The Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) legend rests upon the assumption that Australia came of age as a nation when the Anzacs landed on Gallipoli on April 25, 1915 during the First World War. This legend is integral to the Australian sense of nationhood and national character. In this highly original book, Alistair Thompson explores both the creation of the legend, and, most crucially, its effect upon those who have lived in its shadow--the survivors of the great war. Looking at the legend's changing significance for Australian politics and society, the author draws on personal interviews with surviving war veterans, as well as the official histories of Charles Bean, and the depiction of Anzacs in nineties novels and movies.

Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend

Thomson, Alistair

Oxford University Press

Anzac Memories

History

Australia & Oceania

OUP Australia and New Zealand

This greatly anticipated update of The Oral History Reader is a comprehensive, international anthology of major, ‘classic’ articles and cutting-edge pieces on the theory, method and use of oral history. This wide-ranging volume illustrates similarities and differences in oral history from around the world, including examples from North and South America, Britain and Europe, Australasia, Asia and Africa. It also details the subjects – such as women's history, family history, gay and lesbian history, ethnic history and disability history – to which oral history has made a significant contribution. This second edition is arranged into five thematic sections. The collection details issues in the theory and practice of oral history and covers influential debates in its development over the past sixty years. New chapters include: <ul>
<li>interview methods and the oral history relationship</li> <li>the use of testimony in truth and reconciliation politics</li> <li>memory and interpretation</li> <li>the digital revolution and new technologies for the creation, use and dissemination of oral history</li> <li>community oral history projects</li> <li>memory and history.</li> </ul>
The Oral History Reader is an essential tool for all students of modern history, memory studies, sociology, anthropology, media studies, cultural and heritage studies, gerontology and archives, library and information studies.

The Oral History Reader (Routledge Readers in History)

Perks, Robert

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Routledge

More than a million Britons emigrated to Australia between the 1940s and 1970s. They were the famous "ten pound Poms" and this is their story. Illuminated by the fascinating testimony of migrant life histories, this is the first substantial history of their experience and fills a gaping hole in the literature of emigration. The authors, both leading figures in the fields of oral history and migration studies, draw upon a rich life history archive of letters, diaries, personal photographs and hundreds of oral history interviews with former migrants, including those who settled in Australia and those who returned to Britain.

Ten Pound Poms: A Life History of British Postwar Emigration to Australia

Hammerton, A.James

Manchester University Press

More than a million Britons emigrated to Australia between the 1940s and 1970s. They were the famous 'ten pound Poms' and this is their story. Illuminated by the fascinating testimony of migrant life histories, this is the first substantial history of their experience and fills a gaping hole in the literature of emigration. The authors, both leading figures in the fields of oral history and migration studies, draw upon a rich life history archive of letters, diaries, personal photographs and hundreds of oral history interviews with former migrants, including those who settled in Australia and those who returned to Britain. They offer original interpretations of key historical themes, including: motivations for emigration; gender relations and the family dynamics of migration; the 'very familiar and awfully strange' confrontation with the new world; the anguish of homesickness and return; and the personal and national identities of both settlers and returnees, fifty years on. Accessible and appealing, this book will engage readers interested in British and Australian migration history and intrigued about the significance of migrant memories for individuals, families and nations.

‘Ten Pound Poms’: A life history of British postwar emigration to Australia

I'm not a good mother - not what Dr. Spock calls a "slow mother" who leaves her chores to make sure junior gets the right treatment. (Dorothy Wright, 1961) I must admit that I am no longer the same person who was tied to the kitchen sink at home. (Phyllis Cave, 1973) This book represents a unique collaboration between a historian and four ordinary women who were extraordinary letters-writers, family photographers and memoirists. As British migrants to Australia these women recorded in intimate detail aspects of everyday life and women's experience that are often lost to history: childcare and housework, housing and domestic appliances, friendship, family and married life. Taken together, their stories enrich and complicate our understanding of key themes in twentieth century women's history. This book will appeal to students and academics interested in British and Australian social history, oral history, women's studies and the lived experience of migration.

Moving Stories: An intimate history of four women across two countries

Skillfully combining oral history and biography, Alistair Thomson tells the life stories of Phyllis, Gwen, Joan and Dorothy, illuminating the forgotten history of women's lives before the advent of feminism. As housewives, working mothers and adventurous travellers, these women recorded, described, compared and explained their everyday lives in Australia in the letters and photos they sent to their families in Britain. In writing about childcare and housework, friendship, family and married life, these women reveal much about Britain and Australia at the time, but as much about themselves.

