The second volume of The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian
Senate contains individual articles on 103 male senators and one woman,
the spirited Senator Agnes Robertson of Western Australia, and the
three clerks who served them covering the period 1929-1962.
This
book presents a very different Australia from that revealed in Volume
1 of the Biographical Dictionary (MUP, 2000). 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 the
Depression and the Second World War. 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 six 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,
these senators 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 was not such as to suppress
individual character.
Contents:
Preface
Acknowledgements
Advisory Board
Contributors
Illustrations
Introduction
Western Australian Senators
Victorian Senators
Tasmanian Senators
South Australian Senators
Qeensland Senators
New South Wales Senators
Clerks of the Senate
Appendices
- Elections and Parliaments
- Presidents of the Senate
- Chairmen pof Committees in the Senate
- Leaders of the Government in the Senate
- Leaders of the Opposition in the Senate
Abbreviations
Notes
Select References
Index
Related Products:
The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate Volume 1: 1901-1929
