Joseph L Davis

THE LIVES OF THE ARTIST MISS JANET CUMBRAE STEWART,
AND HER LOVERS THE MYSTERIOUS MISS ARGEMORE
FFARINGTON ('BILLY') BELLAIRS & THE AUSTRALIAN-BORN
ARTIST MARY MERCER
Includes a comprehensive index and a full list of all the works mentioned and illustrated

An extraordinary catalogue of the life of a wealthy woman who regularly socialised with Sydney’s social, financial and artistic elites.

The detail with which Mrs Dundas Allen’s life was catalogued in the social pages of the Sydney press – both in words and photographs – is possibly unrivalled.

It would be hard to imagine that even many of today's most diligent instagrammers and Facebookers would chronicle their social lives in such detail over so many years and yet, in the case of Mrs Dundas Allen, it all happened long before the age of the internet.

This new book, which includes rare and previously unpublished photos, encompasses some 35 years additional research on Lawrence’s experience of Australia since publication of his first book on D. H. Lawrence at Thirroul in 1989. It includes a very comprehensive index.

SOME EXAMPLES OF THE 'ARCHITECTURE' OF THE SUPPOSED EXISTENCE OF A PRE-1930 NSW 'OLD GUARD' AND THE FASCIST AND NON FASCIST ELEMENTS OF ITS BRASH YOUNG STEP-CHILD NAMED THE NEW GUARD.

What follows is a detailed debunking of the myth that D. H. Lawrence ever encountered members of some so-called ‘Old Guard’ in NSW along with a wide-ranging examination of the evidence or otherwise for a presumed pre-1930 Australian para-military outfit with some special focus on some Sydney architects and also on both the putative post-1930 ‘Old Guard’ and the very operative and functioning New Guard in the Illawarra and Country districts of NSW. Some specific reference is also made to the ‘White Guard’ in Victoria and ‘Wilson’s Farmer’s Army’ in Queensland with a full index and bibliography.

All the stuff you've never read before about two of Wollongong's "Upper Ten" at American Creek, Appin, Austinmer, Berkeley, Bulli Mountain, Figtree, Five Islands, Hill 60, Kiama, Lake Illawarra, Mount Kembla, Mount Keira, Red Point, Rixons Pass, Unanderra (Charcoal) and The Shoalhaven - complete with a full index.

A wildly digressive tale of how sometimes the only historical record women leave behind is the names of the men with whom they've been sleeping; along with the added oddity of how a dim and distant memory of the man Jane Rose's mother may have once been rooting enabled Jane to get a no-strings-attached land grant in Thirroul.

Although four full-length books and several academic theses have been devoted to radical political thought in Australia during the WW1, not one has previously identified the adjoining coastal Illawarra townships of Coledale and Scarborough as an epicentre of Australian anti-capitalist activists and activism.

This present study is an attempt to rescue some of the previously anonymous individuals involved from what historian E.P. Thompson called “the enormous condescension of history”. It also endeavours to show that in some Illawarra communities during WW1 the ruling ideas were not always those of the ruling class. The study is also particularly interested in what becomes of the families and the individuals who do not share the values of the society in which they live.

The study provides an explanation of why the towns of Coledale and Scarborough remained hotbeds of political dissent for the first 50 years of the 20th century and why, in the person of Ted Roach (the leader of the famed Dalfram Dispute), Coledale was the birthplace of one of the greatest political radicals Australia has known.

Wobbly Wollongong also charts the long history of industrial sabotage in Illawarra from the 1830s through until 1919. The book also reveals how the extraordinary police presence in the seaside towns of Coledale and Scarborough provide an example of precisely how thorough-going a police state could exist in a supposedly liberal democratic capitalist country like Australia.

This book confirms and explores in detail the real identity of nearly all the people Alexander Harris describes anonymously in the Australian literary works he produced between 1826 and 1840. Includes an exceptionally comprehensive index of individual people and places.

A study of  the work of Geoff Dyer which is even better on Lawrence than Clive James' fabulous short essay titled “D.H. Lawrence in Transit”, published in "D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet" edited by Stephen Spender, (New York: Harper and Row, 1973, pp. 159-69.

How is it possible to depict large portions of Illawarra's rather lovely but narrow coastal plain in just one single image?

Back in the 1880s and 1890s, a Prussian tea pot manufacturer - along with the Australian photographer Nicholas Caire and artists A.H. Fullwood and William Clarson - all seemed to know  precisely how to go about it.

In this talk Dr Joseph Davis will spin a wild tale of sex, colonial ingenuity and four artists who came down to Illawarra to successfully tackle "the big picture"  - all while poor Lawrence Hargrave was still struggling with the novel idea of jumping off a cliff at Bald Hill."

This perfectly proportioned Californian Bungalow was the work of one of Thirroul's most respected builders: Mr W. J. Langdon (born Kiama 1887). William Langdon (who married the daughter of Daniel Webb, Thirroul's first shopkeeper) was also responsible for the large two storey 1927 brick premises at 360 Lawrence Hargrave Drive – along with many other fine private residences in the town. As a master craftsman, Mr Langdon obviously spent much love and care in the construction of his own home. 408 LHD Thirroul, however, has much more historical significance than simply the fact that it is a solidly built classic design.