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This article asks: what are the factors that encourage and enable, or require and force, some fathers to reduce employment and stay home with children? It draws upon a conceptual model which examines how 'gender cultures' and 'gender systems' shape 'gender arrangements' of work and family life. The article uses evidence from oral history interviews conducted with men who were stay‐at‐home fathers in late‐twentieth‐century Australia. It concludes that when Australian families negotiated decisions about who would stay home with young children, economic forces were usually more influential than gender ideals. Yet the oral history accounts also show what fathers, and their families, could gain when men took on a shared and central role in the care of their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1970s Australia, magazines and newspapers regularly featured stories about transgender women. The articles were often exploitative and depicted transgender people as freaks, with headlines designed to shock and mock. Digging deeper, there is another side to transgender people in the Australian media. Notwithstanding the exploitative nature of the coverage, the media was still a site of transgender visibility in an era where there otherwise was none. Oral histories with transgender Australians often mention the importance of a particular television show, article or magazine because they saw others 'like them', and they realised that they were not alone. Some transgender people even kept those articles for years because of the connections they felt to an otherwise uncertain identity. There were also features in the press that were empathetic to transgender Australians, whether that be on the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), in magazines such as Cleo or in broadsheet newspapers. This article analyses the complex role that media played representing and relating to transgender Australians in the 1970s. Drawing on a mix of newspaper, magazine and television sources, as well as oral histories, the article opens new lines of inquiry about histories of transgender visibility, public discourse and understanding the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the policy and practice of Australia's so-called 'eugenic phase' of border control embedded within the 1912 Immigration Act. It highlights the efforts of the first London-based Commonwealth Medical Officer - Dr William Perrin Norris - who designed a medical bureaucratic system intended to keep 'defectives' out of Australia. Norris' vision is revealed to be befitting of his character, experience, and a passion for uniformity which went beyond his legal jurisdiction. In examining the associated political debates, procedural instructions and the practicalities of the legislation, this article advances a more nuanced historical understanding of this period of Australian border control, and traces the evolution of the idiot and insane prohibited immigrant clause in the first quarter of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Department of Military Studies at the University of Sydney ran courses from 1907 to 1915. The manner in which it functioned and the role it played is not widely understood, in particular how it was integrated with the Commonwealth Military Forces. Within the history of the development of the Australian military it is usually treated as a footnote before the arrival of Royal Military College Duntroon, and discarded as having limited impact. This article challenges that assumption, demonstrating how significant the Department's influence was within the Commonwealth Military Forces as an early example of integration between tertiary education and professional military education, while also situating the Department within the context of wider British Empire officer education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the various new modes for making photographs that were explored by Australian photographers in the first decades of the twentieth century, three in particular – Pictorialist images, authentic records, and personal snapshots – had far-reaching implications for the institutions of Australian photography. Pictorialist photographs are now the foundation of many Australian art museum collections; photographic records produced at the time have become iconic in Australian public history, forming the backbone of many social history collections; and personal snapshots from the period are increasingly reproduced in social histories. Historians of Australian photography have discussed and analysed each of these modes1, but they have tended to treat them separately, or even in opposition to each other, and to concentrate on the distinct careers of individual photographers. This article looks at this crucial period, and these key photographic modes, from the point of view of the worldwide networks and systems for the distribution, exhibition, collection, and indexing of photographs. We show how these modes, far from being distinct, overlapped one another as each grappled with the same issues of nation, history, and memory, and as each articulated their nationalistic concerns through international networks and idioms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent accounts of efforts to racially circumscribe mobility in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia have described how the figure of the Indian immigrant came to be perceived by white settlers as a threat to their visions of a settled order. However, the case of Cassim Mahomet escapes this analysis. Cassim was the son of a family of Indian circus performers brought to Australia in the 