https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/nation ... 5inkp.htmlLYNDALL RYAN: 1943 - 2024
Professor Lyndall Ryan was a leading Australian historian who showed that rather than being rare, massacres were a key tool of colonisation and far more extensive than previously realised.
She died on April 30 at Lake Macquarie Private Hospital in Gateshead, NSW, aged 81.
Her PhD thesis on Tasmanian Aboriginal history began to be published in article form in the early 1970s and pushed back on the myth of Tasmanian colonial history that Truganini was the last of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
This research ran in parallel with her involvement in second wave feminism. In this arena, Ryan was a founding member of the first Sydney Women’s Liberation Group in 1970 and a contributor to feminist publications. During this period she also became involved in the Leichhardt Women’s Health Centre, an initiative that led to a lifelong interest in women’s reproductive health.
Ryan’s groundbreaking monograph, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1981), based on her 1975 PhD thesis, changed the face of Australian history. A classic, it was expanded into a second edition (1996) that incorporated new research. Subsequent scholarship and controversy shaped an epic new work, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803 (2012), shortlisted for the Ernest Scott Award in 2013.
As her long-term friend and historian Professor Ann Curthoys noted in a recently published tribute, Ryan had a “strong awareness of place and the importance of maps in helping readers connect events to specific places”, evidenced by the 33 detailed maps in her thesis. This emphasis on maps would figure prominently in her later career.
Notable Deaths
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Irrev-Black
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Re: Notable Deaths
Goodbye, and deep thanks, to Professor Lyndall Ryan
Greedy fuckers cannot self-regulate.
Prove me wrong.
Prove me wrong.
Re: Notable Deaths
Tom Robbins.
I only read "Another Roadside Attraction", but I really liked it because it included a sort of Catholic insider story about an infiltrator who discovers the body of Jesus in the Vatican and smuggles it America, where a couple of revolutionary hippies debate whether they can use it to bring down Christianity, because it's physical evidence of the mortality of Jesus. It's more about the power than the flowers, but at the same time it is riotous and over the top, and sort of expressed my aspirations as an angry ex-Catholic school boy in the 1980s.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/ ... es-aged-92
On another level I have the notion that Tom Robbins became a commodity, a unit-shifter, and his counterculture is a bit like a brand, a product, a flavour. Well nearly everyone succumbs to the process that turns revolt into style, so I won't hold that against him. But everything American is tainted, or so I think now that America has fallen, its current screaming cultural decrepitude is drowning out the glories of its finest days - unambiguously the 1960s.
I'm in an ambivalent mood today because Super Bowl is on, and anti-sportsball types are taking the piss quite nicely with pictures of excellent birds using the hashtag #SuperbOwl... and then I read that the inspiration for the name "Superbowl" really and truly is the bouncy toy "Superball" which first became a huge fad in the 1960s. The toy gave me more pleasure than the overcooked sport ever did. This in turn led me to reminisce about my own childhood delight at other things like frisbees and yo-yos and the various cards and stickers sold with Scanlens bubble gum. I think if commercial culture stayed at around that level, it would have been all right.
I only read "Another Roadside Attraction", but I really liked it because it included a sort of Catholic insider story about an infiltrator who discovers the body of Jesus in the Vatican and smuggles it America, where a couple of revolutionary hippies debate whether they can use it to bring down Christianity, because it's physical evidence of the mortality of Jesus. It's more about the power than the flowers, but at the same time it is riotous and over the top, and sort of expressed my aspirations as an angry ex-Catholic school boy in the 1980s.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/ ... es-aged-92
On another level I have the notion that Tom Robbins became a commodity, a unit-shifter, and his counterculture is a bit like a brand, a product, a flavour. Well nearly everyone succumbs to the process that turns revolt into style, so I won't hold that against him. But everything American is tainted, or so I think now that America has fallen, its current screaming cultural decrepitude is drowning out the glories of its finest days - unambiguously the 1960s.
I'm in an ambivalent mood today because Super Bowl is on, and anti-sportsball types are taking the piss quite nicely with pictures of excellent birds using the hashtag #SuperbOwl... and then I read that the inspiration for the name "Superbowl" really and truly is the bouncy toy "Superball" which first became a huge fad in the 1960s. The toy gave me more pleasure than the overcooked sport ever did. This in turn led me to reminisce about my own childhood delight at other things like frisbees and yo-yos and the various cards and stickers sold with Scanlens bubble gum. I think if commercial culture stayed at around that level, it would have been all right.
I can feel it