Memories and Dreams Reflections on Twentieth Century Australia

'Modern Australia. has many different meanings. The essays in this collection demonstrate that historians have been involved in both constructing and challenging those meanings. Most history asks how we came to be as we are, but never is the question so immediate as when we face the twentieth century. Here we look into a mirror in which we can recognise ourselves. This disturbing feeling of closeness is the peculiar challenge of twentieth-century history - the consciousness that so many of its events are within living memory, the sense that our lives are entangled with it, the awareness that it underpins so many of our dilemmas today. The twentieth century is the repository of our collective memories and dreams.'

In this collection, sixteen accounts demonstrate what has been happening to the study of Australian History. Through these essays - on subjects as diverse as Anzac and shopping, 1950s monarchism and forbidden comics, Hills Hoists and Aboriginal politics - the reader can share the excitement of arguing about a past which shapes, and is shaped by, the lives of all of us.

Penny Russell is the author of A Wish Of Distinction: Colonial Gentility And Femininity and is currently working on female culture in Australia. Richard White is the author of Inventing Australia: Images And Identity 1688-1980 and articles on nationalism, popular culture, travel and war.