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.

Book Review: Europe: Curtin's Empire: Australian Encounters

This article provides a study of Australian-Indian sporting relations in the 1920s and 1930s. It draws attention to a number of tours made by hockey (Indian teams to Australia in 1926, 1935 and 1938), cricket (an Australian team to India 1935-36) and soccer teams (an Indian team to Australia in 1935). It does so with reference to a number of issues of historical importance. Racial discourse was central to press reports and official discussions that accompanied Australian encounters with Indian athletes and society. The abilities of Indian athletes that were displayed in their contests with Australians were viewed through a lens of Orientalist stereotypes. The racial aspect of this relationship was paradoxically supplemented by expressions of Imperial unity. India was on occasion recognised as a ‘sister dominion’ of Australia, and the relationship was located within a context of wider Imperial unity. Counter-paradoxically, the Australian-Indian sporting relationship also revealed tensions within Australian (and New Zealand) society.

On 30 May 1925 British officers opened fire on Chinese union protesters in Shanghai’s International Settlement, sparking a series of anti-imperialist protests now known as the ‘May 30th Movement’. This article traces the response of the Australian Labor movement to these events. It examines connections between Chinese and Australian unions and shows how Asian anti-colonial nationalism affected Australian perceptions of class-based inequality in the 1920s and 1930s. Orthodox histories of the Australian Labor movement emphasize its inward-looking and xenophobic nature but these national historiographies have been too quick to assume the isolation of Australia from pan-Asian anti-colonialism. Rather than arguing that Australian unionists supported decolonization in the inter-war period this article explores how class relationships mediated Australian encounters with colonized people in Asia. Treating Shanghai and Sydney as entangled outposts of Empire suggests we need to re-evaluate interpretations of Australian class dissent that regard it either as part of a solely European tradition or as a motivated only by local conditions.

This article argues that Australia reimagined its geopolitical identity in the mid-20th century by recollocating the two terms of its unique, contradictory status as an island continent. Whereas colonial Australia had stressed the continental element of this descriptor, the middle years of the 20th century witnessed a shift in self-perception that laid stress on Australia as an island. This article identifies a wide, interconnected range of reasons for this change that turns on the dilemma of national interiority. Where Walter Benjamin identified the correlation between the domestic interior of the bourgeois dwelling in modernity and the imagined interior life of its inhabitant, the Australian encounter with European modernism transposed this analogy onto the newly colonized interior of the continent itself. At this complex intersection between identity and space, this article argues, the dilemma of a national interiority in played out as a predicate of possession.

A. C. Milner’s visiting inaugural at N.U.S. invites exploration of its author’s intellectual development, for he boldly claims a role for an Australian historian of Southeast Asia as a promoter of liberal governance for Southeast Asian societies, in face of militant Islamism. His earlier “postmodernist” commitment to “getting inside the Malay experience” constitutes some sort of precursor, but relativist scepticism fits as uncomfortably as does, in its own way, advocacy of Australian tolerance of Asian authoritarianism. In attacking Leifer’s Realism, the lecture seems ill-informed, while the post-war Oakeshott is scarcely relevant to the diverse societies of Southeast Asia.

Fame and Disability

A broad-brush survey of American influences on the development of Australian planning thought over the past century is presented. Set within a wider appreciation of the Americanization of Australian society, and drawing on cross-cultural urbanism and the international diffusion of planning ideas, the article chronologically explores a series of Australian encounters with American planning from the city beautiful era to the new urbanism. Parallels between American and Australian stories are clearly striking, but a major theme to emerge is the adaptation of American models to new spatial and social settings and the tensions embedded within these encounters. The borrowing process was not uncritical. Many interactions ended unhappily with planning ideology restlessly moving on to new panaceas.

No country outside the United States has given creationism a warmer reception than Australia, which has spawned an internationally successful creationist ministry and at times even welcomed creation science into the classrooms of state-supported schools. A half-century ago, however, when organized anti-evolutionism first appeared in Australia, it attracted virtually no attention, and for over three decades thereafter it remained isolated on the far margins of Australian society, too obscure and impotent to warrant public concern. As late as 1984 one of the best informed students of Australian fundamentalism predicted that `because of the different national traditions and educational systems, the [creationist] controversy is not likely to become as intense in Australia as in USA�.The following decade proved him a false prophet. The most intense creation-evolution debates in the world have occurred on Australian soil, and Australian creationists have insinuated themselves into the religious, scientific, educational, and political life of the country. In this brief history of creationism and anti-creationism in Australia during the past half-century or so, I highlight two distinctive (though not unique) characteristics of the Australian encounter: the efforts of both sides to tar the other with a `made in America� brush and the contribution of anti-creationists to the success of the creationists. Paradoxically, by hounding and ridiculing creationists, the critics significantly boosted the visibility and viability of creationism in Australia.