Australian History Research Articles

Reading, Reflection, and Resilience in the Study of Australian Literature

ABSTRACT This article explores supportive learning practices and related complexities in a first-year Australian literature course anecdotally reported to be challenging in content because it requires the study of several traumatic narratives as well as texts that directly contradict accepted discourses of Australian history and culture. The article analyses the role of critical reflection in developing students’ skills in reading resilience, with a focus on responding to trauma and the complex entanglements of language, power, and identity. In doing so, we offer an understanding of how critical reflection can constitute a useful response to reading triggering texts, particularly when affective response is bound up with pre-existing ideas about collective identity in a post/neo-colonial context. Thematic analysis revealed the presence of three core themes patterned across the data: confrontation and discomfort, relatability and familiarity, and perseverance versus abandonment. Our work expands literary studies pedagogy by contributing valuable insights into students’ affective responses to reading challenging texts, the relationship between discomfort, relatability, and engagement in the literary studies classroom, and the independent development of strategies for reading stamina.

Lionel Lindsay’s Maghreb: Orientalism as Anti-Modernism

Lionel Lindsay still troubles Australian art history. An illustrator and etcher of undeniable skill, he voiced conservative aesthetics, including his anti-modernist and antisemitic polemic Addled Art of 1942. However, Lindsay was also philo-Arab, as he demonstrated in his 1929 visit to the Maghreb to meet Etienne Nasr’Eddine Dinet, the Islamophile Orientalist whose 1889 Snake Charmer was Lindsay’s favourite painting at the Art Gallery of NSW. During two months in Bou Saada and Kairouan, Lindsay made dozens of watercolours, drawings and meticulous etchings of ‘local character’, studied here as a group for the first time. Drawing on Lindsay’s unpublished diaries, letters and memoirs this article shows that this anti-modernist Anglo-Australian’s ‘Orientalism’ ignored the settlers and chose favourites among the peoples of the Maghreb.

Meat, Livestock and the Colonial Project in 1830s and 1840s Australia: The Frontier, the City and the Colonial Imagination

From the 1820s, the settler occupation of Australia expanded rapidly, driven by the growth of sheep and cattle grazing. Like similar histories in other settler societies, this story is well-known and has begun to be told in ways that centre the active role played by these animals in both aiding and resisting this colonising project. Yet the ways in which this frontier expansion related back to colonial cities is less widely recognised; pastoral expansion relied on settler cities, and limited export markets meant that beef and mutton glutted the markets in colonial cities. This article reveals how the movement of cattle and sheep (living, slaughtered and imagined) linked the pastoral frontier of New South Wales (the oldest Australian colony) to Sydney (the major city of the colony) and then to Britain. Exploring the movement (physical and imagined) of meat and livestock reveals the extent of the impact of settler pastoralism in new ways.

Marian Quartly, The Middling Sort: A South Australian Family History

Marian Quartly, <i>The Middling Sort: A South Australian Family History</i>

Worker co-operatives in Australia 1833–2024

While there are qualitative discussions of the history of worker co-operatives in Australia, there have been no substantial quantitative long-term studies of their development. The development of the Visual Historical Atlas of Australian Co-operatives allows long-term analysis to be undertaken of Australian worker co-operatives. This paper will examine the definitional and theoretical issues surrounding worker co-operatives before proceeding to a discussion of the development of the Atlas and the general insights it provides into the history of worker co-operatives in Australia. The paper will then examine in more detail specific periods of Australian co-operative history to provide a more detailed explanation of the fluctuating fortunes of worker co-operatives in Australia. It notes that recent development of the Earthworker co-operative in Victoria provides a pathway for the future of worker co-operatives in Australia.

Colonialism and imperialism in Austrian history curricula and textbooks (1945–2023)

The article considers the depiction of colonialism and imperialism in Austrian textbooks (n = 61) and curricula issued since the commencement of the Second Republic in 1945. The analysis indicates that textbooks made use of the freedom afforded them by state stipulations, which, while evidently taking a distinctly eurocentric point of view, give textbook authors scope for taking decisions on the inclusion or exclusion of particular topics. The textbooks studied covered various aspects of this area of history that curricula did not list expressly, such as the impact of European colonial aggression on Indigenous populations. Simultaneously, the analysis showed a long absence from textbooks of colonialism’s implications throughout history to the present day, and demonstrated that textbooks reproduced racist ideas well into the 2000s, with corresponding effects on perceptions of history among Austrian population today.

