In this innovative mixture of labor history and cultural history, Diane Kirkby explores the central figure of the barmaid. Drawing on previously unexplored archives, new documentary sources and oral h
State and private employers in New South Wales recognised the convicts' previous occupations, and employed a large proportion of them in the same occupations they had held at home. The women convicts - often classified as prostitutes - in fact brought a range of occupational skills equally as important for the economic development of Australia as those of the male convicts. Once settled in Australia, the convicts consumed a diet, and experienced housing, superior to that received by free men and women at home. The organisation of their work was not very different from that in Britain and Ireland and, while cruel treatment did exist, the likelihood of numerous floggings during their term of sentence is shown to be a myth. Convict workers is a study in comparative history, noting the resemblances and the contrasts with indentured labour, slavery and punitive communities elsewhere. By illuminating the contribution of the convict workers to Australia's economic and social development.
From the Ruins of Colonialism throws new light on history, social memory and colonialism. The book charts how films, books and storytelling, public commemoration and instruction have, in a strange ens
Hunters and Collectors is about historical consciousness and environmental sensibilities in European Australia from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It is in part a collective biography of t
The Politics of Work is concerned with the complex relationship between economic and technological change, the nature of sexual division in the workforce, and the role of union, employer and state act
Up until the 1970s, a large proportion of Aboriginal people in Australia had some experience in institutions as part of government assimilation and protection policies. By focusing on three communiti
"Taking the absence of Aboriginal people in rural South Australian settler descendants' historical consciousness as a starting point, Memory, Place and Aboriginal-Settler History combines the methodol
