ABSTRACT In reply to several letters from readers, the editor of Australian Sun & Health, a nudist magazine, asked, “Does it really matter?” This question arose regarding circumcision and the foreskin after multiple contributors voiced their opinions on circumcision in Australia and its relation to nudism. This article examines those letters and the discussions surrounding the penis, foreskin and circumcision at a time when the latter was becoming less prevalent in Australia. I contend that nudism offers a vital perspective on these debates as nudists routinely confront the body in all its raw complexity. Therefore, nudists may provide valuable insights into this conversation, especially since the body is not regarded as taboo, and due to historical and ongoing interests in concepts of the natural, specifically the body in its unaltered state. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Australian Sun & Health served as a platform where readers could view the penis in its authentic form, facilitating discussions about its various representations. Thus, Australian Sun & Health played a role in normalising the foreskin within a circumcising culture.

ABSTRACT Between 1967 and 1975, psychiatrist Dr Howard Whitaker directed a program for the legal use of LSD and psilocybin in Victoria, Australia. His controversial practices were marred by misconduct, unscientific methods and evidence of malpractice. This study explores Whitaker’s LSD-assisted therapy in the 1970s through interviews with former staff of Mayday Hills Psychiatric Hospital in Beechworth, Victoria. These staff members share their experiences working with Whitaker and implementing groundbreaking techniques. The interview data, collected in a broader social history project about Mayday Hills, sheds light on Whitaker’s unconventional and unethical approaches and reminds us that the 1970s was a time of reform in Victorian mental institutions. The current research in psychedelic drug therapies shows remarkable similarities to Whitaker’s early positive findings from over 50 years ago.

ABSTRACT The creation of visual artefacts for First Nations Peoples, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, requires a nuanced approach that accurately reflects the multiple existing diverse identities and cultures across so-called Australia. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) programs, such as DALL-E, over the past five years, with their ability to generate visual depictions from text prompts, concerns about gaps, inaccuracies and misrepresentations for diverse populations have become increasingly prominent. This article highlights the challenges we faced when using AI to visually represent First Nations Peoples’ identities and cultural themes in the production of two project newsletters. Given AI’s growing influence in areas such media, education and technology, its ability to shape or twist cultural narratives is profound. Misrepresentations generated by AI can perpetuate harmful stereotypes and contribute to the ongoing erasure of Indigenous cultures. Central to this issue is the lack of First Nations voices in AI development and the ethics of Indigenous data sovereignty. Through an eight-step framework, we show how to maintain sovereignty over this knowledge within digital spaces, allowing First Nations Peoples to control their own stories, identities and visual representations.

ABSTRACT In 1868 eminent Australian author Marcus Clarke wrote a gothic tale for his own Colonial Monthly Magazine titled “Cannabis Indica”, purportedly under the influence of hashish. Contemporaneous reviewers discussed this little-known short story as merely a curio, and modern scholars have followed suit. However, the experimental short story is distinguished as one of the first fictional portrayals of altered consciousness and drug use in Australia by an Australian author. Scholars have primarily considered depictions of altered states of consciousness and drug use by European and American writers rather than colonial authors due to the plethora of international fictional and scientific accounts of drug taking. This article argues that Clarke’s story acknowledges and modifies these international understandings, gothicising the experience of drug taking and adapting colonial touchpoints of understanding about the drug, including its oriental origins and link to medical perceptions of insanity, to engage in a literary experiment into colonial consciousness and what it means to be torn by the duality of rational and irrational, of scientific thought and fantastical thinking, and of being both a colonial and part of the empire.

ABSTRACT In June 2015, the BBC historical series Banished arrived on Australian television screens amid major controversy. Written by the celebrated British screenwriter Jimmy McGovern, Banished dramatised life in the British penal colony at Sydney Cove in 1788. When the series first premiered in Britain, it developed a strong following among British viewers despite mixed reviews from critics. In Australia, however, local criticism of the series began before it had even aired on the cable TV network Foxtel, and this criticism—from critics and audiences alike—far outweighed viewer interest. In this article, we look closely at the distinct ways that Banished appeared on British and Australian screens at the time of its release. We are particularly interested in the way that what had seemed to McGovern, his filmmakers and British audiences to be a fresh and revealing story of British colonisation quickly became a deeply problematic story of erasure and concealment when it landed in Australia. These very different viewings of Banished in Britain and Australia offer an intriguing insight into the contrasting understandings of the history of British settler colonialism in the former metropole and colony in 2015.

ABSTRACT An important influence on the historical evolution of Australia’s conservation movement was cinema. Documentary films about travel, commonly known as “travelogues”, were often used to promote nature-based tourism and recreation. They had particular salience in Tasmania, where the government sought to use the island’s natural heritage to define the state’s identity, establishing a specialist film unit for this purpose. Three distinct narratives about nature and its conservation were developed in these Tasmanian travelogues from the 1920s to the 1970s, with the government increasingly interested in promoting the idea that extractive industries such as forestry and hydropower could be compatible with or improve the aesthetic and recreational appeal of wild nature. Thus, while nature travelogues could assist conservationism, including to facilitate the establishment of national parks, they also unleashed ideas that posed a risk to that agenda.

ABSTRACT The 2014 publication of Yuin historian Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu signalled a shift in Australian agricultural discourse and practice. Prior to its publication, little attention was given to the intersection between food practices and (de)colonisation. Over the past decade, small-scale alternative food movements as well as large-scale export-oriented producers have responded unevenly to Pascoe’s provocation. While the former sought to develop a decolonial approach in response to a growing awareness of settler complicity in colonial food systems, the latter, represented by government agencies and peak organisations, adopted a milder reconciliatory turn of Indigenous–settler relations within conventional agriculture. This article argues that Dark Emu presents a pivotal moment and rupture in Australia’s agricultural practices and food discourses. We examine the sociopolitical conditions surrounding Dark Emu and ask how its publication produced an urgency towards decolonial thinking across alternative food actors, and reconciliatory thinking in agriculture more broadly. We conceptualise the “Pascoe Moment” as a set of contingent conditions around Dark Emu that activated an urgent need to reassemble food systems in response to the (de)colonial question of agriculture. In doing so, this article untangles how agricultural actors differently engage in decolonial questions.

ABSTRACT As a result of exposure to a classical education or to the histories permeating the popular culture of the British Empire, many Australian soldiers who went overseas during World War I were receptive to encounters with the past. There are examples of soldiers practising amateur archaeology and souveniring artefacts. The officially sanctioned excavation and appropriation of the Shellal Mosaic is the most well known, but there were many small-scale instances of similar activity. This article assesses the evidence for Australian encounters with Roman antiquities at Brightlingsea, Essex. Notwithstanding the limitations of this evidence and the scope for further research, we argue that the likelihood is that Australians did unearth and souvenir Roman artefacts at Brightlingsea. Like similar incidents from other theatres of the war, many of which were also poorly documented, it helps to illustrate the way in which engagement with the material culture of the past was a significant aspect of Australians’ wartime experience.