1890s, who, after serving in army concert parties during World War I, returned to Australia to build a lengthy and popular career as a vaudeville performer, magician, actor and recording artist. Cassim's success in show business was founded on his creative exploitation of two apparently contradictory stereotypes, the Australian digger and the mysterious Oriental magician. The first of these characters, 'the Indian Digger', emphasised Cassim's connections to the emerging tradition of the digger and the Anzac legend; 'the Son of India' was a composite, orientalised figure familiar to Australian audiences as a stock character in vaudeville and the circus. This article highlights Cassim's ability to perform multiple identities successfully. It reconsiders the equation of Indian mobility to and within Australia with white settlers' negative perceptions and, by approaching Cassim's microbiography from the perspective of performance, investigates the interplay of race, mobility and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1950s, the Christian mission to the Anindilyakwa Aboriginal people of Groote Eylandt, North Australia, was in disarray over the question of marriage. Missionaries thought they had won Aboriginal people to their system of monogamous marriage, conducive to Australian citizenship and consistent with Christian teaching. But a series of ‘marriage disturbances’ suggested their confidence was premature. In Aboriginal English, to ‘marry straight’ (as opposed to ‘close’) means to marry according to a complex kinship system which arises from clans’ spiritual relationships to the land. I argue that foregrounding Aboriginal conceptions of marriage – that is, alternative indigenous ways of marrying ‘straight’ – reveals that Aboriginal people were doing more than simply rejecting missionary monogamy. The role of kinship in re-creating Aboriginal systems of land tenure and social order reveals marriage as an important site of resistance to the (sometimes contradictory) settler-colonial encroaches of both missionaries and the state. It also demonstrates that Aboriginal people had their own spiritual and social priorities for marriage that were not oriented around the intrusions of colonisers. While they acted to resist missionary visions of Christian citizenship and Western conceptions of heterosexual monogamy, they also worked to uphold their own kinship systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Labour and economics are traditional strengths of Australian history, though in recent decades cultural history has instead dominated historical practice. This article discusses the relationship between the economic and cultural in Australian history, utilising our own research as case studies that explore reasons to combine the structural and discursive. Inspired by settler colonial studies and other developments internationally, we propose a new historical materialism for Australian history. In particular, we argue for an increased attention to economic questions and data in combination with cultural history sources and analysis; for the greater historicisation of capitalism as itself a specific and contingent phenomenon; and for the application of Marxist tools, without discarding the lessons of the cultural turn and their specific value to Australian history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between 1926 and 1935 the Better Farming Train made seven trips to the Victorian Mallee region. Modeled on North American examples, the mission of the Train was to spread the "doctrine of better farming" to this wheat-growing region. The Train carried to the Mallee ideas about the promise of science and the hopes of modernity. It championed particular ideas about agricultural development, settlement, and the role of female labor in carrying out the yeoman ideal of the small farmholding. Although the product of a specific time and place, it also tapped into a long-standing belief that the mallee lands could be developed through correct settlement, the advances of technology, and the application of science. The Train was more than a moving collection of exhibits; it also freighted a way of imagining the Mallee that saw in the prospect of golden fields of wheat a way of redeeming the land and forging a modern nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1890s agricultural settlers moved into the Victorian Mallee, an area characterized by low rainfall and a deep-rooted eucalyptus mallee scrub. By rolling, cutting, and burning this scrub, large areas could be rapidly brought under cereal crops. The key to success on this agricultural frontier was cheap land and the cropping of broad acres using labor-saving cultivation and harvesting machinery. From the 1890s to the early 1920s, settlers successfully farmed the southern regions of the Mallee. In the 1920s settlement pushed north into drier regions, but settlers were allocated blocks too small to be viable, and in the 1930s world commodity prices collapsed. From 1938 to 1944 settlers across the Mallee experienced a run of very dry years, and dust storms became a feature of Mallee life. Government intervention resulted in the consolidation of blocks, which enabled settlers to less intensively cultivate their land and to combine cropping with sheep farming. Government research encouraged new methods of cultivation in the 1940s to arrest sand drift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines self-sown crops as agents in the agricultural development of Australia's southern mallee lands from the 1890s to the 1940s. Self-sown crops suggested ways to farm and provided the enticement of an occasional windfall. They assisted with expansion and