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Meredith Lake, The Bible in Australia: A cultural history, updated edition
Meredith Lake, The Bible in Australia: A cultural history, updated edition NewSouth Books, 2020, 518 pp. ISBN: 9781742237213, p/bk, AUS$32.99 Meredith Lake’s The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History is now available in a second edition. When I first reviewed Lake’s epic…
The first woman hanged in Sydney
David Collins records the death of Ann Davis in An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 1798, p86 On 23 November 1789, Ann Davis became the first woman hanged in New South Wales. Listen to Rachel and Alex…
Janet Lee, Fallen Among Reformers: Miles Franklin, Modernity, and the New Woman
Janet Lee, Fallen Among Reformers: Miles Franklin, Modernity, and the New Woman Sydney University Press, June 2020, 168 pp. (plus works cited and index), ISBN: 9781743326886, p/bk, AUS$45.00 In a new full-length work on Miles Franklin (1879–1954), Janet Lee, Professor of Women,…
Kathryn Harkup, Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts
Kathryn Harkup, Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts Bloomsbury, July 2020, 340 pp. (plus an appendix, bibliography, acknowledgements and index), ISBN: 9781472958211, p/bk, AUS$29.99 The great Bard is well known for his plays and his poetry. He is also a…
Horse Drawn: John Rae and 'The Turning of the First Turf'
John Rae c1884, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (ML MSS A807) John Rae is, perhaps, my favourite dead white male. On the surface, he’s really rather ordinary. An administrator who was meticulous and ambitious, he was a career public servant.…
Order in the Court! The Trial of Two Murderers
John Jenkins 1834, by John Gardiner Austin, National Library of Australia (nla.pic-an5600121) In the mid-eighteenth century, the famous London magazine Punch published a short piece on the ever-increasing popularity of true crime stories: We are a trading community—a commercial people. Murder is,…
A story of escape: a terrible true tale or fake news?
Traveller's engraved horn, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (LR 23) One of the most perplexing tales to come out of Norfolk Island in the nineteenth century is the story of Bennett and Balsto. A story that beautifully illustrates both the…
Anne McKendry, Medieval Crime Fiction: A Critical Overview
Anne McKendry, Medieval Crime Fiction: A Critical Overview McFarland & Company, 267 pp., ISBN: 9781476666716, p/bk, US$39.95 Medieval Crime Fiction: A Critical Overview by Anne McKendry is this year’s must-have text for all crime fiction enthusiasts and scholars. McKendry’s work is a stunningly…
David Hill, Convict Colony
David Hill, Convict Colony Allen & Unwin, 2019, 356 pp., ISBN: 9781760528669, p/bk, AUS$32.99 David Hill's new book Convict Colony is positioned as a story of a settlement that survived against all the odds, covering the first thirty years of the colonisation of…
William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company Bloomsbury, 2019, 522 pp., ISBN: 9781408864388, p/bk, AUS$26.99 Highly-regarded historian William Dalrymple's The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company is a fabulous achievement. There are two epigraphs upfront.…