Writing history is my profession. I’ve been doing it for about thirty years. Here is some of what I’ve done in the past and what I’m working on now.
This one is a paper I wrote for an Engineering Heritage conference, held in the Old Parliament House in Canberra. A lovely location and a good conference. It was published in the conference proceedings. It pulls together a lot of work I’d done on Main Roads Western Australia, the State Electricity Commission of Western Australia … More The Post War Project in Western Australia
At last year’s Melbourne convention we held a panel item about the history of fandom in Australia. On the panel were me (as moderator), Lee Harding, Dick Jenssen and Rob Gerrand. The panel discussed the beginnings of modern fandom, mainly in Melbourne, in the 1950s, including earlier exposure to science fiction, the public attitude to … More The history of Australian fandom at Continuum
In 2001 or thereabouts I was commissioned by the Victorian Department of Natural Resources to prepare a thematic study of the heritage of government and administration in Victoria. Part of that process was to write a history of the topic before going on to a more detailed study of the built environment associated with that … More A History of Government and Administration in Victoria
Continuing on with experimenting with putting some old writing on the www here is a piece that I probably wrote in the early 1990s, almost certainly while I was still doing my PhD. It was published in the newsletter of the Aviation Historical Society of Australia but I don’t know when. (A matter for later … More Norman Brearley Laughs Loudest
Of late I’ve been busy working on the third volume of the history of Australian civil aviation in Australia and neglecting other things that need doing. One is the process of putting some of my previous research here. This one began as a paper I presented at an Australian Historical Association conference in Brisbane (maybe … More Creating Airmindedness
I’ve mentioned that I’m currently working on the third volume of a three volume history of Australian civil aviation in the 20th Century. Here are the previous two volumes which have been published by BHS Publishing. They are available as ebooks on the Ballarat Heritage Services shop on their website, $20 for volume 1 and … More Australia’s Civil Aviation History
Here’s one which I probably write in 1995. It was published in an American fanzine but the scan that I made of it some time later doesn’t tell me anything about which fanzine that might have been. There are some interesting insights here about what fandom was like in the mid 1990s, a period when … More Fanzine Fandom as Oral Tradition
For a change, something which has yet to see the light of day elsewhere. I will be producing paper copies of this chronology for a panel session about ‘Australian SF Fandom in the 1960s’ to be held at the coming Melbourne Speculative Fiction, Continuum XIV, over the long weekend in June. It will appear in … More An Annotated Chronology of Australian SF Fandom, version 2
Here’s a little piece based around some of the oral history interviews I conducted for the history of Main Roads Western Australia in the 1990s. I guess this was written in the early 2000s but I have no idea why I wrote it or who for. Still, it is an interesting read that hints at … More Road Makers of the North West
I’ve been working on this project since before I left the Public Service in 1987. While I was doing some research for my Honours Thesis in the Australian Archive (now National Australian Archive) I came across a shelf of folders which were photocopies of all the Cabinet decisions made by the various Commonwealth governments since … More Australian Government Decisions about Civil Aviation to 1923