consolidation of holdings and provided moral lessons in the value of persistence. In the context of the rise of modern, scientific farming characterized by strict regimes of crop rotation and fallowing, self-sown crops encouraged farmers to maintain more adaptive, less regimented approaches. Ultimately, modernist systems triumphed, and by the mid-twentieth century self-sown crops were all but excluded from mallee agriculture. For a time, however, these plants played a significant role in shaping approaches to farming in the mallee lands and sustaining agricultural enterprise there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural societies have precursor societies that can be misrepresented in the process of writing agricultural history. Also, the interest in environmental history on labor and nature is rarely applied to Indigenous workers. This article addresses these two issues in the context of Aboriginal people of the Murray River in the region of the Victorian Mallee in southeastern Australia, now premier wheat country. It argues through a close examination of work within a "geography of labor" along the river, that Indigenous people at European contact in the 1840s and long before, labored in a far more successful and sustainable manner than humans did for most of the farm history of this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1950s, the Soviet Union made great efforts to persuade its former citizens among the 'displaced persons' (DPs) resettled in Australia after the war to repatriate. They sent two undercover military intelligence men to Canberra to identify DPs who might be interested in returning, offer them free passages, and organize the repatriation. The result was a paltry dozen repatriations, out of the estimated 50,000 eligible DPs resettled in Australia. This strange story - hitherto completely unknown and reconstructed on the basis of recently opened Soviet classified material in the State Archive of the Russian Federation and ASIO files in the National Archives of Australia - adds a new angle to our understanding of Soviet-Australian (and, in general, Soviet-Western) relations at the height of the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The remote West Australian town of Broome has a unique photography heritage that sheds new light on the complexities of photography and intercultural relations. During the early twentieth century thriving Japanese communities were established in this region around the lucrative pearling industry. These Japanese communities also helped to develop a fascinating photography culture in Broome. Photography was not simply a business opportunity for the Japanese or a means of documenting people and events; it was a medium through which hierarchised social relations were produced, redefined, and challenged. This article examines photographs by these Japanese residents as an important site of cross-cultural communication and interpretation. These photographs of Anglo-Australian, Japanese, and Aboriginal residents of Broome enrich the study of cross-cultural photographic encounters, and emphasise the dynamic and dispersed qualities of Australian photographic practice and history. Here national histories of photography are usefully conceptualised as the products of imbricated social, economic, and cultural relations that operate across regional, national, and international realms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines cultural representations of the mid-twentieth century mother of schoolchildren in a mass-circulation Australian women’s magazine, arguing that schools and schooling have been under-acknowledged in the historiography of mothering, despite their importance in shaping modern childhood and family life. Framing theAustralian Women’s Weeklyas a medium of public instruction, we identify and analyse its advice about schooling, both direct and implied, across a variety of the magazine’s sections: in illustrations, news, feature articles, advertising, letters and advice columns. This advice was informed by the popular dissemination of medical, psychological and educational expertise, by managed exchanges amongst the magazine’s readers and by the availability of a variety of consumer products. Much of the guidance offered to mothers was aspirational, aimed at educating and thereby modernising the readership. The interconnectedness of advertising and editorial produced visual and textual images of an “educational home” in which children had their learning supported or enriched, just as their bodies were capably fed and clothed. By the 1950s there was an increasing emphasis on interpersonal relations and therapeutic psychology and theWeeklyhad embarked on a project of encouraging mothers to learn more about schooling, to do more to support their children’s learning and to take an interest in education as a social project. Despite her strong and growing connection to the school through her children, however, the school mother was almost always represented as working outside its physical boundaries during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article highlights the important function of family and kinship networks in the pastoral industry of the Port Phillip District and Victoria, Australia, during the nineteenth century. Using the core case study of the extended Cameron family--or the Cameron "clan" from the Scottish Highlands--in the Western District of Victoria, it demonstrates how family networks assisted in the accumulation and consolidation of large pastoral properties and enterprises and thus aided the agricultural entrepreneurialism of migrants who saw greater commercial opportunities throughout the Empire than