Endeavouring Banks: Exploring Collections from the Endeavour Voyage. Edited by Neil Chambers. Sydney: New South Publishing, 2016. Pp. $69.99 hardcover. The catalogue to a major exhibition held in Lincoln, UK, this sumptuous publication about the Endeavour’s collections also serves as a valuable contribution to eighteenth-century Pacific history. The exhibition of the same title was held … Continue reading Review of Endeavouring Banks
Last year I was honored to launch the latest book by my friend and collaborator, Mike McDonnell. The transcript is below. You are all Mike’s friends and colleagues, so you probably know—or you should know—the basic gist of this book. If you don’t: it’s about the Native Americans who live at the top end of … Continue reading Masters of Empire
When I joined the Modern History Department at Macquarie University, I did not realize how many members were into swimming. By odd coincidence, I spent a good deal of my early years swimming at national competitions. My new colleagues spotted a vulnerability and soon I was also part of their Saturday morning racing down at … Continue reading Swimming
Until late 2021, I am the Lead Chief Investigator in a large collaborative project called "Facing New Worlds." This project is generously funded by the Australian Research Council's Linkage Scheme and housed in the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. It involves researchers from Macquarie University, the University of Sydney, and the Australian National University, and turns around … Continue reading Comparative Portrait Project
Growing up a land-locked swimmer: musings on oceans, pools and coaching [published in T. Evans, ed., Swimming with the Spit (Sydney: NewSouth Press, 2016). My mum was a poor swimmer. She had migrated to Australia from England in 1964, and remained permanently worried about being ‘out of her depth’. She had heard that all Australian … Continue reading My Spit Chapter
Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin. The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016. Pp. 353. $49.50. “For more than two hundred years,” the authors of this timely new book state, “people have loved to hate Thomas Robert Malthus” (1). The formulator of the bitterest … Continue reading Review of The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus
Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire. By Coll Thrush. The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016. 328 pages. Cloth. Like its cover image of three Cherokees traversing a London pedestrian crossing, this book is arresting and intriguing, and it successfully challenges ongoing assumptions about where and how … Continue reading Review of Indigenous London
