Australian History Research Articles

Coming to terms with the past? Aboriginal history and the Great Australian Unknowing

Despite significant public discourse and the volume of scholarship produced by the Aboriginal history field over more than half a century, ‘coming to terms with the past’ in settler colonial contexts remains an enduring challenge. Reflecting on the emergence of the field of Aboriginal history in Australia, this article provides a brief contextual overview of what is referred to as ‘Aboriginal history’ and the contestation of this body of work that ensued. Identifying a range of barriers to and enablers of deeper historical engagement with First Nations histories in Australia, we reflect on the success or otherwise of efforts to promote historical understanding of First Nations histories in Australia. We argue that the dedicated labour of those within and outside the academy has had limited impact in changing the historical understanding of the broader Australian public, and that what we term ‘the Great Australian Unknowing’ persists.

Children as parties of encounter on Australian frontiers: girls in colonial Victoria, 1835–1856

ABSTRACT Indigenous-settler relations on antipodean frontiers have been well analysed by numerous scholars, yet the actors and agents are usually framed as adult and often male. Focusing on the Australian colony of Victoria from its invasion in 1835 to the mid-1850s, I position young people as parties of encounter in this contact zone. I focus on three case studies of settler girls with vastly different upbringings who interacted with First Nations communities near their homes. Using contemporary writings, memoir and art, I demonstrate that the complex cross-cultural encounters and relationships formed between Indigenous peoples and settler children could at once reinforce and unsettle settler colonial imperatives. I show that positioning girls as interlocutors and contributors within a settler colonial context illustrates how colonial violence was embedded in domestic domains. However, the connections between Aboriginal peoples and these settler girls could unsettle and resist the negation and elimination of Indigenous sovereignty. By centring settler children’s experiences within the processes of dispossession which characterised the invasion of the Australian continent, this article unsettles understandings of the settler colonial frontier and expands conceptions of who could be an actor in this context.

"We Are One, But We Are Many": Conceptions of Australia’s Sovereign People and the Proposed Voice to Parliament

This article examines the defeat of the 2023 referendum on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament (‘Voice’) in terms of competing conceptions of ‘the people’ in Australian constitutional law. Applying James Tully’s theory of popular sovereignty to Australian law and history, this article advances the tension between two views of the sovereign people — as homogenous and formally equal, or plural and differentiated — as a lens to analyse developments in Australian constitutional law. It begins by briefly surveying the history of Indigenous Australian sovereign difference under the Australian Constitution, situating the recognition sought through the Voice. It then identifies, drawing on Tully’s critique of ‘modern constitutional’ popular sovereignty, an orthodox conception of the sovereign people persisting in Australian law as a homogenous, formally equal entity authorising the supremacy of representative Parliament. Finally, it suggests a competing strain of Australian constitutional thought which, constructing the sovereign people as plural, enables alternative forms of constitutional governance. Such plural modes of constitutionalism, it argues, were embodied by the Voice and informed the No campaign’s arguments in the terms of a ‘unified’ constitutional ‘people’. Through examination of the Voice, this article articulates competing constructions of ‘the people’ as a lens for interrogating developments in Australian constitutional law.

Patriarchal Dividends and the Creation of Political Elites in Colonial New South Wales

ABSTRACT Across the 19th-century industrialising world, expectations of access to power became based on expertise and economic role rather than birth. In the early White settler Australian colonies—where no non-Indigenous hereditary aristocracy or political institutions existed—the men who pursued status and influence and designed the political institutions of self-government justified their ambitions on the basis of their “independence”, a long-held marker of masculinity. In this article, I consider the gendered rhetoric of debates about the meaning of independence in colonial New South Wales through the lens of Raewyn Connell’s concept of the “patriarchal dividend” to argue that elites are a reconfiguration of patriarchal power in capitalist democracies. Because the criteria for rights to vote and stand for election were debated in terms of the character and conduct of men rather than their family lineage, political power accommodated more men but continued to make winners of particular men and losers of other men, as well as women.

‘Give it to the Mitchell, it would be there for those that come after us’: interwar feminists’ archival activism and the recasting of Australian history

In the 1920s and 1930s, Australian feminists – alongside their counterparts across the world – confronted their omission from collecting institutions as they fought exclusion from the entangled pursuits of history-writing and nation-making. Extending the scholarship on women’s ‘archival activism’, this article details feminists’ heterogenous mnemonic practices by studying how author Miles Franklin and suffragist and pacifist Vida Goldstein created paper trails and considered posterity. Scrutinising both women’s divergent archival strategies and memory networks not only clarifies their decisions about housing their collections in state archives or gender-dedicated institutions but reveals their deliberation over whether the nation constituted a suitable vector for the transmission of feminist knowledge.

