Beechworth A Titan S Field

The fascinating, troubling legacy of the gold rush. Everyone knows gold made Victoria rich. But did you know gold mining was disastrous for the land, engulfing it in floods of sand, gravel and silt that gushed out of the mines? Or that this environmental devastation still affects our rivers and floodplains? Victorians had a name for this mining waste: ‘sludge’. Sludge submerged Victoria’s best grapevines near Bendigo, filled Laanecoorie Reservoir on the Loddon River and flowed down from Beechworth over thousands of hectares of rich agricultural land. Children and animals drowned in sludge lakes. Mining effluent contaminated three-quarters of Victoria’s creeks and rivers. Sludge is the compelling story of the forgotten filth that plagued nineteenth-century Victoria. It exposes the big dirty secret of Victoria’s mining history – the way it transformed the state’s water and land, and how the battle against sludge helped lay the ground for the modern environmental movement. ‘Sludge is a fascinating, entangled story of human endeavour and environmental destruction. An exciting and timely reminder that history is a dirty business, precisely because it oozes its way into the present.’ —Clare Wright ‘Sludge, slurry, slickens or porridge: call it what you will, mining waste made a mess of Victoria’s environment. In Sludge, Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies carefully investigate this murky history of greed, mismanagement, reform and forgetting. It is a gripping account of an environmental catastrophe, and it vividly conveys the long-term costs of short-term gains.’—Billy Griffiths ‘This is the book about the goldfields I most wanted to read but didn’t think could be written. It’s a remarkable achievement.’—Tom Griffiths ‘If Victorians dreamed of glittering gold, what they got was a tidal wave of sludge that covered the land like a poisonous blanket and made the rivers run thick as gruel. Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies vividly recreate the forgotten landscapes of nineteenth-century Victoria, revealing how people and mining destroyed the country that nurtured them, and how that silent legacy is still with us today. Here is a powerful parable, a work of brilliant rediscovery and a wakeup call for our own times.’ —Grace Karskens

This book explores an Australian regional community’s reaction to, and involvement with, the Boer War. It argues that after the initial year the war became an ‘occasional war’ in that it was assumed that the empire would triumph. But it also laid the foundations for reactions to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. This is the first exploration of the place of the Boer War in Australian history at the community level. Indeed, even at the national level the literature is limited. It is often forgotten that, despite the claims that Australia became a federation via peaceful means, the colonies and the new nation were, in fact, at war. This study aims to bring back into focus a forgotten part of Australian and imperial history, and argues that the Australian experience of the Boer War was more than the execution of Morant and Hancock.

On the top shelf in his aunt's dressing room, Damien Freeman discovered a collection of family memorabilia that told a story he had always assumed to be perfectly unexceptional. The Aunt's Mirrors reveals an unexpected story of how an immigrant family from Poland made a new life - whilst continuing an old one - in 19th century Beechworth, Grafton, Rylstone and Sydney through the shared sense of meaningfulness that permeated the lives of seven generations of this Australian Jewish family.

This is a biography of Vera Deakin, daughter of the Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, focussing on her work with the Australian Red Cross. At the outbreak of war she gave up her musical studies to initiate the Wounded and Missing Inquiry Bureau of the Red Cross in Cairo and later in London. After the War she championed the needs of limbless veterans. During the Second World War Vera undertook similar work in Melbourne for the Red Cross. She was also involved in other Melbourne charities and welfare bodies, including the Children's hospital and Yooralla.