at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established as a British imperial penal colony, Van Diemen's Land received approximately 75,000 convicts before cessation of convict transportation in 1853. A vast network of penal stations and institutions were created to accommodate, employ, administer, and discipline these exiled felons. Popular interpretations of Australia's convict past highlight dynamics of shame, avoidance and active obliteration that characterized Australia's relationship to its recent convict past. Yet, closer examination of these colonial institutions suggests a far more ambivalent relationship with this 'dark heritage,' evidenced by continuous tourism and visitation to these places of pain and shame from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 1902 the Victorian suffragist Vida Goldstein helped establish the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) in Washington, D.C. Four months later, the Commonwealth Franchise Act gave white women unprecedented political privileges. Despite these pioneer achievements, Australian women struggled to achieve prominence within the international suffrage movement before the First World War. Discounting traditional explanations that expense and distance kept Australians on the IWSA’s margins, this article reconsiders the concept of national representation – a central tenet of liberal internationalism. In the wake of Federation, deep colonial loyalties persisted and women remained ambivalent about assuming the responsibilities of national and international citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the database created by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project (www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs) which documents the recipients of the twenty million pounds paid in compensation to the slave-owners at the time of abolition, as a starting point from which to explore some of the implications of the flow of human and financial capital to Australia in the 1830s and 1840s. Once the Caribbean was no longer a place to make a fortune, descendants of slave-owners chose this new colony of white settlement as the next frontier of empire. Colonial officials, sheep farmers and writers were amongst those who attempted to make a new life, carrying with them attitudes to racial difference which inflected their understanding of Aboriginal peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indian hawkers have gone unrecognised in mainstream narratives of Australian history, yet they were an important part of the bush economy and continue to be remembered affectionately by those who knew and worked with them. In retrieving the life of one of these men, Boota Mohamed Allam, this article presents the hawker's experiences as a personalised case study of some of the ‘big stories’ of modernity, in Tony Ballantyne’s phrase, in particular of the overarching themes of migration, empire, nation and race. This article has been peer reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to restore the history of internationalism to our understanding of the legacy of the First World War, and the role of universities in that past. It begins by emphasising the war’s twin legacy, namely, the twin principles of the peace: national self-determination and the League of Nations.Design/methodology/approach It focuses on the intersecting significance and meaning attributed to the related terms patriotism and humanity, nationalism and internationalism, during the war and after. A key focus is the memorialization of Edith Cavell, and the role of men and women in supporting a League of Nations.Findings The author finds that contrary to conventional historical opinion, internationalism was as significant as nationalism during the war and after, thanks to the influence and ideas of men and women connected through university networks.Research limitations/implications The author’s argument is based on an examination of British imperial sources in particular.Originality/value The implications of this argument are that historians need to recover the international past in histories of nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of agriculture on Australia's nineteenth and twentieth century economic development is well known. While wool's contribution is rightly celebrated, the contribution of agricultural crops has received less attention. This paper focuses on one major staple, wheat, from 1861 to 1939. Both patent data and a new measure of technological progress, the cumulative number of wheat varieties tested for local adoption, are used to quantify the contribution of agricultural innovation to growth. We find innovation in this sector made an important contribution to the growth of total factor productivity over the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Redditch was a champion thoroughbred who won many major jumps races in Australia before his death in 1935. In Australia, jumps racing (primarily steeplechasing and hurdling) is now confined to Victoria and South Australia, and is far less popular than it was in the 1930s. The latter part of the paper compares reaction to the death of Redditch with contemporary jumps racing debates. The paper explores what has changed since 1935 and what can be learned from the death of Redditch in relation to contemporary jumps racing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the meaning of Empire Day in the British World was manipulated and transformed through a range of urban institutions before reaching the public at large. Selecting cities in England and the Antipodean colonies for comparison, we shall challenge the assumption that a hegemonic imperial ideology