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This paper examines prime minister Robert Menzies decision to support science education in Australian schools in 1963. This was a landmark shift in policy for the federal government, but in many ways mirrors the decision of Eisenhower who brought down the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958. The paper uses a transnational approach to offer a new way of looking at the 1963 decision by focusing on the need for science education and the environment which supported science advocacy rather than the traditional interpretation of political expediency to court the Catholic vote. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines ten years (1963-1973) of visits to Australia of Italian Communist Party (PCI) officials. In particular, the visits' origins, meaning and ramifications are analysed and framed against the background of post-war migrant worker identity discourses and radical politics. They appear to have shaped markedly the direction of the experience of Italian communists in Australia, especially in Sydney, and their interaction with both the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and the PCI. Ultimately, they helped spread the message of Italian communism among migrants and encourage the replication on Australian soil of the successful experience of the Europe-based PCI federations with thousands of worker members. For the CPA, which had been looking for new ways to break through to the hearts and minds of the migrant proletariat, the visits heralded a stronger partnership with its Italian members, a closer link with Eurocommunism, and a potential new stream of recruits that would have reversed the hemorrhaging of membership. The visits were instrumental, as argued in this paper, for the establishment and promotion of an Italian cultural and language space for which far-left Italian migrants in Australia had long yearned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the period 1930-46, drought and wind erosion turned parts of the US and Australia into dust bowls. While the US events are well studied, historical research on similar processes in Australia is less abundant. The first part of the paper focusses on the transnational transfer of soil conservation policy and science from the US to Australia, claiming it stimulated the diffusion of an ecological conservationist's conscience within the wider Australian society. The dust storm years were therefore a key period for the evolution of ecological thought and environmental ethics in Australia. Taking the example of four key figures of Australia's conservation movement of the 1960s and later, the second part of the paper shows intellectual continuities between these precursors and the later conservation movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1954, Hugh Stretton took charge of a threadbare history department at the University of Adelaide. By the end of his tenure as department chair in 1966, staff numbers had increased fivefold and the department was recognised as one of the best of its kind in Australia. Stretton wanted his department to 'teach history interestingly', which was his overriding criterion in making new appointments. He also ran a democratic department that went against prevailing notions of 'God-Professor' departmental governance. As well as highlighting the singular features of the Adelaide department, the present paper places the growth and the character of 'The House that Hugh Built' within wider Australian and global contexts. The 'Stretton era' straddled a period of rapid expansion of the university sector both locally and internationally, which entailed a move from a generalist to a more specialised curriculum, with a greater emphasis on research and publication, and a less male-dominated faculty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration has played a particularly significant role in shaping settler-colonial societies, including Australia. Successive governments have taken instrumental roles in constructing narratives of Australia’s immigration history. Contrary to the images we see today – of capsizing boats and desperate people seeking refuge – the picture of post-Second World War immigration was all sunshine and smiles, hope and opportunity. Throughout the post-war decades the vaunted Australian sense of fairness was tested by those who entered the country without valid entry permits, for example stowaways and ship’s deserters or visitors, including students who had overstayed their visas. In this paper, we consider an archaeological assemblage of 327 graffiti made by immigration detainees while they were awaiting deportation from the North Head Immigration Detention Centre in Sydney, New South Wales. These graffiti provide a counter-narrative to the rosy image and official record of late-twentieth-century immigration to Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the relationship between law, medical knowledge and romantic suffering in early twentieth-century Australia. Drawing upon a sample of breach of promise of marriage actions from 1824 to 1930, it argues that where the plaintiff’s pain was largely presumed in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth century mastering the language and performance of anguish became crucial to legal success. The less that women suffered socially from romantic disappointment, the more they sought to prove it in court. Women dressed the lesions of their hearts in the disinterested language of medicine and borrowed psychological categories of trauma from victims of war and railway injuries. Heartbreak was thus legitimized as a species of pain by a convergence of law, medicine and women’s audacity to take their feelings seriously. The court’s response to these new bodily articulations of suffering provides a counter-history to the usual tale of law’s preference for the tangible over the intangible. Somatic injury was relegated to special damages, determined by the evidence of doctors and with less lucrative compensation, while emotional injury occupied the dominant, more profitable category of general damages. The history of heartbreak thus demonstrates the historical contingency of legal hostility to emotional injury. