Don Dunstan and political and social reform in Australia

Don Dunstan, Premier of South Australia in 1967-68 and 1970-79, was an extraordinarily influential politician whose sweeping reforms led the way nationally and internationally in areas ranging from constitutional reform, Aboriginal land rights, equal opportunities, decriminalisation of homosexuality and civil liberties to urban planning, the arts and food culture. This project will produce the first full-length, comprehensive biography of Dunstan. It will also use Dunstan’s political and cultural transformation of South Australia to examine the wider dynamics of reform in Australia in the1960s and 1970s, to understand how and why such change occurred at both state and national levels.