ABSTRACT Much has been written about the medical side of Medibank and Medicare, but there is almost nothing about how public hospitals are dealt with under Medibank/Medicare. This article addresses that lacuna by examining the current iteration of Commonwealth—state funding arrangements, termed the National Health Reform Agreement. The article reviews the “reform” aspects of the agreement and argues that it has been unsuccessful as an instrument of reform. It concludes by arguing that the agreement should be split into two: a National Public Hospital Services Funding Agreement, which would be revised to include clear performance indicators and an emphasis on efficiency, and a parallel System Reform Agreement, which truly attempts to address critical reform issues in the Australian healthcare system.

ABSTRACT Keeping in mind how memory and history constitute power, this article advocates the use of existing oral histories of subalterns that make rich contributions to our understanding of regional towns such as Uralla and Guyra, in the New England Tablelands. By paying close attention to subaltern oral histories outside the written record, including Indigenous narratives, we can better understand our shared history in place. By drawing on past subjective oral histories while working collaboratively with community, this essay supports processes of heritagisation that first deconstruct and then describe meaningful histories, thus contributing to decolonisation. Oral history is not always easily accessed and its protagonists do not consistently explicate their intersubjectivity. Nonetheless, this article builds on Lynn Abrams’s view of oral history as advocacy while acknowledging the need for care in its use for heritagisation.

ABSTRACT This article examines Indigenous representative bodies in Australian politics from 1973 to 2005 with a particular focus on the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee, the National Aboriginal Conference, the Council for Aboriginal Development and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. The examples of these Indigenous representative bodies illustrate the pervasive settler colonialism that has underpinned the government’s approach in Indigenous affairs and highlights the problematic nature of relations between the national government and Indigenous peoples. This entrenched settler colonialism reinforces ongoing colonial structures, maintaining the legitimacy of national government at the expense of Indigenous peoples’ political autonomy. The article reflects on the 2023 constitutional referendum proposal of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament as an outcome of the continued underlying settler colonial dynamics underpinning government interactions with Indigenous peoples conducted at the political level.

ABSTRACT In the late 1970s, for the first time, veterans of Australian diplomacy published multiple books that disputed the fundamentals of the national diplomatic pattern, their projects impelled by what they saw as a “crisis” in foreign policy and its management under the Fraser government. The putative crisis was occasioned by a drastic withdrawal of funding from the foreign affairs and aid sectors, the concentration of foreign policy initiative in the hands of the prime minister, and the rise to prominence of a group of personal political advisers. Alan Renouf and Malcolm Booker both rejected the accustomed and unqualified reliance upon the United States as a security and diplomatic partner, appealing to current developments—notably the Vietnam withdrawal—to indicate waning US will and capability. For Booker, the emergence of Soviet strategic interest in the Indian Ocean region indicated that Australia would be forced to deal with regional powers on new terms; Renouf was more sanguine on the prospects for managing regional relations through a middle-power strategy. In the trajectory of their careers, both Renouf and Booker were victims of the “crisis” of the 1970s, though estranged by its bureaucratic consequences.

ABSTRACT Edward William Rollins (c. 1852–1939), ″Professor Starlight″, was a noteworthy boxer and entertainer in Australia for three decades from the 1880s. A dapper gentleman and consummate storyteller, he was celebrated by the sporting press well beyond his fighting days. Born in British Guiana, he offers a valuable opportunity to extend the historiography of African Caribbean migrants in Australia at a time of growing interest in British imperial dynamics, legacies of slavery and Black migrant histories. As the author of a published memoir and the subject of several interview-based newspaper articles, Rollins is a rare example of a Black public figure in Australia who left notable personal accounts. We triangulate these writings with press reporting and archival records to examine Rollins’s life, as well as to assess the carefully curated inclusions and omissions contained in his written accounts and interviews. We argue that the fact of his achievements and claims not always being exactly true was beside the point. Rollins was a raconteur and entertainer as much as he was a boxer and, as Mark McKenna has posited in relation to the historian Manning Clark, to “keep his audience entertained, it was sometimes necessary to be flexible with the facts”.

ABSTRACT Flute playing was primarily a male domain during the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. Whereas the piano and singing were traditionally considered acceptable musical pursuits for women, the flute was not thought to be an appropriate choice of instrument. As women were not included in orchestras, they formed their own. Despite facing strong opposition and public criticism, Australia’s trailblazing women flautists pursued music as both amateurs and professionals. Against a backdrop of changing trends in women’s work in 20th-century Australia, some women musicians first broke into the profession as replacements for men who were serving during World War II. This article uses newspapers to uncover women flautists’ entry into the classical music scene of the early 20th century, highlighting the achievements of five pioneering women: Constance Pether, June Lindsay, Florence Elkin, Linda Vogt and Audrey Walklate.

ABSTRACT This article explores a famous but controversial figure in the Australian imaginary, Captain James Cook, and his representation in children’s books over different periods. We examine three representative examples of children’s books that explore James Cook and his first voyage to the South Pacific: The Story of Captain Cook: An Adventure from History (Ladybird Books, 1958), Excuse Me, Captain Cook: Who Did Discover Australia? (Salmon, 1988) and Meet … Captain Cook (Murdie and Nixon, 2011). Each book was created by the respective authors and artists at different points in time, so we analyse the stories using Joseph Campbell’s three-stage metaphor of the “Hero’s Journey”, a canonical structure that he identified in mythological narratives or monomyths that resonate across cultures and epochs. Our analysis demonstrates that representations of Cook in children’s picture books are largely conservative, drawing the reader’s attention away from contentious alternative perspectives of his story.