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The general focus of this paper is on religious teaching brothers, a very much neglected group within the body of historical scholarship on Catholic education generally. Notwithstanding the existence of an extensive body of literature of a hagiographic nature – much of it commissioned by male religious orders – as well as a small number of academic theses, brothers occupy a field wide open for research on many fronts, internationally and using a wide variety of research approaches. The paper concentrates on a particularly neglected area: the recruitment practices of the orders. It does so in relation to the situation in Australia from 1930 to 1960. First, the broad background to the work of Catholic religious teaching brothers from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century is considered. This is followed by a general overview of three of the four principal ways in which the orders sought new recruits: through the influence of the Church on the Catholic home, through the work of the Catholic school, and through the efforts of special recruiting agents. The paper then moves to the central area of concern – namely, a social semiotic analysis of the special recruitment literature produced by the religious orders and used by them in Australia from the 1930s to the early 1960s. The analysis draws on an analytic approach based on a theory of social semiotics. What the analysis reveals is the sets of practices and textual mechanisms through which the orders enticed young men to join their ranks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the role of the London-based international news agency, Reuters, in transmitting propaganda-inspired news to Australia during the First World War as well as the take-up of such news by the Australian press. It explores how the propaganda function was understood within Reuters and how this function changed during the course of the war. It focuses on Reuters' establishment, in March 1917, of a special British Empire 'supplementary news service designed to unite the Empire behind the war effort. The paper explains Reuters' success in Australia which arose, in large part, from its partnership with the United Cable Service, an Australian agency managed by Keith Murdoch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1950s, rock’n’roll as both a musical genre and a pervasive youth cultural form spread from the U.S. to emerge in various regionalized forms throughout most Western societies. Through the development of various social, technological and industrial circumstances, rock’n’roll was the first youth subculture in Perth, Western Australia to develop widespread acknowledgement across popular cultural consciousness. From its roots in working-class culture to its eventual commercial embrace by middle-class audiences, rock’n’roll developed in Perth through a set of specific circumstances linked to both racial and class-based factors, distinctive to the city as a small, isolated and predominantly suburban location. Whilst the majority of historical analysis on early rock’n’roll focuses on Australia’s east coast, this paper attempts to counter that by drawing from interviews conducted with a number of individuals who were instrumental in the emergence of rock’n’roll in Perth. As such this essay delivers a social history of the style as it developed in that city, placing it at the beginning of a fundamental shift in popular music as a cultural phenomenon, and underlining the importance that a number of specific social and cultural factors including class and race played in the development of a locally specific rock’n’roll culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been limited sustained analysis of the lived reality of citizenship amongst Indigenous Australians exempted from protectionist legislation last century. Through examining the diaries of Daisy Smith, this paper explores how her household, exempted from such legislation in Queensland, experienced citizenship during the 1940s and early 1950s. The diaries show that Daisy Smith and her family exercised civil, political and social rights of citizenship, enjoyed meaningful lives and had a sense of belonging to the Australian nation. However, they also show that Daisy Smith constantly worked hard to uphold the conditions of exemption and protect her family's exempted Aboriginal status. These conditions required the Smith family to deny and relinquish all connection with their Indigenous heritage and embrace the dominant Anglo-Celtic culture or risk losing exemption. In this way, their inclusion in the Australian nation and enjoyment of citizenship rights were conditional upon them being manifestly normative Anglo-Celtic citizens. Their experience of citizenship was by its nature restrictive and coercive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, the Jessie Street National Women’s Library curated an exhibition in Sydney,Remembering Pine Gap, using their extensive collection of materials relating to the Pine Gap women’s peace camp held in central Australia in 1983. Arguably, one of the most iconic events of the Australian women’s peace movement held at the height of Cold War politics, the event accrues significance through being the subject of an exhibition. As well, the exhibition is one of the few that takes a feminist event as its sole focus, and so reminds us of the material connection between the politics and aesthetics of feminist space and time. This article investigates what this might mean as a form for remembering feminist activism, and as an activist form.Remembering Pine Gapis therefore critically situated in relation to other feminist and social protest exhibitions, and is then addressed as an activist form through its feminist aesthetics. In doing so, the paper seeks to extend the ways in which activist spaces and forms can be remembered as physical and material sites as well as intellectual cultural heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the 1880s there was fierce debate in colonial Australia and throughout the English-speaking world about the functioning of increasingly democratic societies and especially who, in terms of race, class and gender, was qualified to participate in the political process. In this formative period of what later became known as the 'White Australia policy', minorities were under intense scrutiny and, within the settler population, the Catholic Irish were the most numerous minority. This paper discusses two controversial and widely-reported 1881 articles by Melbourne writer, A.M. Topp. He argued strongly that the Celtic Irish were actually an 'alien' race, fundamentally antithetical to English governance and morality. Mass Irish migration, in Topp's view, constituted a threat to the political stability and racial superiority of the whole English-speaking world. Topp drew upon contemporary racial science and the works of leading intellectuals, but he was also influenced by political crises then occurring in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. Topp's articles, and the responses they elicited, highlight the complexities of race in colonial Australia by demonstrating that major racial differences were perceived by some to exist within what has often been portrayed as a largely homogenous 'white' settler society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1922 there was a total solar eclipse with the central track traversing the Australian continent from Western Australia, through South Australia and across Queensland. Local and overseas astronomers mounted major observing campaigns to verify the amount of gravitational light bending predicted by the Theory of General Relativity. This paper looks at how the media reported the results from previous expeditions in 1919, which were conducted by the British, and the necessity for the 1922 measurements in Australia. It was this latter local eclipse that was the impetus for Australian correspondents to report on General Relativity. In