History

To borrow from Jones and Bassett: ‘Not another Kelly book!’ Well, yes; in fact two more can be added to last year’s bumper crop. One of them comes from Kelly Country itself, written by two local residents. And the two books provide a perfect example of the extremes in the Kelly publishing game.

Venice is a vast project for an historian. Dennis Romano has written what he calls a ‘remarkable history’, generous in its pursuit over 600 pages, with eighty-five pages of impeccable documentation. It is a revisionary history, not only because Romano goes beyond the end of the Republic in 1797, when Napoleon conquered Venice and planted a Tree of Liberty in St Mark’s Square. The three chapters on Modern and Contemporary Venice bring Romano’s history to the present day.

Many students of Australian history are aware of a particularly ugly cartoon published in the Bulletin in December 1946. ‘The Pied Harper’ depicted a hook-nosed Arthur Calwell playing a Jew’s harp welcoming a shipload of ‘imports’ (Jews) into Australia. This was the stereotypical image: bearded, unattractive, and similarly hook-nosed. The analogy with the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin was clear. In contrast – and to assuage such public anxieties about mass migration – were the published photographs in January 1948 of Calwell, the immigration minister, celebrating Nordic-looking ‘beautiful Balts’, as he termed them, on their arrival to Australia.

The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History announced itself in 2001 as ‘a landmark publication, the first such work of reference for any Australian state or territory’. This new edition, which adds entries, updates others, and lands with a thump at almost 200 pages more than the previous volume, is especially timely in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which magnified awareness of the differences between the histories and cultures of the Australian states.

In his 2015 study of Joseph Stalin, historian Stephen Kotkin suggested that the Bolshevik revolution could have been stopped by just two bullets: one aimed at Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, hiding across the border in Finland but pressing the Bolshevik Party to seize power; a second bullet for Leon Trotsky, on the ground in Petrograd as a determined band of Red Guards, sailors, and soldiers stormed the Winter Palace.

Across more than five hundred pages and written by thirty-three contributors, Dhoombak Goobgoowana contains stories about the University of Melbourne’s relationship with Indigenous Australians.

In September 2023, ancient Rome became the focus of a viral social media trend. Women were encouraged to ask men how often they thought about the Roman Empire. The results were emphatic. It became apparent that many men thought about the Roman Empire frequently. The enduring fascination with the Romans should not be surprising; they continue to have an impact on our lives every day.

Robert Fisk was one of a few journalists who could rightly be described as a legend in his lifetime. Anyone with a passing interest in the Middle East over the past fifty years will certainly know his name and will probably have come across some of his reporting. Serious students of the region will have read his books. British-born, Fisk was mostly based in Beirut from 1976 until his death in 2020, during which time he covered all the wars – and horrors – of the greater Middle East. What he witnessed infuriated him; seething anger permeated his writing.

The English Soul is a history of Christianity in England from the Venerable Bede to the present, a period of roughly 1,400 years. Its enthralling journey leads us from the medieval mystics, including Julian of Norwich, through the torments of the English Reformation and the exhilarating spread of revivalist and evangelical movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the charismatic Christian movements of more recent times. If the narrative that emerges is principally that of the Established Church and the creation of its High and Low denominations, it is also one that encounters a shocking array of sects and seekers, doubters and dissenters, ranters and ravers, along the way.