Search

The article urges for history teaching to move beyond telling the truth about the colonisation, genocide and dispossession of First Nations Australians towards a context of justice in the Australian history classroom. It cautions the risks of capturing narratives that rely on mistrust and the balance between documenting and interpreting the truth. It suggests a questioning of the curriculum by creating a false balance and interrogating the language used to frame and shape historical events.

The Australian higher education system has its origins in the "Oxbridge" model, and while traces of its Eurocentric heritage persist, the system has evolved through a blend of continuity and change. To grasp the trajectory of Australian higher education, it is essential to delve into its historical development and the pivotal events that have shaped its current form. This article explores significant milestones in the establishment of Australian higher education, all within the backdrop of Australia's history as a colonized nation transitioning to Federation in the 20th century. Embedded within this commentary is a recognition of the intricate challenges faced by academics within the realm of higher education. Historically, academia has remained an exclusive and elitist sphere, marked by imperial and patriarchal norms that have favored white, heterosexual men. These norms have perpetuated the perception of their superiority, consequently influencing how minority groups have navigated academia, both as students and academics. The institutionalization of political, economic, and symbolic ideologies has further exacerbated the obstacles encountered within academia. Therefore, it becomes paramount to consider the impact of the higher education system's operations on academics and how it has perpetuated the influence of colonialism and imperialism on the shaping of scientific knowledge and practices throughout history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1936, Prof A. P. Elkin attended a seminar in Hawaii lasting several weeks, on the topic of 'native education'. In his various papers presented to a range of experts from the region and beyond during the formal conference held in Honolulu as part of the residency, Elkin set out his views on the future of the Indigenous people of Australia. Education would be pivotal to this new approach on pragmatic and humanitarian grounds. Elkin concurred with the findings of the residency: local forms of adapted education were considered appropriate for most Aboriginal Australians, only a minority continuing into further education; communities as well as children should be better prepared for their integration into the nation as the Indigenous people. This paper sets out to interrogate the proximity of anthropology and education in these claims, and the elision of Aboriginal people's agency including their contemporaneous campaigns for equal education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are various ways of apprehending the past: archival research, material culture, media, memory and experiencing the traces of 'history on the streets'. This photo essay follows some walks around the central business district of Sydney and its close surrounds. I trace the visual evidence of 'Asia in Australia', triangulating the visual evidence with archival and other sources. When we talk about Asia and Australia we are no longer simply talking about bilateral relationships between two hermetically sealed entities called 'Australia' and 'Asia' but rather a series of connections which brings together Australians, Asians and Asian Australians in global chains of connectedness, through the production, distribution, dissemination and consumption of fashion, artistic works, cultural products and cuisine in our everyday lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty years after the birth of medical imaging from Röntgen's 1895 discovery, military authorities understood the advantage of visualising injuries of wounded soldiers and monitoring their treatment. In World War One, medical imaging equipment was difficult to use and had to be operated in challenging environments. The most common use of x‐rays was the imaging of metallic foreign bodies such as bullets and shrapnel lodged within a soldier's body. The need to diagnose, manage war injuries and return soldiers to battle, led to medical imaging innovations including alternate means to record an image, better x‐ray tubes and an early form of tomography. Such technological advancements were made by scientists serving their respective countries. With information sourced from the Australian War Memorial archives, this paper also focusses on the experiences of an Australian wartime radiographer. This investigation demonstrates the importance, sacrifice and skills of men and women who took on the difficult task of medical imaging in the first truly world‐based conflict. It highlights how a new profession and associated technology emerged as an important tool in military medicine. Importantly, our profession's history within the context of military history should be preserved, while also honouring the legacy of individuals who contributed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to present a problematising and exploration of how teachers educated within settler-colonial systems are positioned to analyse critically and resist whitewashed curriculum when planning for school-based learning. Since the 2013 implementation of the Australian Curriculum: History, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies have been a mandatory, albeit subsidiary, focus area of study. While publications have explored the purpose of, the need for, and the possibilities offered up by cross-curriculum education, very little attention has been paid to how curriculum is enacted within schools. Through a poststructuralist lens, and a non-Indigenous researcher positioning, this article illuminates a discursive analysis of ways in which six history teachers in Victoria, Australia, perform their subject positioning along a continuum of compliance–resistance within the Australian education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on, History teaching has been the subject of debate in recent times.1 The review of the Australian , curriculum has raised questions about included and excluded content in the teaching of Australian History, leading to robust debate and advocacy from a variety of interested parties.2 While much of the the debate has centered around the prescribed content, History has a lot more to offer than mere knowledge of historical ‘facts.

