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Dictionary of Australian Biography

Biographical encyclopaedia of Australians deceased before 1943

Summary

Biographical encyclopaedia of Australians deceased before 1943

Field	Value
italic title	Dictionary of Australian Biography
name	Dictionary of Australian Biography
image	File:Dictionary_of_Australian_Biography.png
author	Percival Serle (1871–1951)
country	Australia
language	English
subject	Biographies of notable Australians who died before 1942
genre	Encyclopaedia
publisher	Angus and Robertson
pub_date	1949
dewey	920.094

The Dictionary of Australian Biography, published in 1949, is a reference work by Percival Serle containing information on notable people associated with Australian history. With approximately a thousand entries, the book took more than twenty years to complete. Published by Angus and Robertson, the dictionary was compiled as two volumes, Volume 1: A–K; and Volume 2: L–Z.

The book contains 1,030 biographies of Australians, or people who were closely connected with Australia, who died before the end of 1942. According to Serle in his preface:

Format

The average length of the biographies is about 640 words. Serle classified them roughly into the following twelve groups:

Group	No. of
profiles	No.	Name
1	Army and navy	10
2	Artists, including architects, actors and musicians	130
3	Governors and administrators	50
4	Lawyers	69
5	Literary men and women	137
6	Notorieties	17
7	Pioneers, explorers, pastoralists, men of business	161
8	Politicians	174
9	Scholars, philosophers, clergy	76
10	Scientists, including physicians, surgeons and engineers	140
11	Social reformers, philanthropists, educationists	53
12	Sporting men (cricketers and athletes)	13

Of the above profiles, the number of women included was 42 or 4 percent of the biographies. Forty-seven percent of those included in the book were born in England, 27 percent in Australia, 12 percent Scotland, 8 percent Ireland, 1 percent Wales and remaining 5 percent were from the rest of the world which included twelve from the United States, nine from Germany, and six from New Zealand.

Award

1949 ALS Gold Medal, winner

Publication details

Notes

In a letter published in The Age newspaper following the announcement of the awarding of the Als Gold medal, critic Nettie Palmer pointed out that the book was not a "biography of Australian literature" but rather a dictionary of Australian biography.

References

"''Dictionary of Australian Biography'' by Percival Serle". National Library of Australia.
{{cite Q. Q5273962
""News of the Day"". The Age, 3 November 1949, p2.
""Biographical Work"". The Age, 7 November 1949, p2p.

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

1949-non-fiction-books als-gold-medal–winning-works reference-works-in-the-public-domain australian-biographical-dictionaries angus-&-robertson-books

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