UNSW Press

Through the Joy of Learning: Diary of 1000 Adult Learners

TOWNSEND, Sue

Coare, Pam

National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE)

"What is taboo in any family or in any society is never fixed. And neither is that body of family information which everybody knows but no one talks about. Mental illness is one such subject, and it created a kind of fence around one central element of Thomson's work in the 1980s - his grandfather Hector's story. He has had the courage to take that fence down and use a range of sources to enter the no man's land of suffering and isolation which was a part of his grandfather's life, and perforce, that of his grandmother and the young child who became his father. When the first edition was in preparation, Alistair Thomson's father objected strenuously to any mention in the book of his father's (Alistair's grandfather's) mental illness; reluctantly Alistair agreed to leave out the subject. We can understand why the author's father, himself a soldier, felt so strongly. The images were too hard to bear for the man who was a young boy in the 1930s, living through very, very hard times with his disturbed father after his mother's death. Now, afflicted with Alzheimer's disease, but still able to read the text, he gave his son permission to tell the story. And it is a compelling and important one. From that story, we see the price families and in particular wives paid for the multiple wounds men brought home with them from war. What the second edition shows was the sheer force of survival in his grandmother Nell, who had not only the handful of two small boys to raise, but a damaged husband to support. And making her life harder still was that her husband's disability was very hard to define precisely....We know that the damage war does to families is generational; it doesn't stop when the shooting stops. It is passed on indirectly from father to son to grandson, and to the women with whom they live. By retelling his family's story, Alistair Thomson has been able to fashion a moving portrait of his family: his grandmother Nell, and after her death, of their sons, Al's dad and his uncle, still children, having cold mutton for Christmas dinner, alone with their father, a soldier of the Great War." -- Jay Winter, Yale University *** Anzac Memories was first published to acclaim in 1994 (by Oxford University Press) and has achieved international renown for its pioneering contribution to the study of war memory and mythology. War historian Michael McKernan wrote that the book gave "as good a picture of the impact of the Great War on individuals and Australia as we are likely to get in this generation," and historian Michael Roper concluded that "an immense achievement of this book is that it so clearly illuminates the historical processes that left men like my grandfather forever struggling to fashion myths which they could live by." In this second edition, author Alistair Thomson explores how the Anzac legend has been transformed over the past quarter century, how a 'post-memory' of World War I creates new challenges and opportunities for making sense of Australia's national past, and how veterans' war memories can still challenge and complicate national mythologies. Thomson returns to a family war history that he could not write about 20 years ago because of the stigma of war and mental illness, and he uses newly-released Repatriation files to question his own earlier account of veterans' post-war lives and memories and to think afresh about war and memory. *** "Anzac Memories is a remarkable book, both for its original content and for the light it sheds on a fine, conscientious historian's re-engagement with his earlier work in view of new archival evidence and relevant studies in such fields as remembrance, medicine, and the social history of war." -- Michigan War Studies Review, 2016-035, March 2016 (Series: Monash Classics)

Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Second Edition) (Monash Classics)

Biographies & Memoirs

Monash University Publishing

I really like the idea that in maybe a hundred years someone could listen and hear about my life to learn about what living in 2012 or 2013 was like. Think that's really cool.--Adam-Farrow-Palmer, born 1988. ***What is life like in Australia? How has it been experienced by those who have lived it? Australian Lives: An Intimate History illuminates Australian life across the 20th and into the 21st century. How have they been shaped by the forces and expectations of contemporary history and how, in turn, have they made their lives and created Australian society? From oral history interviews with Australians born between 1920 and 1989, fifty narrators reflect on their diverse experience as children and teenagers, in midlife and in old age, about faith, migration, and activism. As interviewee Kim Bear (born 1959) explains, Stories are a great way to inform people about what it is to be human. Even if you say one thing that resonates with them, there's that connection made. This book conveys the nature and spirit of Australian life, in all its diversity, particularity, and uniqueness. To read these intimate, personal stories is a cathartic experience, and an illuminating one, for visitors to Australia, teachers and students examining Australian life past and present, and, of course, for those who themselves know intimately what it is to live as an Australian. (Series: Australian History) [Subject: Australian Studies, History, Biography, Oral History]

Australian Lives: An Intimate History (Australian History)

Puri, Anisa

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Thomson, Alistair. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Thomson, Alistair

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Thomson, Alistair. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend

Anzac Memories

The Oral History Reader (Routledge Readers in History)

Ten Pound Poms: A Life History of British Postwar Emigration to Australia

‘Ten Pound Poms’: A life history of British postwar emigration to Australia

Moving Stories: An intimate history of four women across two countries

Moving Stories: An intimate history of four women across two countries

Through the Joy of Learning: Diary of 1000 Adult Learners

Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Second Edition) (Monash Classics)

Australian Lives: An Intimate History (Australian History)