Tom Griffiths

Slicing The Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica by Tom Griffiths

May 2007, no. 291

Last year I was invited to a literary festival celebrating writing about Antarctica. At the opening drinks session, I fell into conversation with a woman who, when she learned I was a participant, asked me if I had been ‘down south’. I said I hadn’t. She replied somewhat ungraciously, I thought, that she felt few would take me seriously in this forum because I hadn’t made the trip. I was taken aback, but still managed to mutter something in reply about Antarctica’s fascination as an imaginative space.

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History as Therapy

by Tom Griffiths •

March 2004, no. 259

At the height of summer fire danger, on Friday, 13 February 2004, the ABC launched on its website an online documentary about the most awesome bushfires since the European occupation of Australia. The Black Friday fires of 1939 still represent the ‘worst possible’ conditions in a continent of fire. The website reveals just how deeply Black Friday burned into the national conscience, and how profoundly it changed attitudes to society and nature. It also took lives and left survivors with enduring emotional and physical scars. Some of those stories are told for the first time.

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Hunters and Collectors: The antiquarian imagination in Australia by Tom Griffiths

by Geoffrey Bolton •

May 1996, no. 180

Geoffrey Bolton reviews 'Hunters and Collectors: The antiquarian imagination in Australia' by Tom Griffiths

Six weeks after the First Fleet sailed for New South Wales Edward Gibbon completed The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Probably the finest example of the Western tradition of history as chronological and sequential, Gibbon’s work provided the Europe of his time with a panoramic background against which the achievements of modern civilization could be measured.

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