Following art historian Bernard Smith's award-winning autobiographical account of his earlier life ("The Boy Adeodatus: the portrait of a lucky young bastard", first published in 1984) he now reflects on life in the 1940s. Themes recalling the period before the family departed for England in September 1948 include; courtship and marriage; forebodings of war and attitudes to Communism and Fascism; political involvement in cultural activities with artists and emigre European-trained art historians anxious to promote modern art and knowledge of art history (not taught in universities at that time) and early employment at the Art Gallery of New South Wales pioneering the arrangement of travelling exhibitions for regional centres. Smith's formative training as an art historian and critic is the important and recurring theme of this book. It encompasses his encounters at London's Courtauld and Warburg Institutes with art historians Anthony Blunt, Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Wittkower and many others; his introduction to art historical methodologies and insights (such as Gombrich's insistence on the linkage between image and concept); and his obligatory 'grand tours' of a range of European cities and their museums, art works and architectural monuments.

Subtle and wide-ranging in its account, this study explores the impact of Australian art in Britain in the two decades following the end of World War II and preceding the 'Swinging Sixties'. In a transitional period of decolonization in Britain, Australian painting was briefly seized upon as a dynamic and reinvigorating force in contemporary art, and a group of Australian artists settled in London where they held centre stage with group and solo exhibitions in the capital's most prestigious galleries. The book traces the key influences of Sir Kenneth Clark, Bernard Smith and Bryan Robertson in their various (and varying) roles as patrons, ideologues, and entrepreneurs for Australian art, as well as the self-definition and interaction of the artists themselves. Simon Pierse interweaves multiple issues of the period into a cohesive historical narrative, including the mechanics of the British art world, the limited and frustrating cultural scene of 1950s Australia, and the conservative influence of Australian government bodies. Publishing for the first time archival material, letters, and photographs previously unavailable to scholars either in Britain or Australia, this book demonstrates how the work of expatriate Australian artists living in London constructed a distinct vision of Australian identity for a foreign market.

Australian and international modernity from the late 19th to the mid-20th century inspires research in many fields of cultural endeavour: architecture, fine arts, design, cinema, theatre, and music; in urban studies, literary history and Aboriginal studies. Impact of the Modern brings together examples of this new interdisciplinary work on modern Australian culture by 21 leading scholars. Their writings reveal an original account of 'modernising' Australia as dynamic and creative in many art forms, and interactively linked with international processes and ideas. The essays in Impact of the Modern were presented as papers at the conference, 'Australian Vernacular Modernities', convened by the editors at the University of Queensland in 2006. Plenary papers by Jill Julius Matthews and Angela Woollacott signal the book's focus on the erotic and gendered spaces, and on popular aspects of modernity. They provide the central focus of the material, through such vital and dynamic categories as the 'modern', the 'erotic' and the 'primitive'. As essential components of the historical processes of innovation and modernisation, these central questions of gender and public sociality are taken up in diverse ways in the other chapters, forming a varied and exciting study of a range of creative Australian engagements with modern international life and popular culture.

​This book draws on archival, oral history and public policy sources to tell a history of foster care in Australia from the nineteenth century to the present day. It is, primarily, a social history which places the voices of people directly touched by foster care at the centre of the story, but also within the wider social and political debates which have shaped foster care across more than a century. The book confronts foster care’s difficult past—death and abuse of foster children, family separation, and a general public apathy towards these issues—but it also acknowledges the resilience of people who have survived a childhood in foster care, and the challenges faced by those who have worked hard to provide good foster homes and to make child welfare systems better. These are themes which the book examines from an Australian perspective, but which often resonate with foster care globally.

Park Min-gyu has been celebrated and condemned for his attacks upon what he perceives as the humorlessness of contemporary Korean literature. Pavane for a Dead Princess is his attack upon the beauty-fetish that reigns over popular culture, detailing the relationship between a man with matinee-idol good looks and "the ugliest woman of the century." To complicate matters further, Park also includes a so-called "writer's cut" of the same story, offering alternate versions of the facts, giving the reader the opportunity to imagine all the different ways this same novel might have been written.

Grahame Kings life as an artist began with his mastery of the new art of colour reproduction as a photolithographic colour etcher in Melbourne in the 1930s. At the same time, study at the National Gallery Art School with George Bell assisted his development as a painter. After war service and travels abroad, King returned to Melbourne with his wife, the sculptor Inge King. The two held a number of joint exhibitions of paintings and sculptures in Australia throughout the 1950s and then, from c.1962 Grahame King turned his attention, increasingly, towards the art of lithography becoming a master in this field of printmaking. He has also devoted himself to promoting the art of lithography and printmaking generally through the Print Council of Australia. He is often called Australias patron saint of printmaking. The book examines his seven decades working as an artist in Melbourne and is lavishly illustrated with colour reproductions throughout.

A collection of linked short stories set in a twentieth century where The Roman Catholic Church controls the western world, the Protestant Reformation never happened, the Inquisition thrives, and a tyrannical Rome maintains its power in a Dark Age by limiting knowledge, outlawing electricity, and curbing technology.