Kerry Greenwood's bestselling Phryne Fisher historical crime novels (1989-2022) and their acclaimed ABC television adaptation, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (2012-2015), draw on historical research to portray 1920s Melbourne. Centring on the affluent private detective Phryne Fisher, the novels and television series address post-World War I social issues within the city's culturally diverse neighbourhoods. This article examines multilingualism as a narrative strategy within Greenwood's fiction and its television adaptation. It offers close readings of Ruddy Gore and Raisins and Almonds, novels that foreground Melbourne's Chinese and Jewish communities. It analyses portrayals of multiculturalism across the novels and their screen adaptations and examines how popular period fiction shapes collective memory and an imagined Australian past.
This article examines the ecological and social impacts of altered river flow regimes and industrial agriculture on the Kamilaroi people and their traditional Country in Moree and Mungindi, New South Wales. Drawing on oral histories with Kamilaroi women and historical and scientific data, we analyse the decline of native grasses-ganalay, or curly Mitchell grass (Astrebla lappacea), and guli, or native millet (Panicum decompositium)-and the consequent erosion of cultural food practices. River regulation, particularly through the construction of Copeton Dam and levee banks, has reduced overland flows, undermining the ecosystems on which these grasses depend. Deep ploughing, irrigation and cropping have compounded this ecological disruption. Kamilaroi voices offer a critical perspective on the long-term impacts of settler-colonial water governance, lending support for the argument that environmental degradation is a continuation of colonisation. By centring Indigenous ecological knowledge and lived experience, we highlight the opportunity to develop native grasses and Aboriginal cultural practices through a rethinking of water management that honours Indigenous rights and food sovereignty and restores ecological relationships.
This article examines the experiences of predominantly Danish migrants and their children as part of the First Australian Imperial Force (1st AIF) during World War I, and their reportage in the Scandinavian Australian foreign-language newspaper, Norden. It differentiates soldiers of Scandinavian heritage between those of Australia's settled ethnic communities and more transient, recently arrived first-generation migrants. It argues that while many itinerant first-generation migrants who enlisted in the AIF as "friendly aliens" had no real ties to the British Empire, Australia or even the settled migrant community, both groups leveraged their military service to achieve faster national integration by war's end. While the migrant press promoted these "adopted" men as symbols of migrant pride and tangible Scandinavian community contributions to the Australian war effort, the soldiers themselves demonstrated a blend of old-and new-world identities that were eventually overridden by an emerging Anzac mythos and a nationalistic sense of what it was to be "Australian" in the years after World War I.
