Graeme Davison: 6 books

I became an urban historian because I believed that our cities deserved more of our curiosity and idealism.City Dreamers restores Australian cities, and those who created them, to their rightful place in the national imagination. Building on a lifetime’s work, Graeme Davison views Australian history,...

This is the story of how the car changed a society. Graeme Davison, Australia's leading urban historian, explores the Melbourne he knows so well to show us how the car entered our consciousness - as an object of desire, a symbol of status, a creator of freedoms, a shaper of sexual mores. His...

'I did not look for skeletons in my family's cupboard, but once the cupboard was open, they simply fell out.' A widow and her eight older children are uprooted from their Hampshire farm in 1850, and thrown together on an emigrant ship with 38 distressed needlewomen from London. How they came...

A public intellectual known for his deeply humane approach to social and urban issues, Hugh Stretton’s thinking has influenced Australian public debates for many decades. Fundamentally, Stretton wanted to make Australia fairer. His book The Political Sciences was hailed by the Times Literary...

From its beginnings Monash has been a 'university in a hurry.' Born on the suburban fringe of Melbourne, it reached outwards rather than gazing inwards. Over its five decades it embraced the challenges of the age of Sputnik, became a hotbed of student radicalism, then took an equally radical turn...

Behind the glittering image of 'Marvellous Melbourne' there existed in the popular imagination another, very different, picture of the colonial metropolis. This was the city of 'low life', of crowded slums, poverty, disease and vice. The nine essays in The Outcasts of Melbourne attempt to reveal...