The Long Last Summer: Australia's Upper Class Before The Great War
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Before the guns of August shattered the old world forever, Australia's privileged elite lived in a gilded age of opulence, leisure, and breathtaking social ritual — a world that The Long Last Summer meticulously reconstructs with vivid historical clarity. Michael Cannon chronicles the lives of Australia's landed gentry, merchant princes, and social aristocracy in the decades preceding the First World War, painting an intimate portrait of a class defined by horse racing, grand estates, elaborate social seasons, and an unshakeable belief in the permanence of their privileged order. Drawing on diaries, letters, photographs, and contemporary accounts, Cannon presents a richly textured panorama of colonial high society — its extravagant pleasures, its rigid hierarchies, and its often startling contradictions against a backdrop of a young nation still finding its identity. Cannon, one of Australia's most accomplished social historians, illustrates with precision and empathy how this world was simultaneously at its most dazzling and most fragile on the eve of catastrophe. The narrative argues that the Great War did not merely interrupt Australian upper-class life — it annihilated it, sweeping away a social order that could never be reassembled. Rich with period detail and suffused with an elegiac tone, this work stands as an essential record of a vanished Australia, leaving the reader to wonder: did those sun-drenched summers feel, even then, like a farewell?
Author: Michael Cannon
Format: Hardback
Genre: Australian history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Before the guns of August shattered the old world forever, Australia's privileged elite lived in a gilded age of opulence, leisure, and breathtaking social ritual — a world that The Long Last Summer meticulously reconstructs with vivid historical clarity. Michael Cannon chronicles the lives of Australia's landed gentry, merchant princes, and social aristocracy in the decades preceding the First World War, painting an intimate portrait of a class defined by horse racing, grand estates, elaborate social seasons, and an unshakeable belief in the permanence of their privileged order. Drawing on diaries, letters, photographs, and contemporary accounts, Cannon presents a richly textured panorama of colonial high society — its extravagant pleasures, its rigid hierarchies, and its often startling contradictions against a backdrop of a young nation still finding its identity. Cannon, one of Australia's most accomplished social historians, illustrates with precision and empathy how this world was simultaneously at its most dazzling and most fragile on the eve of catastrophe. The narrative argues that the Great War did not merely interrupt Australian upper-class life — it annihilated it, sweeping away a social order that could never be reassembled. Rich with period detail and suffused with an elegiac tone, this work stands as an essential record of a vanished Australia, leaving the reader to wonder: did those sun-drenched summers feel, even then, like a farewell?