general, the Australian newspapers chronicled informatively and accurately, they provided a good coverage of the eclipse parties and stressed the significance of the 1922 investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the politics of telecommunications reform between 1967 and 1972, during which time Labor developed a new policy approach that included committing to reconstitute the Postmaster-General's Department as a relatively independent statutory authority. This represented the first serious attempt to reconcile the conflicting objectives of Australian policy: to provide affordable universal services by a government department expected to operate as a 'business-like' enterprise, and ended the political consensus about how national telecommunications should be delivered. The paper contrasts Labor's policy with the Liberal-Country government's more incremental approach; and highlights a significant public policy shift that has received insufficient attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of universities in the twentieth century is, at least from the perspective of growth, a massive success. Australian higher education is no exception. Prior to the Second World War, Australia had six universities and approximately 10,500 students. Now there are in excess of one million students attending 39 institutions. In each phase of student expansion, governments have sought to make universities accessible to new segments of the community, a pattern that informs contemporary social inclusion initiatives. This paper focuses on two successive periods – the 1940s/1950s and the 1960s/1970s – during which university participation expanded. Comparing two universities which were at that time very different from one another – the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales – I consider the ways both universities approached admissions to understand what each institution hoped to achieve in attracting students beyond the traditional elite. This helps move beyond government strategy and rhetoric to consider what universities believed was at stake as they enabled new students to enter their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In late 1960s a powerful myth developed in the United States that Vietnam veterans were spat on when they returned home. A parallel myth survives in Australia with widespread claims that paint or even blood was routinely thrown at returning soldiers. In a 1966 incident, red paint was thrown on Lieutenant Colonel Alex V. Preece as he led the First Battalion through Sydney. The Australian myth remains central to perceptions of Australian Vietnam veterans as despised outsiders and feeds into contemporary demands that Australians support their soldiers and the wars in which they are involved. This paper explores connections between cultural politics in the Unites States and Australia, particularly as they pertain to the contentious legacies of the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What impact did the emergence of public opinion polls have on politicians and newspaper journalism? Based on interviews in the 1980s with American journalists and congressmen from the 1930s and 1940s, Susan Herbst argued that while “traditional” methods of assessing public opinion remained ubiquitous, attempts to quantify public opinion were also widespread. This paper offers a critique of her methods, questions the notion of a “transition”, and reports a different set of findings. Based on an exhaustive examination of the Australian metropolitan press during the 1951 referendum, it shows the limited impact of polls on political journalism—indeed, on political calculus more generally—and how heavily Australian journalists and politicians relied on “rational” measures of long standing not discussed by Herbst—results of earlier referenda and of previous elections, as well as the betting odds. It also shows the importance of a range of “traditional” sources—the reception accorded party leaders at campaign rallies, politicians and campaign organisers' reports, the extent to which the referendum had divided parties, judgments about the popularity of state governments, and the activities of key interest groups—some of which, again, are not noted by Herbst. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The late nineteenth-century expansion of public schooling in Australia from an initial focus on the elementary phase to post-primary provision, and then to a more systematic secondary education over the early to mid-twentieth century, went hand in hand with the emergence of new populations of children and young people – a new constituency. In turn, these developments called into being a New Teacher, and a new system of teacher education, formed in accordance with what was widely understood as the New Education. Moreover, this was conceived as clearly in the service of nation-building. This paper traces aspects of the history of teacher education in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century, proposing that this is best understood with reference to the cultural and ideological significance of English teaching and the English language, nation and empire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Writing in 1927, five leading scholars and administrators of the Australian schooling systems published a book entitled Education in Australia: a comparative study of the educational systems of the six Australian states. These authors wrote of Australian education in a time of great optimism, and one of the key areas of reform they addressed was the introduction of forms of post-primary schooling for a ‘problem’ population of 12–15-year-olds who were not attracted to, or staying with, the high school curriculum which led towards university study. Through the lens of Education in Australia, this paper undertakes a genealogical exploration of the way the adolescent emerged as an object of school reforms in the early twentieth century and shows that these reforms were articulated with discourses of race, social efficiency, science and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

‘Since the Great War began’, Professor David Orme Masson told a Melbourne audience in September 1915, ‘two statements have been made, and so frequently repeated that today they are commonplace. The first is that the result … depends on … men and more men, munitions and yet more munitions. The second is that this is a war of chemists and engineers—a war of applied science’. To Britain's assistance in this war of invention and applied science came more than 120 Australian scientists, whose particular technical skills were urgently needed by the expanding munitions industries. However, their contribution to the Imperial cause and to Allied victory has been overshadowed by the heroism of ANZAC troops in Gallipoli and in France. This paper begins the task of assessing the importance of their work for Britain, and the significance of their wartime experiences for post-war Australia, as viewed through the lives of the men and their organizing genius, A. E. Leighton. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]