The Call of the Heart最新文献_第3页

The Call of the Heart Pub Date : 2018-11-07 DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv8xngj3.41

T. Ryan

{"title":"Magnificent Obsession","authors":"T. Ryan","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv8xngj3.41","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv8xngj3.41","url":null,"abstract":"POSTHUMOUSLY AND HANDSOMELY published, this book is a poignant tribute to its author’s ‘magnificent obsession’. For a decade before her sudden death in April 2000, the Melbourne historian Jacqueline Templeton had pursued her interest in the migrations to Australia of Italians from the Valtellina, a province of Sondrio in Lombardy, high up in the Alpine and prealpine zones of northern Italy, close to the present-day border with Switzerland. On the day following the completion of her manuscript, Templeton was diagnosed with a terminal illness and told that she had only months to live. That night she suffered a severe stroke; three days later she was dead. Family and friends grieved for the loss of a vibrant and charming woman. As this book testifies, with Templeton’s too-sudden passing, the world of scholarship suffered its own terrible blow. Templeton was a gifted writer, a fine teacher, an imaginative scholar, and a loyal and principled colleague. The Department of History at the University of Melbourne had been her professional home for most of her working life. It is clear also that the Valtellinese community, which Templeton had known so well on her many visits to the region, had lost a sensitive chronicler and interpreter of the ambitions and aspirations of its wandering sons and daughters. In those lives and in the lives of their descendants, Templeton picked up the threads of an important human story. In her telling of it, she embraced a singular and powerful strand in the long history of the Valtellina itself. She has enriched understandings of the complex processes of migration to Australia, and she has made an original contribution to the historiography of the European migrations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time of her death, Templeton’s manuscript stood as a draft of 160,000 words. After her committed labour of years, and her travels back and forth between Australia and Italy, there was the danger that publication might not occur. As Templeton had conceived her task when she closed her laptop on that morning in April 2000, more than a year of work remained to polish the manuscript and to prepare it for the press. Much vital biographical and family history material necessary for an understanding of the central core of her book — a selection of the letters of the migrants themselves — existed only in various drafts. And no publisher had yet been found. But, in a collective act of professional generosity, a number of Templeton’s colleagues, led by John Lack, worked to bring the manuscript into its final form and to find a publisher. This story of good academic citizenship recalls the efforts made in the same department by R.M. Crawford and J.A. La Nauze in the 1950s to bring into print the manuscript of Margaret Kiddle’s pioneering Men of Yesterday (1958). She, too, had died with a great and vivid work barely complete; and she, too, was selflessly served by her colleagues and friends, who brought her work into p","PeriodicalId":328857,"journal":{"name":"The Call of the Heart","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129631832","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}