was streamed uncontested and unaltered to urban populations. Indeed, it is argued here that because of significant differences in urban development in Britain and colonial towns, the meaning of the imperial message was variable. In the British context imperial meaning was directed to cure perceived local crises while, alternatively, within a colonial setting imperial propaganda came secondary to national priorities. The conclusion is that, in the case of Empire Day, the urban setting is decisive to understanding how imperial propaganda was transformed to meet the needs of local or national environments. Key differences in the way civic culture and the provincial press evolved in Britain and her colonies ensured that Lord Meath’s desire that Empire Day would nurture a unifying and homogenous imperial identity proved an elusive aspiration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Famously Prime Minister Billy Hughes blamed the Irish Catholic vote and the influence of Archbishop Mannix for the defeat of his first conscription referendum in 1916. Australian historians since the 1960s have cast doubt on this claim. A more subtle effect of the tumultuous events in Dublin at Easter 1916 was suggested by Patrick O'Farrell: the Easter Rising brought to an end the Irish Home Rule movement in Australia, to be replaced not by republicanism but 'by nothing'. What then might remain of the Easter Rising in Australian history and memory? At the very least, it is suggested here, a long-term effect was its impact in driving Hughes to create new security legislation and a Commonwealth police. Alongside the work of tracing this legacy of the Rising in Australian institutions of law and security, this lecture traces also some contours of its effects in politics and memory. [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]

The Commonwealth of Australia was founded in dreams of a Pacific empire. One of the first acts of the new nation in 1901 was to request the transfer of British New Guinea to Australian control. Aware of their poor reputation with regard to the treatment of Aborigines, Australian political leaders determined to redeem their reputation in the new colony. At the same time, however, they wanted to encourage white settlement and overcome Papuan resistance to the white take-over of their land. Alfred Deakin recruited professed ‘Australianist' Hubert Murray, the foremost critic of the old regime of Captain Barton, to effect this goal. Papuans were anxious about the transition from British to Australian authority, apprehensive that ‘white men' were coming to steal native land ‘like they had stolen the lands of the Queensland natives'. From the Papuan perspective, the Australian take-over of British New Guinea and Murray's ascendancy represented continuity in colonial practice, rather than the advent of modern imperial ideals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Some internationally minded liberal intellectual men in Melbourne and Sydney in the 1920s and 1930s became obsessed with the Pacific, viewing its peoples as instructive and appealing, even as possible guides for solving Australia's population problems. I follow three of them—Frederic W. Eggleston, Stephen H. Roberts, and Adolphus P. Elkin—as they read the lessons of Oceania. In particular, experiences in Hawaii and intimacies with Pacific peoples led them to revise their opinions of Aboriginal Australians, re-evaluate the mixing of races, and even question the white Australia policy. Additionally, I consider here what these reflections on the beach and entanglements in the boarder-lands of the surf may have meant for the development of a style of internationalist white masculinity during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the late 1920s and 1930s, Hubert ‘Oppy’ Opperman (1904–96) rose to prominence as the greatest endurance cyclist of the period. After success in Europe, Opperman spent a decade setting a slew of transcontinental and intercity cycling records. This article explores how Opperman attained his celebrity status and why his feats of endurance resonated powerfully with the Australian public. More than a mere distraction in the economic turmoil of the Depression, Opperman’s significance can be explained within the context of broader concerns about modernity, national capacity, efficiency and race patriotism. This article also argues that for a nation insecure about its physical and moral condition, Opperman fostered new understandings of athleticism, masculinity and the capacity of white Australians to thrive in a vast and sparsely populated continent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to explain why South Australian agricultural land use is focused on continually increasing productivity, when the majority of produce is exported, at the long-term expense of agriculturally-based communities and the environment. A historical analysis of literature relevant to the agricultural development of South Australia is used chronologically to report aspects of the industry that continue to cause concerns in the present day. The historically dominant capitalist socio-economic system and ‘anthropocentric’ world views of farmers, politicians, and key stakeholders have resulted in detrimental social, environmental and political outcomes. Although recognition of the environmental impacts of agricultural land use has increased dramatically since the 1980s, conventional productivist, export oriented farming still dominates the South Australian landscape. A combination of market oriented initiatives and concerned producers are, however, contributing to increasing the recognition of the environmental and social outcomes