….On Wednesdays closest to the full moon the Shire of South Gippsland held their meetings. The councillors could sleep on the way home because the horse would be able to see its way in the moonlight.
In such a primitive but romantic way were things done once upon a time in a green and forested corner of Victoria. It was a remote land stumbled upon by escaped convicts and Her Majesty’s officials. Over the Great Dividing Range from New South Wales came the explorers McMillan and Strzelecki, and then farmer-settlers and diggers.
From long ago and until they were displaced by the intruders, the Aboriginal Bratauolong people looked after the spirits and led their lives amid a natural abundance. But not even the powerful spirits that wreathed the mountains of Wilsons Promontory could protect them.
“Wednesdays Closest to the Full Moon” traces the history of the southernmost part of the Australian continent from its indigenous inhabitants to the present day. It is a genial and capacious history, with a wealth of detail and anecdote…

Barry Collett’s Wednesdays Closest to the Full Moon brings hundreds of long-gone people out of the shadows and on to the clear light of the page. This local history of South Gippsland is a large book, but it does not pile up statistics, nor is it written to score points in academic debates. The author tells his story in immense detail, but writes without academic jargon, in clear and imaginative language, with flashes of lateral thinking, insight and new interpretations. It is a convincing page-turner, which brings centuries, places and people to life, with their hopes, industry, conflicts, humour, grief, disappointments and eccentricities. The long history of the Bratauolong people is invoked with care and their encounter with newcomers is teased out with all its complexities. Life in South Gippsland has always been, for both black and white, something of a `pioneer’ and `frontier’ experience, but with complicated older cultural roots. Professor Davis McCaughey has written that  `Dr Collett’s history of South Gippsland is perceived in a dual perspective. Personal histories –what happens to people, how they live, suffer, work and die – is interwoven with awareness that the lives of men and women are frequently conditioned by forces beyond their control’. The past is not idealised as ‘the good old days’, nor depicted as oppressive and miserable. It shows how some generalisations about Australian history, even world history, are modified by local history, and it shows how we sometimes need a sense of irony and paradox to understand people’s attitudes. It breaks new ground in local history - not only for Australians but also for writers and readers of that genre around the world.

Barry Collett is an Oxford professional historian of Renaissance Europe, but he also knows every inch of the bush and the small towns of Gippsland: he has grown up with its people; his ear is attuned to what they say and mean. He has a scholar’s command of the archival and printed materials, and a scrupulous respect for the evidence, but he has also written from the heart. He has given us a living and wonderfully fresh account of people of the past.

Barry Collett was born in Australia and brought up in a remote bush area, where he was once a good shot and rabbit trapper. At the age of fifty-one, he graduated Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, with a thesis in Italian intellectual history, supervised by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, Regius Professor of History. He taught at the University of Melbourne 1992-2004, and then became Research Scholar in the Faculty of History at Oxford. He is currently writing a biography of Bishop Richard Fox, the founder of Corpus Christi College in 1517, and is also engaged on research for his memoirs of childhood in East Gippsland and a book on the sixteenth century frescoes in the church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Parma. He has published several books and numerous articles in international academic journals and encyclopaedias, writes book reviews, given radio broadcasts, and interviews on historical topics. In 2001, he brokered funding from the Altajir Trust, based in Dubai and London, for a lectureship in Middle Eastern History at the University of Melbourne. He is founder and a director of Executive Renaissance, which conducts historical lectures and seminars for business and professional people in Australia. He is now learning to fly light aircraft, and hopes that his family and friends will want to fly with him.