Alan Atkinson

Alan Atkinson is an honorary senior research fellow at the University of Western Australia. The third and final volume of his book, The Europeans in Australia, won the Victorian Prize for Literature 2015 and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History. He is also the author of Camden, The Commonwealth of Speech and a number of other books. His forthcoming book, Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm (NewSouth Publishing), will appear in late 2022.

Alan Atkinson reviews 'Scurvy: The disease of discovery' by Jonathan Lamb

April 2017, no. 390 • 23 March 2017

I have been dazzled and baffled by this book. The variety of learning, showing itself especially in a range of beautiful and apposite quotations, is wonderful. The depiction of scurvy as subjective experience is brilliant and deeply sympathetic. However, parts of the historical argument are very hard to follow, and altogether they suggest that the imagination at play in these pages is more thoroug ... (read more)

ABR RAFT Fellowship: 'How do we live with ourselves? The Australian national conscience' by Alan Atkinson

September 2016, no. 384 • 22 August 2016

'Never have sentinels between the human and the inhuman been more necessary.' Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor[i] When Australian federation was being planned and its implications first worked through, various men and women with agendas of their own set themselves to make something of it. For some, it was all about internal free trade. For some it was about the equal participation of women ... (read more)

Alan Atkinson reviews 'Settler Society in the Australian Colonies' by Angela Woollacott

August 2015, no. 373 • 29 July 2015

Free settlement in Australia from 1788 to the 1850s is an old and favourite topic for historians in this country. It has engaged historical imagination for nearly two centuries, starting with William Charles Wentworth’s A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales, published in London in 1819. Many other histories were written during the period itself, fo ... (read more)