After Light (book)

After Light: A History Of The City Of Adelaide And Its Council, 1878-1928.

Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1996.

This is a detailed scholarly history, social, administrative and technological, of the "city square" of Adelaide from the late Victorian era to the eve of the Depression. It was commissioned by the Adelaide City Council and was the product of two years' full-time work. Its primary documentation draws on the City of Adelaide Archives, to which I had full. The first scholarly history of Adelaide to appear since 1878, it covers a rich period which saw the transformation of Adelaide from a pioneer, if planned, town to something like a modern capital city.

After Light aims to be more than a parochial municipal history. The emphasis throughout in on social and technological change and one of its strengths is that it relates shifting tastes and the cross-currents of ideas active in Adelaide to those found elsewhere in the Western world. The book has a full scholarly documentation but it is written in an accessible style likely to appeal to the informed lay reader as well as the historian.

For a more developed paper on the astonishingly high infant mortality rates in Victorian Adelaide, see the Sidebar entry 'Dead Babies'.