2004, Ryan, John Sprott

For the sesquicentennial in 2003 of the University of Melbourne, two of its senior historians produced their four chapter text, 'A Short History of the University of Melbourne'. This particularly handsome and trenchant volume covers the whole period in a way that which be savoured by: those who know the university well; those who will enjoy its many insiders' perspectives (knowledge of the place's "lore"); as well as by those who have seen the (more recent) Australian university, qua institution, as a "secular church", with a like eclipse of the public respect for it in recent generations from both students and parents. For the folklorist or social historian the essays are amusing and ironic both at surface and much deeper levels, are filled with many graspable concepts/appraisals that are not too subtly presented, and - in a very real sense - they constitute a "Doomsday Book of Australian Society", if one may misquote a famed assessment of yesterday of Henry Fielding's 'Tom Jones'.

2007, Ryan, John S, Mason, Susan

In 1979 I saw the film, 'The Deer Hunter'. As long as I can remember, I've had great personal difficulty with violence in any shape or form and this movie was extremely violent, based in large measure on the effect of the Vietnam War on a group of American friends. An early scene in the movie saw the ominous 'thud, thud, thud' of several helicopters coming through the jungle clearing, and the sound reverberated through my being. It was unnerving, frightening, terrifying and this was the mere suggestion of things to come. The initial impulse was to walk out of the theatre there and then, but I forced myself to stay believing that I had some sort of duty to know something of the horrors of war. This is what it's like for many 'baby boomers'. They have had no experience of war. At the conclusion of the movie I walked back outside into busy George Street, into the brilliant Sydney sunshine, trembling inwardly and shaking outwardly, incredulous that the city was carrying on regardless and quite oblivious to my fractured psyche. How on earth was it for the actual people who had experienced such terror? Barry Heard's book 'Well Done, Those Men', has a similar profound effect on those who read it.

2006, Ryan, John S

"Folklore cannot be understood only by looking at it within the context of a single culture." --'Acknowledgement', in the Introductory Section to 'The Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Folklore and Folklife'. Westport, CN/ London: Greenwood Press, 2005-6. ... Let us start with a seeming digression. The fourteen member Editorial Advisory Board of the cited milestone-marking encyclopedia of folklore worldwide was one particularly composed of a wide range of active scholars, in the main the then editors or long serving representatives of (regionally) significant folkloric journals.

1999, Ryan, John S

This pleasingly Printed clean-text volume is concerned with the debt owed by modern sport-in several English-speaking countries as well as to the mother country itself-to the very persistent sports of eighteenth century England before the impact of the Industrial Revolution. The general field has not been neglected so much as ignored in favour of foci on such matters as poachers, inns and crowds. Yet there have been many other very specific sports histories, such as Hylton Cleaver's 'A History of Rowing,' 1957. The present author has been redressing this wider situation with such of his earlier books as: 'Sport and Society': Elizabeth to Anne (1969); 'Bare Knuckles': A Social History of Prize-Fighting (1988); and 'British Sport': A Social History (1992; 1997).

1976, Ryan, John S

In the first part of this record of the New England career of John James Galloway the surveyor, the last section concluded towards the end of 1849, at which time he had been based for some time at Warialda, with occasional returns to his main camp at Armidale. Over the next three years or so he was to consolidate the embryonic townships, communication lines and reserve systems for the Northern Tablelands, as well as do important survey work along the western slopes and the Dividing Range, while also supervising Assistant Surveyor Henderson's labours on the central western and south western verges of the area.

1997, Ryan, John S

This volume is the fourth in the same publishers' series entitled "Approaches to Local History" under the general editorship of David Hey. It is a practical yet inspiring book which considers what local history is, the positive values of such researching and how one should go about it. It concentrates - as does much folklife work - on the lives of ordinary people in the relatively recent past. This work of family history seeks to do what local history does - relate people to place, or, rather, the place to the people. Over and beyond the "near" Welsh area of Monmouthshire the book's especial focus is on families; neighbourhood networks; their links with national events; and the dynamics of those same local communities. The writer, a scientist, addresses methodologies; the keeping of records; awareness of limitations; and how to adventure into history's waters and so make the "human journey" back into our own pasts. As he has taught himself he can also teach others. Or is it that the Arts-Science divide is an artificial one, the best scientists easily able to cross it? Certainly the book is infectious, persuasive, and remarkably liberating of the fears that preclude so many from similar endeavours.

1997, Ryan, John S

This fine and even sumptuous compilation of more than 4,400 largely proverbial weather sayings, mainly drawn from American and British sources and archival collections, is particularly a reflection of the habit of compiling such material in the latter parts of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The senior author - who died in 1994 before the book's publication - and his colleagues, had already issued 'A Dictionary of American Proverbs' (1992) and 'A Dictionary of Wellerisms' (1994). The third author was also responsible in 1990 for 'International Proverb Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography', Supplement 1 (1800-1981) issued by Garland. Their Preface now categorises these weather dicta as usually expressing either "folk wisdom in a metaphorical fashion" or "superstitions without any rational or scientific basis" (p. vii), and also stresses their folk transmission, over a considerable period of time, "the collective wisdom of generations of people who have depended on knowing at least to some degree of certainty what the weather might bring" (p. ix).

1986, Ryan, John S

This overview paper is concerned to shed some light on naval medicine from the views of three contemporary surgeons who reported on the vile conditions under which British sailors (and convicts) lived, fought and died over some one hundred years. It ranges from the naval campaigns of the 1740s to the customary use of naval surgeons to supervise convicts bound for Australia, and then to supervise free settlers' travel to this country in the 1840s. Conveniently we may focus on the views of three Scotsmen, whose careers in naval medicine may be said to span the period, viz. : Tobias George Smollett (1721-1771); Dr. James Lind, R.N., (1716-1794); and Surgeon Thomas Galloway, R.N. (1797-1852), the last of whom was at sea during years 1793-1841 and whose own naval listings extended over the period from perhaps 1791 to his death more than 60 years later. The first was briefly a naval surgeon, then novelist, historian and satirist; the second, 'the father of nautical medicine', began in the humble capacity of surgeon's mate in 1739 (the same year as did Smollett), then resigned the service in 1747, but was recalled to the navy by being appointed Senior Physician at Haslar Hospital, where he remained until 1783. In the last years of his life he may very well have met the young Thomas Galloway, long based on Portsmouth as a second surgeon's mate from January 1793, a follower of the other's medical theories, and himself possessed of a like warm humanity. The other two men would have agreed most feelingly with the famous opening to Lind's 1757 book, 'An Essay on the most Effectual Means of Preserving the Health of Seamen in the Royal Navy': "the number of seamen in time of war who are lost by shipwreck, capture, famine, fire or sword are but inconsiderable in respect of such as are destroyed by the ship diseases and by the usual maladies of intemperate climates."