‘Other’ black peoples: rethinking race and settler colonialism in Australia’s northern tropic

ABSTRACT The Moreton Bay penal station was established in 1824 in a remote area of northern New South Wales – now part of Queensland – to punish convicts for offences committed in the colony. To discourage these ‘repeat offenders’, prisoners performed hard labour in irons and were regularly flogged under an unforgiving tropical sun. Among the station’s inmates were twelve men of African and South Asian ethnicity, including George Brown of Ceylon and Sheik Brom of India. Both South Asians escaped from Moreton Bay and lived with the district’s First Peoples, gaining knowledge of their languages, customs and laws. Later, following closure of the penal station in 1839, another thirty convicts of African ethnicity were sent to Moreton Bay as government workers, including Mauritians, Afro-Caribbeans, and Khoisan men from the Cape Colony. Their experiences varied widely from becoming mediators and interpreters for First Peoples to serving in the Border Police where they enforced ‘law and order’ on a contested frontier. Using detailed archival research to reconstruct the life stories of these convicts illuminates the complex spaces they occupied, complicating narratives of ‘white’ settlement and conflict with First Peoples in Queensland.

Regulating precarious work: A paradigm shift

Abstract Precarious work, the problems it poses in terms of labour standards/regulation, and remedies to this, have sparked considerable attention from researchers and policy-makers over the past three decades. This paper examines industrial relations (IR) legislation introduced by the Australian Labor government elected in 2022, and which, amongst other things, has addressed precarious work. These initiatives are placed in historical context, noting how essentially similar problems shaped IR regulation a century earlier. The article also examines the more immediate precursors to the legislation, by reviewing state and federal inquiries into precarious work and related issues in Australia from the 1990s onwards. Placing the new legislation into historical context enhances our understanding of the law and surrounding policy debates. The Albanese federal Labor government package of industrial relations laws introduced between 2022 and 2024 marked a paradigm shift from earlier measures. While these reforms are rooted in Australian institutions, law and industrial relations history, they provide an alternative policy template for addressing the problems wrought by neoliberalism on labour standards, especially if accompanied by synergistic reforms in other areas, such as immigration and economic policies promoting manufacturing.

Understanding and healing from racism: a strong case for truth-telling and the role of Australian history

Understanding and healing from racism: a strong case for truth-telling and the role of Australian history

“Shepherdesses in the Bush!”: Representations of Women’s Shepherding Labour, from Britain to the Australian Colonies in the 19th Century

ABSTRACT The shepherdess has long been a potent pastoral motif in Britain, popularised as Little Bo Peep. By contrast, women as economic actors in the sheep industry have scarcely registered in rural historiography. This article combines insights from cultural and social history to examine how, and to what effects, understandings of shepherdesses (inflected by gender, class, and race) circulated between the metropole and the Australian colonies in the 19th century. This provides new insights into how settler colonialists made sense of women and women’s labour in their new rural environment, which extend beyond tropes of the female pioneer and hardened bushwoman.

Eradicating Waste in the Making of the Lower River Murray, Australia, 1880–1940

The concept of waste pervades contemporary water policy and the polarised debates about river management in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin. However, the preoccupation with waste, and its associated notions of efficiency and productivity, is not merely a reaction to the relatively recent environmental critique prompted by excessive extraction from rivers and streams. We argue that the fixation with eradicating waste is embedded in the Australian colonial political imagination, where it has served as a powerful catalyst for projects of river transformation and as justification for territorial control of water. Initially control was exerted by Australian colonies and then later by state governments. A close examination of South Australia’s portion of the River Murray between 1880 and 1940 identifies four sites that were perceived as wasteful: the ocean to which the River Murray runs, wetlands, lakes and the atmosphere. To eliminate waste from and above the land surface, hydro-engineers and settler authorities transformed the lower River Murray with weirs, locks and barrages, at the same time as they altered society–water relations. Waste was articulated and acted on from within colonial processes with such force that the effects continue to set the parameters for today’s water policies and wider settler societal relations with rivers.

Redressing the Absence of Military Blockhouses and Forts in ‘Origin Theories’ for the Elevated House

ABSTRACT Architectural histories remain largely silent on Indigenous people’s agency in the creation of Australian frontier settler architectures. It is argued that this absence has negatively impacted our understanding of emerging Australian vernacular architectures. A case study is made of elevated buildings found in the colonial settlement of Port Essington, Northern Territory. This paper explores social and cultural drivers for building elevation. It considers British military personnel and officials’ fear of attack settling in Northern Australia. Here, successful Aboriginal guerrilla war tactics directly impacted British fort design. Inter-cultural conflict directly resulted in the shift from groundwork fortifications to elevated timber blockhouses. Defensively sited, blockhouses provided an elevated point of retreat for dwelling; visually surveying surroundings; securing precious stores; and mounting offensive military attacks. It is concluded that frontier conflict should be more closely explored in Australian architectural histories.