Gendered enterprise: Women and Australian business history

AbstractThis special issue examines women and Australian business history. Contributions explore women's entrepreneurship in small urban businesses, side hustles, agriculture, and family companies. Articles highlight the importance of women's businesses, as a financial necessity for women, their families, and their communities. Authors examine the barriers for women in business, including legislation, licensing, societal expectations, and discrimination. Articles also explore women's intersections with other demographic characteristics, with access to enterprise mediated by class and the rural–urban divide. Finally, contributions examine the way traditional archives have obscured histories of businesswomen, and the opportunities offered by feminist historical methodologies for studying business history.

Hey History! Giving voice to Australian history

Hey History! Giving voice to Australian history

A Future in the Past

Australia's History educators frequently face challenges regarding the value of post-school qualifications in history. Comments from Australian Government ministers have intensified claims that history degrees lack broad skills valued by employers. This study addresses the dearth of research examining the alignment between learning outcomes from history degrees and occupational skills. A comprehensive analysis was conducted on learning outcomes from 27 history degrees offered by Australian universities. These outcomes were mapped against the Australian Government's Skills Classification Core Competencies and Occupation Listings, employing a rigorous curriculum mapping methodology. The results identified 126 occupations that align with the skills and competencies developed through history degrees. This research not only challenges misconceptions about the employability of history graduates but also provides empirical evidence of the broad applicability of historical skills across various sectors. The findings reveal a significant concentration of history graduates in managerial and professional roles, indicating the high value placed on critical thinking, analytical, and communication skills developed by studying history. However, the study also highlights areas for improvement, particularly in digital engagement and numeracy skills. The research demonstrates that history degrees cultivate a range of transferable skills highly sought after in the modern job market, including advanced communication, critical analysis, research proficiency, and adaptability. These skills position history graduates to excel in diverse fields such as public policy, journalism, law, business, and education. Furthermore, the study underscores the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in curriculum design to enhance graduate employability. This research contributes valuable insights for curriculum development and career guidance in history education, demonstrating that history degrees lead to diverse and meaningful employment outcomes. It also provides a robust evidence base for advocating the value of historical studies in an increasingly skills-focused higher education landscape.

Value, knowledge and reputation: zoological exchange by Australian museums, 1870-1900.

The burgeoning nineteenth-century public-museum sector built a significant part of its natural-history specimen collections through extensive international trading. The early 2020s has seen an upsurge of scholarly interest in this largely overlooked trade. Exchange was a distinctive aspect of the natural-history trade that reveals much about the diverse practices and motives of the institutional collectors. Economic-geographic benefits included conserving the limited financial resources of museums and exploiting complementarities in the geographic distribution of specimens. Collection management, institutional reputation, social connection and international diplomacy were also part of a complex mix of value making that shaped this important international trade. We analyse the exchange practices of the three largest museums in the Australian colonies in the final three decades of the nineteenth century who exchanged Australia's 'rare and curious' fauna with collectors across the globe. By deploying and analysing extensive, comparative data on a particular form of natural history, zoology, and a particular kind of trade, exchange trading, among three Australian museums, this paper extends and enriches recent scholarship on the mobility of natural-history specimens and how they were traded.

Exploiting inter- and intracontinental markets: The business of transporting convicts to the Australian colonies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century

This article explores the pivotal role played by convict transports in the expansion and redirection of British maritime trade to the East. Through an investigation into the business of transporting prisoners across the seas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it reveals that contractors, shipowners and captains connected to convict transportation were at the forefront of exploiting new trading opportunities in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. By analysing the voyages of convict ships within the prism of long-haul trading ventures, this work reveals the often overlooked business acumen of those who organized and executed convict transportation as they participated in inter- and intra-continental maritime trade.

