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Political diaries can claim literary, political and intellectual significance, yet they have rarely been subject to serious or extended enquiry. In this article we offer the first comprehensive survey of the Australian political diary. We also analyse these writings in some depth, suggesting that, taken as a whole, the diaries reveal three Weberian “ideal types” of the politician: the “patrician”, the “professional”, and the “radical”. These ideal types are used to shed a new light on the functioning and limitations of parliamentary democracy in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tracks the passage of Aboriginal protection, as a contested imperial institution, from the Caribbean to Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand via the Cape Colony and Britain. In doing so, it reconfigures the historical geographies of colonial philanthropy, and of those individuals who sought to implement and resist it, as a set of specific, intersecting trajectories. These trajectories, of people, ideas and texts, both connected and remade multiple colonial places. The article also advocates positioning the contemporary politics of the colonial past in Britain, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, within a wider, trans-imperial, set of connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Australia Felix” was an exclamation, an inspiration, a propaganda coup, and an enduring myth. As a description it was accurate for European pastoralists and fatal for the people who watched the Europeans arrive. The name, as a geographical designation, had a very short life. The Aboriginal owners and inhabitants of the country lost their land and their lives within the same short years. When Melbourne was founded in 1835 there may have been more than 10,000 Aborigines in the Port Phillip District that would become the state of Victoria. Two decades later, less than 2,000 remained. A decline of 80% in 20 years—some peoples suffered a 90% loss in less than ten years—is for most historians no reason to raise a question of genocide. The historical record suggests reconsideration is overdue. The views and actions of settlers who achieved the total displacement and near extinction of the Aboriginal peoples in a few short years are only part of the story. Official records show that both the government and parliament of Imperial Britain foresaw such a terrible outcome, and took steps, however inadequate, to avert it. They knew the relations of genocide—“extinction”—were endemic to colonization. Conscious of being responsible for the lives of colonized peoples, their clear intention was to prevent more deaths. The concerned authorities who instituted an undermanned and short-lived Protectorate were less clear about the way their larger intentions made them complicit in destruction. By ideology and pragmatism they were as much engaged in the great historical venture as the settlers they sought to curb. The British civilization that engendered their Christian concern was the same civilization destined to extinguish the indigenous world. Thus did even the most informed and idealistic men of influence help doom the peoples they worked so hard to save. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today we accept that football in its various forms is the predominant winter sport in Brisbane; in fact, it is reasonable to state that this is true globally. This paper examines the construction of identity of Brisbane and its people through football in the colony of Queensland during the 1880s. It demonstrates the centrality of sport in this process. The struggle over the choice of football code illustrates how sport was a feature of contested social and cultural terrains and how support for a game was a source of the construction of the identity of initially Brisbane and later Queensland. The paper further illustrates the centrality of the role of sport in the cultural hegemony of British imperialism and of the predominance of the ideology of athleticism in the public schools of colonial Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kenneth Russell, bibliophile, anatomist, surgeon and historian helped to acquire Leslie Cowlishaw's historical library for the College, and subsequently cared for and catalogued the collection. One book in the collection is especially interesting as it bears the name of every owner since 1656; another belonged to William Bland of Sydney, sometime surgeon, convict, educator and legislator, whose surgical ability and inventive mind stimulated this reflection on libraries and book lovers. Bland was almost certainly Australia's first vascular surgeon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deals with a study which argued that colonial censuses played a key role in the processes of colonial dispossession of the Aborigines in Australia from 1835 through 1840. Application of Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality; Effect of statistics evolution on traditional ideas of causality in the second half of nineteenth century; Historical accounts of census at Port Philip Bay in New South Wales.

This article evaluates the extent that Aboriginal societies in early nineteenth century Australia were known by Europeans coming into early contact with them as Aboriginal nations rather than as tribes. The study demonstrates that early nineteenth century Evangelicals saw the Aboriginal societies that they encountered on the Australian frontier as nations because the Evangelicals’ view of the world was based on that found in their Bible, in which it is described how God had divided the world up into different nations. The article draws the conclusion that seeing Aboriginal people as nations was common among the Evangelicals. However, the practice of mapping and delineating individual Aboriginal nations was limited to a few Evangelicals, such as George Augustus Robinson and Edward Parker, who had acquired an intimate knowledge of Aboriginal culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eden Alternative™ is a philosophy of personal, organisational and environmental transformation founded by Dr. William Thomas, a Harvard trained geriatrician. He wanted to create a living environment in existing aged care institutions to eliminate loneliness, helplessness and boredom from the lives of residents, which he argued were the plagues of ageing that account for the bulk of their suffering. The Eden Alternative™ is a contemporary approach to long-term care, designed to combat these plagues of ageing, by incorporating companionship, a sense of purpose, variety and spontaneity into the day-to-day experience of aged care residents. Creating a warm, loving and caring 'home' that enriches the lives of all who live and work in it, is the overarching goal of The Eden Alternative™. The locus of decision-making is with the resident, which ensures the right of each resident to a life worth living. This exemplar outlines the inception and growth of The Eden Alternative™ in Australia and New Zealand.