Australian History Research Articles

Say her name: Madge Donohoe and the promise and problems of using Trove to write Australian suffrage histories

Like most middle-ranking suffragists, the Sydney schoolteacher Madge Donohoe is largely invisible in Australian historiography. Until widespread newspaper digitisation, the task of uncovering her name, let alone tracing her rise from Kogarah Girls’ School to the British National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’ executive committee, would have been unimaginable. In this paper, I outline how Trove has enriched Australian feminist histories from the suffrage era (1890–1910). Yet, as indispensable as it has become, new histories relying on newspapers to vividly retell the suffragists’ stories also reveal the database’s distorting effects, not least the absence of the vibrant women’s advocacy press from its collections. Trove, I argue, affords vital new points of entry into lives like Donohoe’s but, without careful interrogation, risks privileging the pressman’s gaze above understanding the quotidian realities of feminist activism.

Rites of Passage: The Voyage to Convict Australia and the Creation of the Penal Labourer

This article explores the ways in which convict labour was simultaneously regulated and co-opted on the long sea passage to the Australian penal colonies. It uses linked longitudinal data for over 39,000 male convicts transported between the years 1817 and 1853 to Van Diemen’s Land, to explore on-board recruitment of convicts by surgeons. A particular focus of interest is the way in which the organisation of the convict vessel shaped subsequent experience in the penal colonies. The article concludes by arguing that a transport ship was not one, but a series of institutions operating under one deck – part of a wider carceral archipelago that served to link metropolitan and colonial institutions.

My life in history

This essay explores the familial and historical circumstances that shaped my pursuit of historical research and, subsequently, underpinned my discontent with some of the practices that surrounded it at Australian universities from the 1970s through to the 1990s. I explore some of the ideas and inspirations that drove my research on childhood, the writing of a volume of the Oxford History of Australia, as well as my engagement with and support for Aboriginal History at the University of Sydney.

Use of Trove in school history classes

The long-standing emphasis on working with primary sources in school history would seem to make Trove an ideal resource for Australian history classes. This review argues that while classroom uptake of Trove was initially slow, it is increasing and encompasses a range of indirect and individual student use. It also suggests that ongoing use of Trove in schools will rely on teachers being familiar with its potential, which may be closely related to their experience of Trove in pre-service courses.

Sacred swamped as profane reigns: Catalysing Indigenous voice through reflexive articulation of place

From 2017 to 2019, I wrote several news stories about an Indigenous woman’s struggle, with others, in Western Australia’s oldest European settlement of Albany to maintain a ban on water skiing at a culturally significant swamp by the banks of which her mother was born. Until my stories were published, news reports had focused on the needs of skiers. The headline of my first story, ‘The sacred and profane’, invoked Bourdieu’s conception of social space as a field constructed by tensions between holders of unequal levels of cultural and economic capital. This is consistent with Massey’s observations of places as contested social constructs. Both theories are complementary frameworks from which to interrogate and inform journalistic practice. This article shows how critically reflexive articulation of place, through journalism, enabled Indigenous voices to be heard in a regional city that had been ground zero for colonialism in Australia’s largest state by area.

О КОЛЛЕКЦИЯХ ФОТОСНИМКОВ АМЕРИКАНСКИХ ВОЕННОСЛУЖАЩИХ ЭКСПЕДИЦИИ «ПОЛЯРНЫЙ МЕДВЕДЬ», СДЕЛАННЫХ НА СЕВЕРЕ РОССИИ В ПЕРИОД ГРАЖДАНСКОЙ ВОЙНЫ 1918–1919 ГГ.

