Angela Woollacott

Australian lives are intricately enmeshed with the world, bound by ties of allegiance and affinity, intellect and imagination. In Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, an eclectic mix of scholars?historians, literary critics, and museologists?trace the flow of people that helped shape Australia?s distinctive character and the flow of ideas that connected Australians to a global community of thought. It shows how biography, and the study of life stories, can contribute greatly to our understanding of such patterns of connection and explores how transnationalism can test biography?s limits as an intellectual, professional and commercial practice.

Race and the Modern Exotic focuses on three internationally successful 'Australian' performers from the first half of the 20th century who created newly-modern, racially-ambiguous, Australian femininities: Annette Kellerman, Rose Quong, and Merle Oberon. Annette Kellerman was a swimmer, diver, lecturer, and silent-film star. Through her international vaudeville performances and film roles, she played with the quasi-racial identity of a South Sea Islander. Rose Quong was an actor, lecturer, and writer who forged a career in London and New York. She built a career based on her own body through a careful appropriation of Orientalism. Quong's body was the signifier of her Chinese authenticity, the essentialist foundation for her constructed, diasporic, Chinese identity. Merle Oberon was one of the most celebrated film stars of the 1930s and 1940s, first in London and then Hollywood. The official story of Oberon's origins was that she was Tasmanian. However, this was a publicity story concocted at the beginning of her film career to mask her lower-class, Anglo-Indian birth. Despite anxious undercurrents about her exoticism, Australians were thrilled to claim a true Hollywood star as one of their own. Racial thinking was at the core of white Australian culture. Far from being oblivious to racial hierarchies and constructions, Australians engaged with them on an everyday basis. Around the world, 'Australian' stars represented a white-settler nation, a culture in which white privilege was entrenched during a period replete with legal forms of discrimination based on race. The complex meanings attached to three successful 'Australian' performers in this period of highly-articulated racism has thus become a popular cultural archive that can be investigated to learn more about contemporary connections between race, exoticism, and gender on the global stage and screen.

Angela Woollacott surveys the role of gender in the new imperial history, looking at key topics and episodes across a broad range of British Empire history. She also explores how gender ideologies and practices affected both sexes and saturated imperial politics and culture.

The first major biography of Don Dunstan, one of the few state premiers to stride the national stage and make a lasting mark on Australian life.

This book examines the experience of women munitions workers in Britain during WW1.

"In the wake of the global financial crisis, new forms of social organization are beginning to take shape. Disparate groups of people are coming together in order to resist corporate globalization and seek a more positive way forward. These movements are not based on hierarchy; rather than looking to those in power to solve their problems, participants are looking to one another. In certain countries in the West, this has been demonstrated by the recent and remarkable rise of the Occupy movement. But in Argentina, such radical transformations have been taking place for years. Everyday Revolutions tells the story of how regular people changed their country and inspired others across the world. Reflecting on new forms of social organization, such as horizontalism and autogestión, as well as alternative conceptions of value and power, Marina Sitrin shows how an economic crisis spurred a people's rebellion; how factory workers and medical clinic technicians are running their workplaces themselves, without bosses; how people have taken over land to build homes, raise livestock, grow crops, and build schools, creating their own art and media in the process. Daring and groundbreaking, Everyday Revolutions serves as an instructive example for activists the world over. It shows how the experiences of the autonomous movements in Argentina can help answer the question of how to turn a rupture into a revolution."--Publisher's website.

"The transnationalism of ordinary lives threatens the stability of national identity and unsettles the framework of national histories and biography. This book takes mobility, not nation, as its frame, and captures a rich array of lives, from the elite to the subaltern, that have crossed national, racial, and cartographic boundaries"--Provided by publisher.