Post-pandemic positions: new perspectives on international education and public diplomacy in Australia

PurposeIn an era of internationalism, higher education and vocational training have been core to Australia’s nation-building, regional co-operation and public diplomacy. This essay examines what has become of the people-to-people aspect of Australia’s engagements in the Indo-Pacific region, as discussed in the Australian government’s influential White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century (2012). More recently, established patterns of international educational exchange, and their economic, social and cultural benefits, have been disrupted by the global COVID-19 pandemic, shifting international relations and domestic politics, with consequences for international education and public diplomacy.Design/methodology/approachThis essay introduces the scholarly context for a reappraisal of Australian histories of international education within the Indo-Pacific region since the mid-20th century, and the role of NGOs, academia and government in educational schemes and scholarships. It draws on an approach informed by international history, the history of education and diplomatic studies, to provide an overview of key themes and the past and present case studies discussed in the seven articles of this special journal issue.FindingsThe little-known histories of international education in Australia, and associated scholarship schemes, are important aspects of soft power or public diplomacy and the nation’s relations with the Indo-Pacific region. We argue that there needs to be greater acknowledgement of the vital role of these interpersonal interactions and the international organisations that facilitated such exchanges in histories of Australia’s internationalism and diplomacy. While Australian governments have initiated scholarship programmes, what is becoming clear is that understanding their significance for Australian–regional relationships demands a research focus on student expectations and experiences that often lay beyond government control.Originality/valueThis essay and the articles in this special issue offer new historic and current insights on international education policy and programmes and Australia’s diplomatic relations. Many of the highlighted case studies have not previously been analysed within this context, and fresh analysis makes an intervention into the field, revealing the complexities and limitations of international education and people-to-people relationships for Australia’s past and present connections with the Indo-Pacific region.

Unravelling National Time: Chinese Voices and the Re-ordering of Australian History

Where are Chinese Australians in Australian history? Australia’s Chinese past is persistently framed as ‘forgotten’ in public debate, a perpetual newness which ignores forty years of scholarship in the field. Contemporary works on Sino-Australian relations proliferate, resurrecting Cold War mentalities but avoiding Australia’s colonial history of Chinese migration and settlement. This article accounts for this forgetfulness while also drawing attention to a spate of recently unearthed Chinese-language sources written by Chinese Australians. These sources, newly translated, invite us to see Australia’s past in a Chinese context, revealing a propensity in Australia to organise historical time along European lines, obscuring ties of causality between events in Asia and Australia. Multilingual archives challenge the primacy of English-language sources in the narration of Australia’s past, humanising Chinese Australians and destabilising China as the proxy for Australian security fears.

Hands Across Australia’s Land Border

Drawing on Indonesian and Dutch newspapers, this article describes how the Australian people and their political leaders were presented in contradictory ways to readers during the West New Guinea dispute. Particularly from 1949 to 1967, at the height of the dispute between the Netherlands and Indonesia over West New Guinea/Irian Barat, Dutch newspapers focused on the nature of Australian colonialism in an increasingly critical manner. The Indonesian press expected Australia – a supporter of its independence struggle and donor of education aid – to sympathise with its claim to the territory of Irian Barat. Sensitive to any signs that Australia sided with the Dutch or that it feared Indonesian ambitions in the region, the Indonesian press was at first displeased by Australia’s policy of ‘neutrality’ and then satisfied that the Australian government would not interfere.

Neither Naïve Nor Fatalistic: Decolonizing Mining Partnerships With Indigenous Communities in Mongolia and Australia

Mining partnerships have often been promoted as opportunities for meaningful collaboration between corporations and Indigenous communities. However, these partnerships frequently lack a nuanced understanding of the colonial assumptions that underpin power imbalances and divergent perspectives. This study addresses this gap by examining how a multinational mining corporation, Indigenous communities, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) representing these communities (de)legitimize their mining partnerships within the framework of global stakeholder colonialism in Australia and Mongolia. The study shows how stakeholder colonialism coerces Indigenous communities into accepting a social reality where mining is inevitable, either with or without partnerships. This dynamic reflects the hegemonic power of mining corporations, which is sustained not by a balance of coercion and consent but by discursive coercion without consent. This implies that there is a failure of this hegemonic power to fully establish itself, opening the door for subaltern resistance and counter-hegemonic struggles by Indigenous peoples. By highlighting Indigenous perspectives that challenge the prevailing managerial views in mining corporations, this study disrupts the corporate narrative that portrays the sole social objectivity where mining is inevitable. Instead, it advocates for a more nuanced understanding that goes beyond a simplistic view of mining partnerships as either naïve democratic deliberation or fatalistic stakeholder colonialism.

