Richard Evans
Richard Evans is a journalist and an academic. He has worked on newspapers and legal magazines, and was a lecturer in journalism at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). His work has appeared in HQ, Quadrant, the Age, Overland and The Republican, and been broadcast on ABC Radio National. He is completing a PhD in history.
Richard’s first book The Pyjama Girl Mystery: A True Story of Murder, Obsession and Lies was published in 2004 and in 2007, Constructing Australia was published by Melbourne University Press. His latest book, Disasters That Changed Australia was published by Victory Books in 2009.
He lives in Melbourne.
Books by Richard Evans
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The Pyjama Girl Mystery
The Pyjama Girl was an unknown woman, found dumped by a road near Albury in 1934. She had been brutally murdered. Who she was, and who killed her, become Australia’s greatest unsolved crime for decades.
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Constructing Australia
Constructing Australia tells the dramatic story of political turmoil, private tragedy and conflict that lie at the heart of three epic engineering events in Australia's history: the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Perth-Kalgoorlie Pipeline and the Overland Telegraph. Combining a wealth of rare archival images with a richly researched narrative, this volume presents the grand sweep of events and the human drama behind each project.
Here is the scale of the vision for Australia's place in the world
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Disasters That Changed Australia
Australian history is full of disasters. Some are natural but many more are man-made, results of individual or collective stupidity, reckless decisions, or greed.
In Disasters that Changed Australia, Richard Evans nominates the worst disasters in an engrossing, insightful account of what happened and why. Picture British General, Douglas Haig through sheer arrogance and determination sending thousands of Australian men into swampy, disease-ridden enemy territory for no strategic gain. Or a feral legion of rabbits let loose on the environment, turning furry friends into an uncontrollable plague. Including Cyclone Tracy, Black Friday, the Snowy Mountains Scheme and the destruction of megafauna thousands of years ago, these are just many of debacles that have defined Australia.
Richard Evans goes beneath the familiar stories and myths, and urges us to rethink how we respond to disasters to avoid making the same mistakes again.
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