New South Wales is that rare political creation, a state founded for and upon the criminal law. The history of its criminal law from settlement to Federation is uniquely fascinating. Drawing on his range of experience as a university scholar, a criminal law QC and a judge, the author explains how Britain's criminal laws were established and developed in its (arguably) most successful colony. There are three themes:the horror and savagery of the criminal law transported to Australia and imposed there;the constitutional importance of basic criminal law rules requiring certainty of proof;the corrupt but necessary role of mercy in the administration of the law.There are several genuinely remarkable features of this book. One is that the author draws upon a vast body of material recently brought to light by Bruce Kercher in his massive disinterment of early colonial case law, to explain in detail the actual working of the New South Wales criminal courts.Another is that the core of the book is an analysis of New South Wales parliamentary debates between 1871 and 1883 on criminal law, illuminating the history of the law (and its future). Yet the most remarkable thing of all about this book is its rarity. In the many places where the British Empire imposed its laws, there are hundreds of universities and centres of legal study.Histories of the criminal law, or studies which can be so described, are rare or invisible. This admirable study will become a classic in its field, required reading by legal scholars, historians of colony and empire, and by astute legal practitioners making arguments for contemporary submissions or judgments.The second volume (Woods, 2018) continues the still-fascinating story from 1901 (when the colony became a state) through until mid-20th century, when the death penalty was effectively abolished.

Exploring the recurrence of cross-dressing and gender inversion within Australian cultural life this book compares and contrasts sustained life-long impersonations where women lived, worked and even married as men, with other forms of cross-dressing such as cross-dressing for stage and the prosecution of men seeking sexual encounters disguised as women.

Arthur Conan Doyle has long been considered the greatest writer of crime fiction, and the gender bias of the genre has foregrounded William Godwin, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Emile Gaboriau and Fergus Hume. But earlier and significant contributions were being made by women in Britain, the United States and Australia between 1860 and 1880, a period that was central to the development of the genre. This work focuses on women writers of this genre and these years, including Catherine Crowe, Caroline Clive, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs. Henry (Ellen) Wood, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Louisa May Alcott, Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, Anna Katharine Green, Celeste de Chabrillan, "Oline Keese" (Caroline Woolmer Leakey), Eliza Winstanley, Ellen Davitt, and Mary Helena Fortune--innovators who set a high standard for women writers to follow.

Henry Lawson - Miles Franklin - Henry Handel Richardson - Kenneth Slessor - Eleanor Dark - Christina Stead - Kylie Tennant - Patrick White - Thomas Keneally - Mem Fox.

There are a considerable number of books on the art of the convicts, so Convicts & Art has been covered reasonably well but art is only once facet of the arts that has been examined to any extent. This book concerns itself with Convicts & the Arts. This book, then, endeavors to look at the convicts’ contribution to the arts, and demonstrates without doubt that the convicts made a significantly broader contribution to the culture of Australia than previously thought. There is a common misconception that all convicts were immediately institutionalised in a cell, and convict culture was solely a prison culture. It needs reinforcing that when the First Fleet arrived there were no prisons in Australia, no cells where they could put the convicts. The early governors and principal authorities quite logically endeavoured to use whatever skills the convicts had. So artists, generally forgers, were placed with those who were interested in recording a visual history of this new land. Among the convicts were bricklayers, house painters, jewelers, silversmiths, goldsmiths and so on, and some of them made significant contributions to the emerging society. Some of these contributions will be developed herein. This work endeavors to examine the convicts’ contribution to the arts in Australia, in areas like the writing of novels, poetry, autobiographies, sculpture, theatre, music, architecture, jewelry, the press, decorative arts and pottery.

Literary representations of British convicts exiled to Australia were the most likely way that the typical English reader would learn about the new colonies there. In Transported to Botany Bay, Dorice Williams Elliott examines how writers—from canonical ones such as Dickens and Trollope to others who were themselves convicts—used the figure of the felon exiled to Australia to construct class, race, and national identity as intertwined. Even as England’s supposedly ancient social structure was preserved and venerated as the “true” England, the transportation of some 168,000 convicts facilitated the birth of a new nation with more fluid class relations for those who didn’t fit into the prevailing national image. In analyzing novels, broadsides, and first-person accounts, Elliott demonstrates how Britain linked class, race, and national identity at a key historical moment when it was still negotiating its relationship with its empire. The events and incidents depicted as taking place literally on the other side of the world, she argues, deeply affected people’s sense of their place in their own society, with transnational implications that are still relevant today.

Issues consist of lists of new books added to the library ; also articles about aspects of printing and publishing history, and about exhibitions held in the library, and important acquisitions.