of agricultural practice and it is argued here that South Australia has the opportunity to value multifunctional land use more explicitly via innovative policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing largely on archival records, this paper examines the Australian use of a detachment from the Native police force to guard the Australian war criminals' compounds for Japanese war criminals established at Rabaul and Manus Island, both in the Territory of New Guinea, from 1945 to 1953. Australia was the only Allied country in the immediate post-war period to utilise civilian police as guards for Japanese war criminals, let alone to draw principally upon Indigenous personnel. While Australian views of the Indigenous population remained paternalistic, if not outright racist, throughout this period, the use of the Native police opened up some small space for more complex perceptions of questions of racial difference. Yet, the Native police detachment to the Australian war criminal compounds has been, until now, generally overlooked in the broader history of the Native police forces of Papua and of New Guinea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an excerpt from the 2014 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture, delivered by the Honourable Josh Frydenberg, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and the Federal Member for Kooyong, on August 14, 2014, in the Queen's Hall at the Parliament of Victoria, Melbourne. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthur Melville ('Mel') Thompson graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1938 with First Class Honours in Physics. After graduation he joined Australia's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research as one of the 'founding fathers' of the National Standards Laboratory and embarked on a life-time career in metrology. His work in precision electrical measurement, ratio-arms transformer bridges and techniques for defining and measuring small capacitances is internationally renowned. He conceived the design of a calculable-capacitor, the Thompson-Lampard capacitor, which led to a new theorem in electrostatics and provided the basis for an absolute determination of the unit of resistance with an increase in accuracy of an order of magnitude. Beyond the calculable capacitor his work had a major impact in electrical impedance measurement in general and on other fields of metrology such as dilatometry and thermometry. Mel Thompson was an inspirational leader and his work facilitated the development of many scientific careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The red kangaroo (Macropus rufus) and the dingo (Canis dingo) are two of Australia's iconic mammals. Both are ingrained in the national psyche and well known internationally. For the red kangaroo, recognition has come despite the fact that the highest densities of the species occur well away from most of the human population. The dingo has achieved its status despite being present on the continent for perhaps as little as 3,000 years. This article considers the question of how, and why, these two animals became so elevated in the popular imagination and the scientific literature. It is a story of both the integers and consequences of scientific research, a story best told with a particular focus on the contribution made by one individual. Alan Newsome changed our understanding of the interactions between agriculture, introduced species and native wildlife, and was one of the first to understand the possibilities of enriching western science with Indigenous knowledge. He was a pioneer in explaining--particularly by reference to the red kangaroo in central Australia--the remarkable story of how Australian wildlife has adapted to survive some of the harshest conditions on the planet. His work across the landscape of the arid zone has had profound implications for management and conservation in Australia. This, then, is the story of three icons: the red kangaroo, the dingo and Alan Newsome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of Historical Records of Australian Science explores some of the sciences that have contributed to our understanding of inland Australia, country variously known as desert, the arid zone, drylands and the outback. The sciences that have concentrated on deserts include ecology, geomorphology, hydrology, rangeland management, geography, surveying, meteorology and geology, plus many others. In recognition that desert science has surged ahead in the past few decades, we have invited contributors who describe various different desert initiatives. We use these case studies to open up the discussion about how Australians see their desert lands, how this has changed over time and how desert scientists from the rest of the world regard the distinctive desert country in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 1902 the passage of the Commonwealth Franchise Act through the Commonwealth Parliament meant that Australia's white women became the first in the world to win both the right to vote and to sit in parliament. Drawing on original empirical research, this article demonstrates that at the turn of the twentieth century, Australia was internationally recognized as a world leader in democratic practice. This little known claim to geo-political fame holds significance for both transnational histories of women's suffrage and for Australian narratives of nationhood, neither of which tend to identify Australian women as critical to the history of modern democracy. Further, re-investigating the origins of women's suffrage helps recall the potency of radical idealism in an era that now privileges