A NOTE ON SOURCES

In the absence of any substantial personal or business archives, I have relied on a range of other sources to write What Will Be Worn.

Trove, and the Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program, deserves a special mention. I owe a huge debt to its very existence; I could not have written this book in the way it has been written without access to the archives of Queensland newspapers, particularly The Brisbane Courier, The Courier-Mail, The Queenslander, The Telegraph, The Worker, The Sunday Mail and the Truth, all of which have been digitised, made keyword-searchable, and freely available online through Trove. Through Trove, I was able to access the work of McWhirters copywriters, and the newspaper photographers, correspondents, editors and columnists, many of them unnamed. Their words, illustrations and images have been invaluable, and I am grateful for them.

The affidavits from my grandparents’ custody and divorce proceedings in 1954–55, as well as the court transcripts from the 1954 custody hearing, all held at the Queensland State Archives, were – for want of a better word – a godsend. While necessarily biased and adversarial in nature, the transcripts allowed me to hear my grandparents talk about their lives in their own words. I also spent many days in the cool quiet of the Archives, photographing and recording details of other relevant documents held there, in particular files relating to the family’s estates and trusts, including wills and death certificates.

The National Australian Archives provided access to my grandfather’s and great-uncle’s service records, and the Australian War Memorial’s extensive archives gave me an insight into the various regiments my grandfather served in. Materials held at the Kennedy Regiment Library, within the Hinchinbrook Shire Library in Ingham, allowed me to reconstruct my grandfather’s time at the Sellheim training camp near Charters Towers. Staff at the Carnegie Library in Ayr helped me piece together James McWhirter’s childhood and early life in Scotland. In the Stirling Council Archives, I was given access to Agnes Cameron’s Kirk Confession. The Coles Myer Archives at the State Library of Victoria provided some back ground material on McWhirters, and the John Oxley Library at the State Library of Queensland provided access to a number of archival sources, including my great-great-grandfather’s pay records from his time working with DL Brown in the 1880s. Similarly, the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland provided access to a number of publications and papers that have been useful. I accessed local historical material including some of my grandmother’s school magazines at the Gympie Library, and The Southport School provided photographs and digital copies of school and alumni magazines.

I have quoted from the following literary works: James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (Collins, London, 1952); Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1966); and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (Vintage, London, 1996, c1987).

Of the many reference works consulted, the following were the most valuable: Life Story of Thomas Charles Beirne by Thomas Charles Beirne and Eileen Macrossan (Truth and Sportsman, Brisbane, 1947); Scotland: Beyond the tourist guides by James Brown (Carrick Ailsa Horizons, Girvan, 2009); The Unnecessary War: Island campaigns of the south-west Pacific 1944–45 by Peter Charlton (Macmillan, Melbourne, 1983); My Nine Lives by Diane Cilento (Penguin, Melbourne, 2007), Brisbane by Matthew Condon (NewSouth, Sydney, 2010); Story of the 101 Anti-Tank Regiment by R.L. Franklin and J.T. Rigby (Regimental Books, Virginia, Queensland, 1976); The Making of a Metropolis: Brisbane 1823–1925 by John R. Laverty (Brisbane History Group, Kelvin Grove, 2009); Temptations: Sex, selling and the department store by Gail Reekie (Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, New South Wales, 1993); On Your Feet: An account of 2 Battery of the 2/1 Australian Tank Attack Regiment in the Wewak Campaign, New Guinea, 1945 by R.C. Searle (Regimental Books, Virginia, Queensland, 1948); A History of the Scottish people, 1560–1830 by T.C. Smout (Fontana/Collins, London, 1972); The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson (Harmondsworth, UK, 1968); Service and Style: How the American department store fashioned the middle class by Jan Whitaker (St Martin’s Press, New York, 2006).