Reclaiming Voices: We Sent Women First

“We sent women first” could well describe Australian Baptist mission history. Australian Baptist State associations were formed in the crucible of 19th-century history, shaped by divisive issues of their British Baptist heritage and the colonial influences as each pursued an independent identity. Mission work in Bengal, India, inspired by William Carey, the BMS and BZA traditions, was the common factor, and in the six independent Australian Baptist Missionary Societies, women were sent first, starting with two from South Australia in 1882. The first man (also from South Australia) joined eleven of these women for their first ‘Convention’ in 1888.

Edgy Conservatives? The Late-Twentieth Century Rise of the Mortgage Belt in Australian Electoral Politics

The expansion of home ownership in Australia in the second half of the twentieth century was accompanied by a new vernacular geography – the mortgage belt. From the 1970s, such belts around major cities were frequently said to be crucial to federal and state elections. This article examines where political commentary located mortgage belt areas in Sydney and Melbourne and finds that it encompassed a diverse range of places often, but not always, on their urban edges. Their residents were believed to be particularly sensitive about interest rates but also other risks. While the politics of outer suburbia has often been posited as conservative, it is argued that such areas were electorally nuanced and reflected longstanding contingency in Australia around expectations of government that stands in contrast to conservatism elsewhere. These areas also highlight the continuing significance of popular access to property ownership as a theme of Australian political history.

Following the yellowcake road: exploring the colonial roots and routes of Australian radioactive minerals, 1900s–1950s

ABSTRACT Over the past 40 years, environmental justice activists and scholars have drawn greater attention to the disproportionate environmental burdens borne by marginalised communities. This includes the consequences of ‘nuclear colonialism’, a phenomenon defined as constituting ‘a system of domination through which governments and corporations target indigenous peoples and their lands to maintain the nuclear production process’. In this article, I seek to complicate this definition of nuclear colonialism by exploring the role of uranium mining in consolidating both British and Australian settler colonial power during the first half of the twentieth century. I will do so through an examination of Australian uranium’s roots and routes as both a manifestation and facilitator of settler colonialism in Australia between 1900 and 1955. Combining sources from both British and Australian archives, this article seeks to contribute to emergent scholarship on the colonial dimensions of mineral extraction in two ways. Firstly, by explicating the role uranium played in fuelling the extractive mentalities of settler colonial Australia. And secondly, by exploring uranium extraction’s contribution to the consolidation of the British Empire’s waning power in the mid-twentieth century.

Introduction to the magnetotellurics special issue of exploration geophysics

The geophysical technique of magnetotellurics (MT) was first described in 1953 and the associated technique of geomagnetic depth sounding (GDS) in 1959. Both methodologies have had a long history in Australia both for academic research and resource exploration. Since the early 1990s with advances in digital data storage, 2D inversion codes and 3D inversion codes from the 2010s, there has been a rapid increase in the number of MT surveys across Australia. Regional MT programs around Australia and since 2013 the Australian Lithospheric Architecture Magnetotelluric Project (AusLAMP) have steadily mapped the 3D resistivity of the Australian continent. To complement the regional AusLAMP MT sites numerous additional transects, and broadband MT grids have been deployed providing remarkable new insights into the tectonic evolution of the Australian lithosphere and provide the link to crustal mineral resources. In this special edition, ten papers explore different aspects of MT research in Australia over the last decade.

Australasian Histories of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean World

ABSTRACTAustralia and New Zealand have deep historical connections—geological, environmental, cultural, political, and economic—with Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Yet while Australasia and the Southern Ocean are historically entangled, their historiographies are largely estranged. This article provides a survey of Australian and New Zealand histories of Antarctica, the subantarctic, and the Southern Ocean. I argue that historians in and of Australasia have contributed significantly to understandings of the region's southern hinterland, including the histories and legacies of Antarctic whaling, sealing, science, exploration, politics, and culture. These same connections and entanglements have rarely been used to shed light on Australian and New Zealand histories, but can offer new perspectives on Australasian histories of intercultural contact and exchange, mobilities, the frontier, imperialism, and internationalism. I argue that conceptualising Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica as littorals of a ‘terraqueous’ Southern Ocean World provides a way to both generate new insights into this region's history and draw new connections with global, world, and oceanic histories.