Biography, Australian History
Book Details

Observing Australia

1959 to 1999

K. S. Inglis

Edited and Introduced by Craig Wilcox

Ken Inglis is one of Australia's most admired and warmly regarded historians. Written with style and wit, Observing Australia is a collection of his short pieces.

Opinion

‘The most striking thing about these pieces is not just their intellectual vigor combined with journalistic flair, but the way they changed perceptions and made things happen.’ (Fiona Capp, The Age, 18 December 1999)

‘Wilcox has achieved something unusual. He has allowed Inglis to effectively write his autobiography through the selection and inclusion of pieces of his writing. This approach makes for an absorbing, enlightening, occasionally moving and frequently entertaining portrayal of a quiet man’s resounding ideas about ourselves.’ (Christopher Bantick, Canberra Times, 20 November 1999)

About this Title

Ken Inglis is one of Australia's most admired and warmly regarded historians. For forty years he has looked with a sharp but sympathetic eye at how we came to be who we are.

Written with style and wit, Observing Australia is a collection of his short pieces. They come from many sources, for Inglis's engagement in our continuing conversation about Australian life has always been expressed through the mainstream press as well as in scholarly journals and his books.

Of those books, The Stuart Case related how the life of an Aboriginal man, wrongly condemned to death, was saved, while Australian Colonists set a new path for Australian social history. Later came Inglis's penetrating history of the ABC, and his role as a creator of the massive bicentennial history Australians: A Historical Library, and his recent multi-award-winning Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape.

This collection reflects the breadth of Inglis's interests: the making and remaking of Australian nationality, war, memory and ritual; the lives of colleagues such as Manning Clark and Stephen Murray-Smith; religion, multiculturalism, and finding the right word.

About the Author

Ken Inglis is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University. He has been a Professor of History at the ANU and at the University of Papua New Guinea. Craig Wilcox, a former student of Inglis's, was a Fellow at the Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at the University of London when he edited this book, wrote its introduction, and compiled its comprehensive bibliography of Inglis's writing.

About the editor: Craig Wilcox is a historian who is currently writing a history of Australia’s part in the Boer war. He studied history at the University of New South Wales and at the Australian National University, where he wrote a doctoral thesis partly under the supervision of Ken Inglis. His first book, For hearths and homes: citizen soldiering in Australia 1854–1945 was published in 1998.

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978-0-522-84866-3