In 2006, Beverley Kingston, Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History at the University of New South Wales, offered the early twenty-first century her very human and wise perspectives on the white peoples' experience of their daily life in New South Wales, from the arrival of the First Fleet to the present. Later in the year she would do the same in a very personal discussion - at unusual length - with Quentin Dempster on television in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's perspectives programme, 'State Line'. Her book, published earlier, 'A History of New South Wales', is the first history of the premier state to have been issued in over a century. It is also both political and social, cultural and insightful, as to many of the events which we tend to list in somewhat perfunctory fashion. The treatment is, perhaps, much of what might have been expected from a reflective historian who has also written well about the experiences of women in work in Australia, we well as the witty and perceptive Basket, 'Bag and Trolley: A Short History of Shopping in Australia' (1994).

Most adult readers of Australian newspapers and receivers of electronic news media broadcasts in the 1960s and 1970s would have been very familiar with the phrase, 'rest and recreation' or 'R. and R.' during the period of the Vietnam conflict. Recently staff members at the University College within the Australian Defence Force Academy collaborated to produce for the Vietnam Generation Inc. and Burning Cities Press, Maryland, USA, a special issue of their periodical, Vietnam Generation, titled: 'Australia R and R: Representations and Reinterpretations of Australia's war in Vietnam'.

It is something of a commonplace of the criticism of the novels of Rolf Boldrewood (T.A.Browne, 1826-1915) that they were composed by a man steeped in the works of the great Scottish romantic and antiquarian. Several of the Australian's romances contained quotations from the master, most scraps of Scottish dialect and a like antiquarian attitude to the past as somehow more engaging, heroic and chivalrous than the novelist's own day. Both writers were able to invest their country's yesterday with more colour and glamour, and their pages with more genuinely eccentric character than their own times might have afforded. It is the contention now than an early novel from Walter Scott, 'The Pirate' (1822) provides much of the structure and pattern to Boldrewood's 'Robbery Under Arms', published serially in 1882-83 and as a book in 1888.

This collection of regional biographical and cultural essays constitutes the fourth such volume to be commissioned, assembled and produced as a result of a commemorative project as between the University of New England and the Armidale and District Historical Society. The driving purpose - one inaugurated and generously funded by the University - is and will remain the same as earlier, as conceived of in the anniversary year of 1998 - to further and enhance mutual scholarly endeavours, as well as to clarify certain strands in the two organisations' shared heritage and distinctive regional and cultural identity.

In January 2008, there was launched in England by SAGE Publications the first issue / number of a new scholarly journal, one entitled Memory Studies, which had set out, boldly and reflectively, the intended agenda, challenges, and prospects for the then to be formally designated research field of 'Memory Studies'. Significantly for Australia, its foundation editors were then listed as being: Andrew Hoskins, Principal Editor, C/o, University of Warwick, UK; Amanda Barnier, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia; Wulf Kanstener, State University of New York, at Binghampton, USA; and John Sutton, of Macquarie University, Sydney. In late 2013, as for the issue No 4, for its Volume 6, the first, second and fourth of the above were still in office, with the second being replaced by another Australian, Catherine Stevens of the University of Western Sydney. Thus the Australian leadership and responsibilities had not decreased, nor had its close proximity of southern location of the editors, while the Editorial Board had some 68 scholars listed - these including, from Australasia - both Scott McQuire and Elaine Reece, of the University of Otago.

The concept of a drowned continent in the ocean depths of the Southern Hemisphere comes from the Indian Ocean and also from the central southern Pacific, both of which regions are held to have had sunken lands which were deemed to be parts of the whole land mass, best known later as Lemuria. The myth is part navigational, part pseudo-religious and nowadays being slowly forgotten, despite occasional reappearances. The more eastern concepts, being those first advanced, may be treated first in a chronological order of publication.