This article aims, firstly, to provide a sketch of the humanistic tradition of education from Classical Antiquity through to the present, as the cultivation of the whole person as an individual and as a responsible citizen, which arguably still underpins European and other western education systems but which has been eroded in Australia. Secondly, this article aims to provide an outline history of universities in Australia from 1850 to the present, highlighting by way of examples consistent patterns and failures, and the sources of challenges now facing the sector. Thirdly, this article provides a brief summary of those challenges, some of which have been exacerbated but not caused by COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past 40 years, campaigns for the return of Indigenous remains stored in collections around the world—known collectively as the repatriation movement—have coincided with an elevation of Indigenous art to a central role in Australian culture, and to a proliferation of creative works that reflect on settler-colonial legacies. Analysis of key works by leading artists Daniel Boyd and Brook Andrew, who work with human remains or their representations, helps to historicise the emergence of a phenomenon that I call "somatic history". These pieces incorporate human remains to evoke a dense combination of colonial history, collective memory and present-day Indigenous identity. These forms of history-making function as affective interventions during a time when national aspirations for Indigenous self-determination have been consistently stymied. As with repatriation itself, a practice in which temporalities tangle as present-day communities seek care for once-lost Ancestors, these artworks position historical transgression within a present of structural harm to resist a triumphalist national narrative of progress that disowns the colonial era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent comments by the Federal Education Minister, Alan Tudge, have reignited the socalled history and culture war in Australian schools. Tudge has argued that the newest draft version of the Australian Curriculum is critical of Australia's proud history and does not leave students feeling optimistic about their future in Australia. This paper examines the accuracy of Tudge's claims by carefully placing them within the context of the draft and current version of the Australian Curriculum in relation to History and Civics and Citizenship and also examining them in relation to the history of political involvement in the development of curriculum. By doing so, it demonstrates that Tudge's claims are not founded on an understanding of the content and structure of the curriculum and betray a limited understanding of both the teaching of History and Civics and Citizenship, and the development of curriculum as a whole. The paper concludes with advice for teachers seeking to navigate the troubled waters of curriculum and education at this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the highlights of the History Teachers' Association of New South Wales (HTANSW) History Curriculum Symposium held in July 2022. Topics included obligation of the citizens of Australia to make democracy effective, role of academic historians and history teachers in public discussions around Australian history, importance of building consultation into the representation of Indigenous histories, and integration of local stories into the history curriculum.

