AustLit

'Until recently, historians assumed that the 1956 'Ward case', in which the historian Russel Ward was denied a lectureship at the New South Wales University of Technology (now the University of New South Wales), was an example of Cold War political repression in Australian universities. When this orthodoxy was challenged in the conservative journal Quadrant in 2004, the incident was brought to the edges of Australia's 'History Wars'. While it sheds some light on the Cold War intellectual environment, the significance of the case is also derived from its place in this more recent debate, and is boosted by Ward's status as author of the classic text, The Australian Legend (1958). This article draws on previously unexamined records to evaluate the evidence surrounding Ward's failed appointment.' (Publication abstract)

'When novelist Charmian Clift returned to Australia in 1964 after 14 years in England and Greece, she was commissioned to write a women's column in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Herald. Her topics ranged widely, from food and drink, migrants and hospitality, famine and peace, children and religion, pop music and Aborigines to travel and housewives. By all accounts Clift struck a chord with her readers, her feel for connecting the vagaries of everyday life with historical and global events and social shifts made hers a distinctive voice in the daily press. This article explores the cosmopolitan outlook of Clift's newspaper column: a world of hospitality and travel based on a common humanity, a perspective that neither feared nor favoured class, caste and colour, all the while not shying away from criticisms of the moral ambiguities of a sophisticated worldliness. It argues that Clift's cosmopolitan perspective offered women a moral space that circumscribed local conditions. The article adds to an emerging body of knowledge on the gendered dimensions of cosmopolitanism and seeks to understand what kind of cosmopolitan world for women existed in 1960s Australia.' (Publication abstract)

'Since the 1950s, a small but growing number of Australian advertising practitioners have produced memoirs documenting their time in advertising. Generally descriptive in their content, they cover the authors’ career trajectory, their successes and shortcomings, and various personal and professional lessons that they have learnt along the way. By comparing and contrasting these memoirs, this article not only charts the experiences and insights of a career in an advertising agency, it also reveals the ways that these memoirs collectively reflect advertising’s inherently ephemeral nature.' (Publication abstract)

'Determining the authorship of unattributed writings can be a major issue for scholars. As this article demonstrates, computational stylistics provides a valuable methodology in helping to answer the question, 'Who wrote it?' Gold occupied much space in the newspapers of colonial Australia in the 1850s-70s. It kept many reporters very busy. Few, however, are known by name. An exception is Charles de Boos, a prolific reporter for the Melbourne Argus and especially the Sydney Morning Herald. Whilst it is possible to identify much of his work, questions arise over the authorship of other columns, such as the series 'A Visit to the Western Goldfields'. Stylistic analysis has confirmed that this series is not the work of de Boos, but that of another writer who remains anonymous. No methodology answers every question, but this example illustrates the potential of computational stylistics to be an important aid in many areas of historical research.' (Publication abstract)