AustLit

'This rich book charts the complex relationship between two iconic Australian women of the mid-20th century: Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hill. Journalists and writers, Bates’s and Hill’s life stories are set against the “great Australian loneliness” of the outback. It is a masterful act of storytelling that is beautifully written, and readers are drawn into an intimacy with the subjects.' (Introduction)

'Marilyn Lake — Tasmanian high achiever, academic, inspired and inspiring historian, thinker, collaborator, mentor, teacher, activist, role‐model, provocateur, friend, ally and shape shifter — is at the centre of this wonderfully rich and appropriately thoughtful collection of essays in her honour. From beginning to end one is left with the sense of a leading Australian historian whose contributions to Australian life and thought, and to Australian history, have been profound, an “astonishing record of achievement” in the words of Ann McGrath.' (Introduction)

'Aboriginal affairs has always been a sore point in Australia. Ever since the first Governor attempted to put in place the Colonial Office’s instructions to treat the inhabitants with “amity and kindness” the exercise has been fraught. There is a text-book version of the changing policy landscape and rote school lessons on the gradual acquisition of Aboriginal rights and freedoms. These go some way to conveying the contested ground, political conflict and personal anguish on which this history was built. Yet, they give the impression of evolution and progress. At the same time, the history wars magnified the fractiousness without carving a pathway through. In this paper I recover an important part of the history, which often goes unremarked. I reflect on the role of humanitarian intervention in this politics. Not only has it been critical to the policy landscape — for good and ill — but there are also historical connections and lineages between then and now, which deserve attention. Closely aligned to a history of human rights in Australia, recovering this history seems more pertinent than ever.' (Publication abstract)

'Mary Montgomerie Bennett (1881-1961) has been called many things: benefactor, biographer, indigenous culture recorder, indigenous rights activist, pamphleteer and schoolteacher. While these descriptions neatly encapsulate her core contributions, there is one descriptor missing from the list that was arguably the defining characteristic of her life and life's work. Above all else Mary Bennett was a writer. She was certainly a biographer, having written her father's biography in 1927. Pamphleteer also encapsulates the nature of her writing, which was thoroughly political, in pursuit of a cause and for the purpose of broadcasting her views. She was also an epistolographer whose extensive letters were both acts of resistance and self-definition. This article explores the significance of writing to Bennett's life and work, and shows how her pen was not just a means of publicising her views and the 'wrongs of the Aborigines' but was a weapon she wielded in her war with the Australian state in defence of the same.'  (Publication abstract)

'This book charts the life and work of one of Australia’s leading twentieth century human rights advocates. It recovers the efforts of Mary Bennett (1881-1961) to found a ‘just relationship’ between Aborigines and non-Aborigines in Australia from the late 1920s, when the possibility of Aboriginal human rights was first mooted on the international stage, to the 1960s, when an attempt was made to have the Aboriginal question raised before the United Nations.

'By placing Bennett’s biography in the context of her humanitarianism—her crusade— Alison Holland reveals the ethics of care, as well as the tensions, contradictions and investments at the heart of humanitarian intervention. Along the way, she shows the forces and ideas which shaped Bennett’s advocacy and the wider context within which her story and her efforts took shape. In demonstrating the close connection between humanitarianism as a political project and the rise of human rights, Holland tells an important chapter in the little known history of human rights in Australia.' (Publication summary)