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The Australian system of mandatory detention of asylum-seekers has become increasingly controversial. Insofar as commentary on detention has been framed historically, critics have pointed to Australia's race-based exclusionary laws and policies over the twentieth century. In this article, we suggest that exclusion and detention are not equivalent practices, even if they are often related. Here we present an alternative genealogy of mandatory detention and protests against it. Quarantine-detention and the internment of 'enemy aliens' in wartime are historic precedents for the current detention of asylum-seekers. Importantly, in both carceral practices, non-criminal and often non-citizen populations were held in custody en masse and without trial. Quarantine, internment and incarceration of asylum-seekers are substantively connected over the twentieth century, as questions of territory, security and citizenship have been played out in Australia's histories of detention.

This article investigates the early twentieth century discourse of tropical medicine as a site in which 'whiteness' became the object of biomedical scrutiny. Australian tropical medicine is notable in that it reversed the usual raced and gendered dynamics of Western medico-scientific research. Rather than studying the black body, it studied the white body, and rather than pathologizing women, it pathologized men. In the early to mid twentieth century tropical medicine was one of the primary sites for the formation of Australian governmental racism and nationalism, and for discussion and implementation of the infamous 'white Australia policy'. It was a response to European science which had long argued that 'white man' and white populations would degenerate in the tropics. I examine tropical medicine and public health more generally as a mode of colonization of northern Australia, in which Aboriginal people were governed and managed through health measures. I also examine the specific ways in which whiteness was constituted by tropical medicine, and the class and gender issues which shaped the representational possibilities of this whiteness. Keywords: Whiteness; tropical medicine; Australian nationalism; history; masculinity.

Women began to redefine the image of nurses as motivated primarily by self sacrifice in Australia in the late 1880s. Images of the 'new woman,' increasing feminism, and the labor movement began to characterize nurses as women interested in careers and advancement who partly fulfilled personal needs through work. Some nurse educators, politicians, and others resisted this role, preferring the image of philanthropic 'angels.', From the 1890s, labor politics and language offered an alternative meaning of `work' for the nurse. This alternative was neither specific nor restrict to working-class women. Nonetheless, it was one [...]