militarism--in Australia, embodied most clearly in the ANZAC legend--over maternalism as the primary source of nation building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work on female participation in Australian Rules football has highlighted the seemingly discontinuous character of the women's game as it spread from Western Australia to Victoria during the period of the Great War. In this paper, an overview of the current literature on the topic is provided, and there is a focus on hitherto ‘missing links’ in the existing sequence of events – the knowledge of which has the potential to create a more integrated narrative of the code. In particular, the photographic, filmic and textual evidence for matches of women's football played in South Australia during the Great War is discussed. These games, with proceeds directed to such charities as the ‘Workers' Memorial Fund’ as well as ‘comforts for the Anzacs’, attracted sizeable crowds and were sometimes played under the patronage of the governor of the state, the mayor of Adelaide and senior military officers. The paper concludes with a reflection on how the availability (or unavailability) of particular digitised sources, and the serendipitous nature of research itself, can have a problematic influence on investigations associated with marginalised sports such as women's football. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses Australian foreign affairs in the years leading up to World War II, focusing on the influence of Australian historian Stephen H. Roberts on Australia's foreign policy. Other topics include a discussion of Roberts' contributions on international affairs to the periodical "Sydney Mail," Australian ideas about Nazism and fascism, and Roberts' ideas about the potential for war, prior to the outbreak of World War II.

The article discusses immigration to Australia after World War II, focusing on the efforts of the Australian government to entice immigrants through international publicity. Other topics include connections between Australia's immigration publicity and tourism publicity, the impact of the White Australia Policy on immigration, and the challenges the Australian Department of Information faced in creating publicity that attracted some groups while alienating others.

Australia's nationally implemented school milk scheme provided liquid cow's milk in special one-third pint bottles to school children from its inception in 1951 (1953 in Queensland) until 1974, at no cost to their parents. This article places the national scheme in the context of improving the safety of liquid cow's milk, dairy marketing, the British school milk scheme, and earlier state-based schemes. It discusses the establishment of this school milk scheme, and the reasons for its eventual and sudden demise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the roles of immigrant and refugee women in the Australian women's refuge movement of the late 20th century. Particular focus is given to immigrant and refugee activists. Details on the Migrant Women's Refuge service and the Refuge Ethnic Workers Program (REWP) in the state of Victoria are presented. Immigrant and refugee women received inadequate services at most refuges and were insufficiently included in decision-making processes. Racism and radicalism are discussed.

The interwar years saw the initiation of a number of important periodicals that reflected the emerging vitality of public intellectual life in Australia. One such publication was The Morpeth Review, a quarterly that appeared between the years 1927 and 1934. Edited by three Anglican intellectuals - E. H. Burgmann, Roy Lee, and A. P. Elkin - it included contributions from prominent historians, political scientists, anthropologists, cultural critics, and theologians. Though its range of concerns was broad, it was guided by a basic vision of intellectual and social life that aimed at reconciling the conflicting elements of modernity. Such conflicts included the divide between the world of work and the family, the divide between classes, between nations, and between church and state, or more broadly, between the secular and the religious spheres. This article will suggest that in the endeavour to reconcile such competing elements The Morpeth Review expressed a kind of political theology that was modernist in inspiration (welcoming science and the critical consciousness) and drew on several overlapping traditions of thought including liberal Anglicanism, Christian socialism, and British idealism, all of which rejected the modern tendency to compartmentalise life and with it to relegate religion to the private sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1979 and the mid-1980s, the ‘Australia 1938’ oral history project, undertaken as part of a Bicentennial History Project, produced just under six hundred interviews about Australian lives in 1938. This article presents a biography of that project and its archive, and it illuminates a critical phase in the development of Australian oral history. By examining the methodological challenges and intellectual debates, both local and international, which shaped the ‘Australia 1938’ interviews, the article aims to guide future researchers as they search the archive and interpret the interviews, which are now available online. I argue that although the ‘Australia 1938’ interviews were affected by the constraints of the Bicentennial History Project, and also by what could be termed ‘conventional’ attitudes to historical evidence, together they comprise an invaluable yet under-utilised source for the social history of the first third of Australia's twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]