This article explores the work of Lutheran missionary F. W. Albrecht, who in the decades following the Second World War instituted a privately funded school scheme to provide formal education to Aboriginal children in central Australia. The scheme that Albrecht devised targeted "half-caste" girls living at cattle stations located within the orbit of the Finke River Mission—historically significant because, unlike the child removal commonly associated with the Stolen Generations, it relied on the consent of Aboriginal parents and encouraged the girls to maintain links to and pride in their Aboriginal cultural heritage. As part of a larger study of F. W. Albrecht and the Aboriginal women who were subject to his education scheme, this article discusses the in loco parentis–style relationship that existed between Albrecht and one of his Aboriginal students. By outlining the emotional content of this history, as researchers (one who claims an Indigenous identity position and one who does not) we argue that an ethical engagement with emotions in history is necessary to avoid what Lewis Gordon has termed "disciplinary decadence". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The placement of Indigenous girls and young women in white homes to work as servants was a key strategy of official policy and practice in both the United States and Australia. Between the 1880s and the Second World War, under the outing programs in the U.S. and various apprenticeship and indenturing schemes in Australia, the state regulated and constructed relations between Indigenous and white women in the home. Such state intervention not only helped to define domesticity in a modern world, but was integral to the formation of the modern settler colonial nation in its claims to civilizing authority in the United States and Australia. In the context of settler colonialism, domesticity was not hegemonic in this period, but rather was precarious and uncertain. By prescribing and demanding from employers demonstrations of domesticity, the state was engaged in perfecting white women as well as Indigenous women, the latter as the colonized, to be domesticated, and the former as the colonizer, to domesticate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst most Russian-speaking displaced persons (DPs) settled in Australia were anti- Communist, a small number were actively left-wing. This article examines the revitalisation of Sydney's left-wing Russian Social Club sparked by the arrival of DPs from both Europe and China. Using recently released intelligence records, it highlights the voices and activities of left-wing DPs and suggests that the impacts of state surveillance and the Petrov Affair have contributed to these politically-active DPs occupying a gap in the historical record. Further, it points to the demands the state made of migrants' political lives during the early Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australians of European descent reconstruct Australian history to silence the mistreatment of Indigenous Australians and to favour the coloniser perspective. Literature suggests that although this reconstructed history is typically accepted uncritically, in recent times, young people may have become more critical of this historical account. Exploring young people's conceptualisations of Australian history may provide insight into emerging perspectives of Australian history, and ultimately young people's understanding of Australian identity. A qualitative research design with a social constructionist approach was adopted. Twelve young people aged 18 to 25 who self‐identified as having an interest in Australian history were recruited and participated in a semistructured interview. Interview transcripts were analysed thematically. Three major themes emerged: "learning and 'relearning' Australian history," "making sense of what is happening," and "who is an Australian?" Viewed through a Freirean lens, some young Australians of European descent appear to be undergoing a conceptual shift from holding perspectives associated with the oppressor to adopting a more critical stance of Australian history. Despite this, understandings of oppression were at times paradoxical. Further research is required to understand the phenomena of this proposed shift and to facilitate and encourage this process of siding with the oppressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the entanglements of Australia and New Caledonia as settler colonies with convict histories. Existing historiography focuses on the importance of the Australian model in inspiring the French to transport convicts to settler colonies, and has explored the moral panic that erupted over the menace of escaped French convicts invading the Australian colonies after the abolition of British convict transportation. My analysis shifts the focus onto the construction of settler colonial authority, analysing the ways in which comparisons drawn by contemporary observers of New Caledonia and Australia served primarily to solidify the legitimacy of settler rule in Australia and increase its regional hegemony into the first few decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on original French and English‐language sources, including the writing of the obscure French convict poet Julien de Sanary, this article makes the case for understanding New Caledonia and its bagne not as unwanted reminders of Australia’s penal origins, but rather as useful sites of projection for settlers in Australia. Constant arguments about the archaic and authoritarian nature of French penal policy and colonialism helped erase the memory of convictism and strengthen settler authority and legitimacy in Australia and internationally. By considering the trans‐imperial entanglements of Australia and New Caledonia, we can further reveal the dynamics of settler colonialism and the processes of disavowal and disassociation that