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While authors of the late 19th century may have been concerned with the production of a masculinist boy, the borrowing patterns of a group of children at a Sunday-school library in Australia show a far more fluid approach to reading and to gender. The children of the emerging Presbyterian middle class at Kurrajong Heights approached their library with imagination and originality. Girls were interested in the practicalities of work and engineering, while boys inhabited more imaginary worlds. There were staggered and overlapping ideas of what it was to be male or female. Borrowing records introduce the complex and confused world of lower middle-class female authors and their influence in making boys and girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smartphone and tablet devices appear to offer some benefits for enhancing the quality of life of people living with dementia, especially enabling them to stay independent and socially engaged in the early stages of the disease. However, there remains a need to understand the ways that these devices may enhance the lived experience of people living with dementia, mild cognitive impairment, and their caregivers. We interviewed 29 people living with dementia, mild cognitive impairment, and their caregivers to explore their experiences of and attitudes towards smartphones and tablets. We generated three main themes: smart devices in practice as a person living with cognitive impairment; living in a digital world, and smart devices as appropriate and easily accessible support for everyday living. Smart devices were seen as valuable, versatile tools to complete essential and meaningful activities, and as necessary devices to participate in modern life. There was a strong desire for greater support to learn to use smart devices to facilitate living well with cognitive impairment. The lived experience of people living with dementia and mild cognitive impairment emphasises the central role of smart devices in their lives, and the need for research to move beyond rehearsal of what is needed to co-production and evaluation of smart technology-based educational interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the intersection between women, reading and colonization in late-19th-century Australia. Particular focus is given to the diary and scrapbook of an Australian girl named Mabel Ogilvie, which focused upon an imaginary realm centered on ideas surrounding Puseyism, a spiritual and ritualistic form of Anglicanism. The author describes how women were chroniclers of the Australian frontier in the late-19th-century, a region that was empire-focused and believed in faulty race science that saw indigenous persons as inferior.

MARTHA LLOYD'S HOUSEHOLD BOOK The original manuscript from Jane Austen's kitchen Introduced and annotated by Julienne Gehrer, with a foreword by Deirdre Le Faye 312pp. Bodleian Library. 30 [pounds sterling]. [...]

Rose Selwyn (1824–1905) was a first wave Australian feminist and public speaker. The poetry, art, and scraps of writing Rose left in her archive allow the reader to piece together an intellectual history, a genealogy of the making of self. Rose attained her way of being through several contemporary influences—the mysticism of Tractarianism, a concern with death and its meanings, an interest in the literary edges of the world, a concern with the suffering body, and a passion for women and a woman-centred world. From these tangled contemporary concerns, she made a feminism for all non-Aboriginal women apparent in her speeches. Her role as a colonising woman in a violent landscape created a complex relationship with Aboriginal people where she may be seen to be criticising her elite landholding (squatter) peers and introducing concepts such as an Aboriginal parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the Hunter River of New South Wales older Regency esthetics of light- colored floaty fabrics were still dominant in the 1830 s and 1840 s. This esthetic was engaged in by both men and women though men were forging the tailored working clothes look of the squatter. While cut and tailoring were important to men, a look was to be achieved, fabric and its tactile nature was important to women. One distinguished oneself by the fabric one chose. Squatter income was erratic and risky and this affected the gift of clothing between women. Smaller, handmade objects like netted mittens, collars and cuffs were exchanged as gifts in an intimate connection with objects as signifiers of affection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depositions, the initial documents of a criminal case, show the interpretation of their task by magistrates and the extent of policing by constables alongside understandings of law by ordinary people. They also show how the Aboriginal subject was countenanced. Molong magistrates attempted zealous adherence to the requirements of the law but their enthusiasm led to them overstepping their allotted role set out in legal texts and the Justice Acts 1850. Constables also exhibited a similar uncontrolled diligence. Ordinary people imagined law could be manipulated to their own ends, but they did so inexpertly and uncertainly. Molong shows one of the cultures developed around law in the mid-nineteenth century and the sheer malleability of what is understood as law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]