Out of the shadows: A photo-essay of antipodean colonisation, resistance and massacres

Landscape photography can be classic renditions of the natural environment within a picturesque tradition found in early English landscape paintings; however, culturally, it can also mean images of other types of environments involving humanity, including human interactions reminiscent of urbanscapes, industrial environments, cityscapes, sites of violent crime, engagement of war and others. Critically, landscape imagery within visual arts also functions within a rhetorical political context by forming concepts of national identity. While this photo-essay comprises of landscape images, the work is not about the landscape or the objects within the space framed by the camera. This work is about ‘place’ and the political and historical events that occurred at these sites. The places photographed in this work are an attempt to draw attention to the violence referred to as the frontier wars between the British military, settlers and Indigenous peoples during colonisation. The objective of the work is to enhance a contemporary consciousness and hopefully amend the collective historical narrative that suggests the British displacement and occupation of Aboriginal Nations was a peaceful transition. Australian history has a blind spot when it comes to the violence during this period that involved fierce resistance from the Indigenous people, the internment of families into missions and the hundreds of massacres by colonists across the entire country.

Sport, Gambling and Masculinity: A Gendered History of Australian Sports Betting

ABSTRACT Sports betting has risen dramatically in prominence over the past 20 years and is now one of Australia’s most popular, and fastest growing, gambling activities. The practice has a long and gendered history in Australia, with almost 9 out of 10 regular sports bettors today being men. This article offers a short cultural history of sports betting that outlines its growth, along with several key reasons for its popularity among men specifically. In the early colonial period, gambling on racing and sports was a masculine pursuit from which women were largely excluded until the late 20th century. Contemporary sports betting’s focus on male-dominated football codes, along with advertising campaigns that objectify women and emphasise masculine narratives, continue to reinforce the idea that sports betting is primarily a men’s practice in modern Australia.

Rewriting History of the Marginalized Voices in Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda

This article examines the exclusions inherent in official Australian history as addressed by Peter Carey in his novel Oscar and Lucinda. Drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism and Gayatri Spivak’s theory of the subaltern, the study critiques the colonial narratives that marginalize aboriginal people, transported convicts, and women. These groups, often silenced in historical accounts, are reimagined in Carey’s historiographical revision, which endeavors to construct a more inclusive history that amplifies the voices of the oppressed. Through a qualitative methodology and an interpretative framework informed by Linda Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism, the analysis situates the novel as a critique of the dominant colonial discourse. Carey’s narrative interrogates the mechanisms of historical erasure by highlighting the contributions and sufferings of marginalized groups, particularly the violence endured by aboriginal peoples and the systemic oppression of women. The novel critiques the colonial framework that perpetuates domination and exclusion while re-centering those traditionally relegated to the margins. Themes such as cultural destruction, patriarchal control, and the alienation faced by marginalized groups are explored through the lives of the protagonists, Oscar and Lucinda, who embody the intersection of these struggles. Carey’s work positions aboriginal people and convicts not merely as historical subjects but as integral witnesses to and agents in Australia’s interconnected history. By weaving their voices into the narrative, the novel challenges the authority of official histories and offers a more nuanced and ambivalent perspective on the colonial past. Ultimately, Oscar and Lucinda critiques the orientalist and patriarchal underpinnings of Australian historiography while advocating for a reimagined historical consciousness that acknowledges and integrates subaltern voices.

After the Victory: the veteran movement in the post-war USSR in the reflection of social and political history

The article describes the monograph by the Australian historian of German origin Mark Edele, “Soviet veterans of the Second World War. A popular movement in an authoritarian society, 1941–1991” (2008; 2023), translated into Russian, which is the first comprehensive study of the history of the veterans’ movement in the USSR in the post-war period.

Lhotsky, the Impostor? Negotiating Natural History in the Australian Colonies

This article considers the activities of naturalist John Lhotsky, who lived in Sydney and Hobart Town between 1832 and 1836, as a means of examining the imagined and material stakes that British settler colonialism held for German-speaking naturalists. For outsiders like Lhotsky, natural history was a means of securing social recognition and financial stability. It was also an ideological minefield, deeply entangled in class politics, with great potential for misinterpretation of social interactions by outsiders. Lhotsky’s dealings within this minefield eventually earned him the reputation of an impostor among some of his contemporaries. Rather than attempting to verify or falsify such assessments, the article attends to these moments with the aim of mapping the complex ‘multidirectional sets of imperial relations’ that he and other German-speaking naturalists inhabited in the mid-nineteenth century.

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.