sustain it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010, the Excellence in Research for Australia assessment programme developed a controversial ranking of journals that was used as a proxy for the quality of the articles in those journals. The ranking was later abandoned because of serious practical and principled problems. The demand for ranking continues, however, from researchers and university managers. For Humanities disciplines, ranking has advantages over citation analysis, especially in assessing recent work. This article discusses the emergence of journal ranking in Australia, especially as it has affected the discipline of History, and concludes by outlining how a ranking might responsibly be carried out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legacy of colonialism in Australia has resulted in the devaluing and exploitation of Indigenous visual culture, design and representation. Through reinterrogating, revealing and documenting previously unacknowledged or omitted Indigenous contributions to communication design history in Australia, this article seeks to reposition examples of Indigenous visual culture as powerful sites of iconographic symbols, graphic forms and political posters. In this article, communication design as 'visual communication' is utilized as a framework to re-evaluate Indigenous contributions to Australian design history. This article presents a number of case studies of Indigenous contributions to communication design within a historical timeline, from prehistoric visual communication to twentieth-century examples—mirroring the development of the communication design industry. Parallel to the historical timeline, I note the emergence of recurring themes that are critical to the incorporation of Indigenous contributions into design history more broadly; notably effects of national politics, conflicted ideas around national identity, cultural ownership of work and the inclusiveness of the design industry. Through an applied retelling using a decolonizing historical paradigm, key Indigenous contributions are recognized and misappropriated work is repositioned, to acknowledge and give voice to Indigenous communication designs and their undeniable role in creating a national design style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the recent cultural turn in economic history, this article resurrects a neglected imperial trade war between Lancashire and Australia to explore the nature of the cultural economy of the British Empire in the interwar period. New work has emphasised the importance of Britishness as the basis for co-ethnic networks that helped underwrite imperial expansion through the nineteenth century. However, this welcome new focus on culture’s significance for economics has, curiously, tended to obscure its dynamic interaction with the economy. Economic activity did not simply benefit from culture, as concepts like co-ethnicity suggest, but also helped to produce that culture. As result, the meanings of Britishness mobilised by trade were never stable, even in the heart of empire itself. This article focuses on a boycott of Australian produce started by grocers in Lancashire cotton towns in 1934, in response to new Australian tariffs on imported cotton goods. Tracing the cultural meanings constructed from the very first planting of cotton in Australia, through to the boycott and its aftermath, exemplifies the dynamic and contingent nature of Britishness generated through trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the business history of the Australian Government Clothing Factory, the key producer of the Australian military and other uniforms during most of the 20th century. Topics discussed include innovation in the Factory's design and production activities, its collaborations with research scientists, and its role as a laboratory for research and development.

This article examines how treating historic abuse inquiry testimonies as retrospective assertions of rights can help to shed light on how this abuse was able to occur and how memories are recalled in an inquiry environment. It presents its approach as a possible framework for other historians seeking to analyse testimonies with sensitivity. It uses, as an example, a case study from the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse concerning two interrelated “homes” for girls, showing the ways in which abuse survivors can use their testimonies to assert rights denied them in the past and further the goals of public inquiries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The liberalisation of the White Australia policy in the mid-1960s was a seminal event in Australian history. It marked the beginning of the end for the racial conception of society which had defined the federation since the late-nineteenth century. Cabinet’s discussions of the proposed changes during these years demonstrate that most Australian political leaders were not only fundamentally opposed to reform but also unconvinced by arguments emphasising the policy’s administrative inconsistencies, lack of humanitarianism and racially discriminatory features. Nor were they entirely swayed by arguments of diplomatic expediency, which had been advanced by senior Immigration and External Affairs officials since the 1950s. The decline of British race patriotism in the early 1960s weakened the ideological foundations of White Australia and allowed policy-makers to reconsider its foreign policy implications, especially in terms of Australia’s relations with Asia. Although cautious, the reforms of the mid-1960s represented an important break with the policy’s fundamental principles and provided the groundwork for further liberalisation and the formal abolition of White Australia in the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aboriginal affairs has always been a sore point in Australia. Ever since the first Governor attempted