Modern Frontier

Modern Frontier: Aspects of the 1950s in Australia's Northern Territory

Julie T Wells, Mickey Dewar, Suzanne Parry (eds)

Modern Frontier is a study of Australia's Northern Territory in the 1950s using an interdisciplinary approach that takes in environmental, historical and cultural history. Through a series of chapters from a number of contributors, a decade in Australian history is revealed from a Territory perspective.

The editors have brought together a diverse range of authors, experts in their fields, who provide a fascinating insight into aspects of Australian history and policy in the north. The decade that brought issues of assimilation and Aboriginal culture to the national stage, against a backdrop of the Cold War, had the Northern Territory as its theatre of representation.

This book explores a period that saw a federal experiment to normalise the north, the black half of a White Australia, across a vast geographic region with diverse population; the results are often surprising and offer new insight into this period in Australian history.

The editors are three historians with a wide experience of researching and writing Territory history. Modern Frontier provided them an exciting opportunity to work with a range of authors representing different disciplines and perspectives, on a subject where the issues still powerfully resonate today, more than half a century on.

"...A multitude of facets in Territory affairs a half-century ago. It''s a new view... a rich, often provocative one." [Professor Alan Powell, author of Far Country].