The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Sena Author: Ann Millar

Product Details: ISBN: 9780522850901 Format: Hardback Pages: 600 Dims (mm): 184 x 254 Pub Date: 15-06-04 Pub Country: Australia Condition: NEW

Description: This second volume of The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate covers the period from 1929 to 1962. It contains individual articles on 103 male senators and one woman, the formidable Senator Agnes Robertson Robertson of Western Australia, and the three clerks who served them. This book reveals a very different Australia from that presented in the first volume. The vision of Australia as a fair and equitable society, cherished so confidently at the time of Federation, now has to be put into practice in the face of Depression and a second world war. In this volume we see senators grappling with an increasingly mechanised society, major industrial, economic and social problems and the growing complexities of public policy. Political parties, strongly influenced by economic conditions and rural politics, divide and re-group, and as the states recognise more and more the extent of Commonwealth power, the Senate asserts its constitutional equality with the House of Representatives. For the most part, the senators of this period are now little-known, but at the time they asserted a marked individuality, as the caricatures on the endpapers imply. At this period of history, party discipline did not suppress individual character. As the Clerk of the Senate, Harry Evans, writes in his introduction to the volume: 'All of these people are admirable for the varied contributions they made, and they all made some contribution, to the survival of parliamentary institutions at a time when those institutions perished in so many other places'. This second volume of The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate has been compiled and edited in the

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