to put in place the Colonial Office's instructions to treat the inhabitants with 'amity and kindness' the exercise has been fraught. There is a text-book version of the changing policy landscape and rote school lessons on the gradual acquisition of Aboriginal rights and freedoms. These go some way to conveying the contested ground, political conflict and personal anguish on which this history was built. Yet, they give the impression of evolution and progress. At the same time, the history wars magnified the fractiousness without carving a pathway through. In this paper I recover an important part of the history, which often goes unremarked. I reflect on the role of humanitarian intervention in this politics. Not only has it been critical to the policy landscape - for good and ill - but there are also historical connections and lineages between then and now, which deserve attention. Closely aligned to a history of human rights in Australia, recovering this history seems more pertinent than ever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the history of tariffs imposed by the six Australian colonies during the nineteenth century. In each of the colonies, we identify the starting dates for the first tariffs, first preferences, and other features, and the turning points in the levels of tariffs. We then construct a time series of the average tariff levels in the individual colonies and an average for all six colonies combined. The conclusion notes general features of the pattern of tariffs and how the main features of colonial tariffs, such as the favourable treatment of intermediate inputs, the complex differentiation of tariff rates within industries, and the protection implicit in the excise tax system all carried over to the Commonwealth Customs Tariff in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digitisation of archives has enabled the public lives of very ordinary women in the past to become much more accessible to the historian. But some have argued that the wonders of searchable Internet databases have taken the serendipity out of historical research, with our understanding of the context and richness of the past the poorer for the ease with which we can now zoom into what we set out to find. This article uses the author's research into the lives of mid-nineteenth-century, colonial, urban businesswomen as a case study to investigate the pleasures and the pitfalls of the digital archive for women's history research. It concludes that a new kind of serendipity—the serendipity of unexpected connections between people and across spaces—is provided by the ever-growing global digital archive, enabling us to see these women more completely than previously possible and creating a new narrative of women's past experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japanese people first settled in Australia in the late nineteenth century, yet the history of Japanese Australians remains mostly unknown. In fact, many contemporary people of Japanese heritage often feel alienated from their own ethnic history, even actively rejecting any connection to the Japanese diaspora. This article examines the reasons behind this phenomenon and how the group Nikkei Australia grew out of a need to explore these issues of ambivalent identity. Nikkei Australia is group of researchers and individuals with an interest in rediscovering and retelling Japanese Australian diasporic stories. Drawing on personal narratives and reflections, this article charts the inception of Nikkei Australia and the group's academic, artistic and cultural activities to date, as well as the issues and ideas that inform and frame the group's tasks ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1927, a ship carrying indentured Vietnamese workers travelled down the eastern coast of Australia on its way to New Caledonia. The movement of the Ville d'Amiens steamer through Australian waters sparked protests against alleged 'French slavery' and, eventually, moved politicians to recall the 'injustice' of the 'pre-White Australia' era. This article uses the Ville d'Amiens episode as a portal through which to explore the nexus between geographies of colonialism and of emotion. It argues that colonial and national power operated in pervasively 'triangular' ways, via the interplay of an affective triangle - of guilt, shame and pride - and a geo-political triangle - of French Vietnam, Australia and New Caledonia. Further, the article calls for greater exploration of the historical, geospatial contingencies of memory, motion and emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 1872, the steamshipHerounderwent quarantine at Sydney’s North Head after a case of smallpox was diagnosed. This article brings together the histories of quarantine, white subjectivity and Pacific mobility through an analysis of theLoganiananewspaper produced by the passengers of theHeroduring their confinement. TheLoganianaprovides a unique insight into the formation of white identities through discussions of race, commerce, science and inter-colonial politics. The case provides an important perspective on a transformative period in Australia’s border history, and also illuminates the tensions accompanying the transition from an older imperial order to political autonomy in the nineteenth-century Pacific. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this essay I trace the development of popular narratives around early Christian missions to Greenland and Australia and ask what influence these narratives still have on the ways in which Christian mission is represented and understood. In order to do this, I consider the ways in which Christian missionary activity during the first fifty years of colonization in each context was represented at the time and has since been represented in newspaper articles written in Danish, Greenlandic, and English. I argue that the specific colonial formations and the distinct histories of anthropological discourse on indigenous peoples in Australia and Greenland led to the development of two quite different narratives about the history, and the outcomes, of missionary activity in the two locations. Finally, I investigate the ways in which the histories of early Christian missions in the two contexts are currently represented in high school curricula in Denmark, Greenland, and Australia, arguing that the popular narratives of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries still play a part in how we understand these histories. While levels of knowledge and understanding of the histories of Christian missions to Greenland and Australia vary greatly both between and within countries, I suggest that the content of earlier representations still influences how contemporary Danes, Greenlanders, and Australians understand their colonial mission histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1981 Australian Financial System Inquiry, known as the Campbell Committee, is widely seen as the start of the reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Accounts of its origins have been dominated by a debate about which policy actor can take credit. This paper utilises cabinet and Reserve Bank archives to reassess the origins of the Campbell Committee. The inquiry had its origins in an earlier attempt by the Whitlam government to take federal control of the regulation for non-bank financial institutions and the building society crisis of the mid-1970s. In its response to these political and economic challenges we can identify the moment in which the Fraser cabinet turned towards market-based reform. The political decisions made in the context of crisis set the path for regulatory change in subsequent decades, particularly in the area of prudential regulation, where we have seen regulatory consolidation and expansion rather than ‘deregulation’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A three-year-old boy, born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1892, lived the final months of his life in an abusive foster home. His death barely made a ripple in the press, and the system proved unable or unwilling to deal with much of the most disturbing evidence about the perpetrators of abuse. This article argues that cases like this one are more than just historical curiosities. They expose abuse that so often lay hidden from the public gaze, and reveal important information about how and why it was allowed to occur. Such cases demand the historian’s attention, not because they are scandalous stories, but because they are sites of historical injustice. They also provide opportunities to understand why systems intended to protect children can fail them so badly, a question that remains pertinent today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There are no independently Australian translations of Thomas More's Utopia. Nor is there any equivalent in Australia to the Society for Utopian Studies in North America or the Utopian Studies Society in Europe. Nor are there any extant formal research groups or undergraduate or graduate courses in utopian studies. There are, however, distinctively Australian traditions of utopian writing, both eutopian and dystopian, and also a limited field of Australian utopian studies, essentially the work of individual scholars. This article attempts a brief description of both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have demonstrated how mobility was gendered across nineteenth-century colonial contexts and how "moving" female subjects have made and remade patriarchal settler colonial regimes. But subjects who moved also came to a stop and spoke. This article explores the ways a Norwegian woman spoke and was heard within the various social and legal spaces of Victoria, an Antipodean British settler colony. Louisa Fritz arrived in Melbourne in 1891 and weeks later became the informant in a trial of "indecent assault with attempt to rape."1 She did so while European settlers were working out the bio- and linguistic politics of creating a "White Australian nation." Through a close analysis of Fritz's speech, this article demonstrates that if spaces are bodily constructions, they are equally linguistic/acoustic constructions made by the speech(es) of migrants, settlers, and those in the blurry space between these categories. More specifically, I argue that paying attention to women's speech illuminates the linguistic dimensions of settler colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers distinctive mediums of memory emerging from the traumatic history of Aboriginal women’s experiences as domestic workers in Queensland, Australia throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One is the exhibitionMany Threadspresented in 2014 at the Ration Shed Museum in the Aboriginal community of Cherbourg in southern Queensland. The other is the collaborative memoirAuntie Ritaby Jackie Huggins and Rita Huggins, which recounts Rita’s life through a dialogue between mother and daughter. The article uses a reading of Jackie’s voice, as consciously activist and feminist, as a way in to understanding the testimonial memory of other Cherbourg women. In remembering, interpreting and presenting their experiences as domestic workers, alongside those of their mothers, grandmothers, aunts and sisters, Cherbourg women are actively intervening in historical and contemporary discourses that seek to limit their representation to that of victims and their community as intrinsically dysfunctional. Instead, through yarning, writing and sewing, Cherbourg women are generating memories, and memory communities, of resistance, strength, resilience, creativity and survival. The paper argues that this memory work is a vital form of counter-memory, which disturbs and unsettles normative Australian representations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]