisted for the 2024 National Biography Award 'A compulsive read about a writer who shaped the way we Australians think about ourselves' —Judith Brett 'Unmissable for anybody interested in the intellectual life of this country' —Sean Kelly 'Ryan Cropp's thoughtful life of Donald Horne … charted the restless and provocative habits of his subject with care and elegance, and animated decades of faded news and current affairs with colour and poise.' —Patrick Mullins, Australian Book Review 'Books of the Year 2023' 'In his accomplished and insightful biography … Cropp has captured a full life, well lived, that was a tribute to the importance of paying attention and making a difference.' —Julianne Schultz, The Conversation

Decadence meets gothic in Manfred Macmillan (1907), a carefully constructed tale of doppelgangers, magical intrigue, and the rootless scion of a noble house. This annotated, first-ever English translation presents an early queer novel long unavailable except in the original Czech. Author Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic (1871–1951) was a major cultural figure in his native Bohemia and cultivated ties with fellow artists from across Central Europe. In their extensive scholarly introduction, translator Carleton Bulkin and translation scholar Brian James Baer situate the novel within longer histories of gay literature, fascinations with the occult, and the cultural and linguistic politics of so-called peripheral European nations. They persuasively frame Karásek as a queer author and cultural disruptor in the fin de siècle Habsburg space. Karasék rejected Czech translations of ancient Greek writers that bowdlerized gay themes, and he personally and vigorously defended Oscar Wilde in print, both on the grounds of artistic freedom and of private morality. He also published a cycle of homoerotic poems under the title Sodom, confiscated by the Austrian authorities but republished in 1905 and repeatedly afterward. A colonized subject, a literary decadent, and a sexual outlaw, Karasék’s complex responses to his own marginalization can be traced through his fantastically strange novel trilogy Three Magicians. As the first volume in that series, Manfred Macmillan is a gorgeous, compelling, and important addition to expanding canons of LGBTQI+ literature.

A clear-eyed examination of how Australia should approach the complex security challenges at play in its maritime domain Security starts at home ... Australia has drawn closer to many of its Asia-Pacific neighbours in recent years, but 'when push comes to shove, it continues to look well beyond the oceans and regions that surround it to the distant horizons of Europe and North America for its ultimate security guarantee'. In Girt by Sea, international-relations experts Rebecca Strating and Joanne Wallis instead turn their gazes to Australia's near region, focusing on the six maritime domains central to its national interests: the north seas (the Timor, Arafura and Coral Seas and the Torres Strait), the Western Pacific, the South China Sea, the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean. In so doing, they reimagine how Australia should understand its strategic challenges and find lasting security.

Hank Nelson was an academic, film-maker, teacher, graduate supervisor and university administrator. His career at The Australian National University (ANU) spanned almost 40 years of notable accomplishment in expanding and deepening our understanding of the history and politics of Papua New Guinea, the experience of Australian soldiers at war, bush schools and much else. This book is a highly readable tribute to him, written by those who knew him well, including his students, and also contains wide-ranging works by Hank himself. –Professor Stewart Firth, ANU.

Profiling more than 1400 print and electronic sources, this book helps connect librarians and researchers to the most relevant sources of information in genealogy and biography.

Classical Aboriginal societies in Australia have commonly been described in terms of social organisation and local organisation. This book presents rich detail on a third and related domain that has not been given the same kind of attention: linguistic organisation. Basing their analyses on fieldwork among the Wik peoples of Cape York Peninsula, north Australia, Peter Sutton and Ken Hale show how cosmology, linguistic variation, language prehistory, clan totemic identities, geopolitics, land use and land ownership created a vibrant linguistic organisation in a classical Aboriginal society. This has been a society long in love with language and languages. Its people have richly imbued the domain of rights and interests in country—the foundations of their native title as recognised in Australian law—with rights and interests in the abundance of languages and dialects given to them at the start of the world.