Volume 17 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography contains 658 biographies of individuals who died between 1981 and 1990. The first of two volumes for the decade, it presents a colourful mosaic of twentieth-century Australian life. It contains biographies of well-known identities such as Sir Henry Bolte, Sir Robert Askin, Sir Reginald Ansett, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Sir Raphael and Lady Cilento, Sir Arthur Coles, Robert Holmes-O-Court, Sir Warwick Fairfax, Sir Edmund Herring, Albert Facey, Donald Friend, Sir Roy Grounds, Sir Bernard Heinze and Sir Robert Helpmann. Eminent Australian women in the volume include Dame Elizabeth Couchman, Dame Kate Campbell, Dame Doris Fitton, Dame Zara Holt and Lady (Maie) Casey. Although many of the women achieved prominence in those professions conventionally regarded as the preserve of women, othersandmdash;such as Ruby Boye-Jones, coast-watcher; Ellen Cashman, union organiser; Elsie Chauvel, film-maker; Dorothy Crawford, radio producer; Ruth Dobson, diplomat; Mary Hodgkin, anthropologist; Margaret Kelly, restaurateur; and Patricia Jarrett, journalistandmdash;demonstrate that some women at least were breaking free of the constraints of traditional expectations. The lives of fifteen Indigenous Australians are included, as are those of a number of immigrants who fled from persecution in Europe to establish a new life in Australia.

Douglas Burrage Snelling (1916–85) was one of Britain’s significant emigré architects and designers. Born in Kent and educated in New Zealand, he became one of Australia’s leading mid-century architects, of luxury residences and commercial buildings, and a trend-setting designer of furniture, interiors and landscapes. This is the first comprehensive study of Snelling’s pan-Pacific life, works and trans-disciplinary significance. It provides a critical examination of this controversial modernist, revealing him to be a colourful and talented protagonist who led antipodean interpretations of American, especially Wrightian and southern Californian, architecture, design and lifestyle innovations.

A panoramic history uncovering the demise of Britishness as a global civic idea since the Second World War.

Volume 18 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography is the second of two volumes to deal with Australians who died between 1981 and 1990. It includes articles by 560 authors on 670 individuals with surnames from L to Z, recording the lives of Australians whom many of us remember from the recent past. There are explorers, farmers, stockmen, trade union officials, business people, educators, criminals, judges, political activists, librarians, ballet dancers, cameleers, musicians and opera directors, speedway riders, polymaths, philanthropists and professional wrestlers and boxers. The volume includes academics Julius Stone and William Stanner; physicists Leslie Martin, Harry Massey and Ernest Titterton; military leaders Frederick Scherger, John Wilton, John McCauley, the first aboriginal commissioned officer Reg Saunders and war historian Alan Moorehead; feminist Ruby Rich and country women's leader Bertha Smith; surgeon Harry Windsor; Director-General of Education Harold Wyndham; ABC General Manager Charles Moses and a raft of diplomats-John Ryan, Dudley McCarthy, James Plimsoll, Laurence McIntyre, Annabelle Rankin, Alfred Stirling, Mick Shann, Marjorie Smart, Percy Spender and Alan Watt, some of whom became state governors; politicians William McMahon, Billy Sneddon, Enid Lyons, Dorothy Tangney, Lionel Murphy, Thomas Playford, as well as political journalist Alan Reid; Governor General William McKell; artists Fred Williams and Cliff Pugh; patrons of the arts John and Sunday Reed and authors Alan Marshall, Stephen Murray-Smith, Christina Stead, Kylie Tennant and Patrick White. Maintaining the ADB's tradition of scholarship, volume 18 presents a colourful mosaic of twentieth-century Australia. This host of lives gives a picture of our society, provides insights into the experiences of our people, and illuminates large themes in our recent history-immigration, urbanisation and suburbanisation, war (World War II, Korea, Malaya and Vietnam), material progress, increasing cultural maturity, conservative and progressive politics, conflict and harmony, and a new phase in transnationalism. It also reveals something of the greatness and smallness of which human beings are capable.