About the Author

Michael Cathcart is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. He has presented Arts Today and the Famous Radio National Quiz on ABC Radio National. Since then Michael has become well-known as a historian on ABCTV. He is the author of Defending the National Tuckshop, and prepared a critically acclaimed abridgement of Manning Clark's six-volume classic, A History of Australia (MUP). He is currently writing a history of water in Australia. Kate Darian-Smith is the Director of the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne, where she also teaches in the History Department. She is the author and editor of several books on Australian social and cultural history, including One the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime 1939-1945 and Memory and in Twentieth-Century Australia. She is now writing on the cultural place of agricultural shows within Australian city and country communities, and on Australian histories within the British imperial world.