One of Australia’s most significant colonial artists was S T Gill. His output was prodigious. Gill’s sketches and paintings are a glimpse of early European settlement in the south eastern colonies of Australia and he has left an invaluable record of life in the latter half of nineteenth century Australia. Babette Smith is an author…

The luck of the Irish so often in history was chronic bad luck. That’s how it looked for 250 Irish convicts when theirship, the Hive, sank ignominiously off the NSW coast in 1835. Miraculously, all survived, guided to safety by local Aboriginal people. Using this fascinating case study, in her new book The Luck of The…