Nowadays visual history and its significance characterized by a broad interdisciplinary approach cannot be overestimated. Since 1991 when the Austrian historian and researcher of images Gerhard Jagschitz (1940–2018) first used the term «visual history», photographs and, perhaps, film documents began to be perceived by the scientific world not only as illustrative material, but also as a storehouse of new, but somewhere forgotten information, for example, concerning the appearance of settlements and people living there, everyday life and imperatives of human behaviour, as well as events in certain historical periods. In this article the author presents the data concerning the American military that gathered collections of photographs from the Polar Bear Expedition of the period 1918–1919. During the First World War, this expedition was undertaken by the United States to the territory of the European part of the North of Russia in order to prevent the German Empire from encroaching on the resources of Russia, taking advantage of its weakness as a result of the political crisis. This military mission, carried out jointly with other allied states, in the history of Russia will be called a foreign military intervention, which, unfortunately, became a catalyst for a bloody civil confrontation. In the course of the study, not only the names of the founders were revealed, but also the modern holders of photo collections located in the United States, providing almost free access to all of them. Particular attention is paid to such an important component of attribution of photographic documents as the identification of the American photographers personalities involved in the creation of the visual image of the Civil War in the North of Russia.

Manus to Meanjin: A case study of refugee migration, polymorphic borders and Australian ‘imperialism’

This non-traditional research article argues that the refugee and asylum-seeker protests in Brisbane’s Kangaroo Point between April 2, 2020 and April 14, 2021 can be viewed against a backdrop of Australian colonialism—where successive Australian governments have used former colonies in Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea as offshore detention facilities—as a dumping ground for asylum-seekers. Within the same context this article argues that the men’s removal to the Kangaroo Point Alternative Place of Detention is a continuation of this colonial policy of incarcerating ‘undesirables’ on occupied land, in this case on Meanjin—Jagera land identified by the colonial name of Brisbane. This extension of Australian sub-imperial and neo-colonial dominion and the imagining of its boundaries is viewed though the theoretical prism of a polymorphic border, a border that shifts and morphs depending on who attempts to cross it. In a departure from orthodox research practice, this article will use visual storytelling drawn from photojournalism praxis alongside more traditional text-based research prose. In doing so, it will use photo-journalistic artifacts and the visual politics that surround them, as core dialogical components in the presentation of the article as opposed to using them as mere illustrations or props.

Growing into epistemic knowledge through performance: Rosanna Raymond’s “Soli I Tai—Soli I Uta” at Berlin’s Ethnological Museum

AbstractThis article explores Rosanna Raymond’s performative intervention titled “Soli I Tai—Soli I Uta” (Tread on the Sea—Tread on the Land). Today, many cultural institutions try to develop progressive strategies to facilitate “intercultural dialogue.” In this endeavor, performative strategies are explored, some of which are developed in collaboration with experts from so‐called “source communities.” Such collaborations have longer histories in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, or Canada. In central Europe, and especially in Germany, this has been a more recent development. One prominent example is the one‐month artist residency of the Pacific artist Rosanna Raymond (b. 1967) at the Ethnological Museum Berlin in 2014, which culminated in her “acti.VA.tion” entitled “Soli I Tai—Soli I Uta.” My article analyzes how Raymond’s performative intervention dramaturgically put different epistemic systems and “ways of knowing” into a contrasting relationship and thus enabled spectators to gain declarative epistemic knowledge, that is to say, knowledge about knowledge and different “ways of knowing.”

Teaching entangled Australian sexual histories: Pedagogy and approaches

AbstractThis is an era of significant shifts in power dynamics pertaining to sexualities, the body and the law reflecting major changes in the socio‐political landscape, as evident in, for example, the #MeToo movement; inquiries into systemic child sexual abuse; and campaigns for equal rights, including marriage equality. This article examines the theme of controversies throughout history and provides a series of pedagogical examples drawn from the authors' innovations in teaching an upper‐level university course on sex and scandal. Although the course spans the ancient, early modern and modern worlds, covering sexual scandals throughout the west, the focus herein is on Australian examples. It begins by introducing the theme of controversy and its place in history, then teases out the related topics of sexual scandal and contestation. This is then followed by some case studies from the course to demonstrate the subject matter included, and to elucidate specific pedagogies employed to maximize engagement and to enhance understanding in a student‐centred and supportive learning environment.

A Reconciled Nation? Mabo and the Reimagining of Australia's National History

ABSTRACT The High Court's 1992 decision in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) is widely regarded as a seminal moment in Australia's legal and political history. The decision established a legal right to native title and placed Indigenous history and politics at the forefront of public debate. As this historiographical survey will demonstrate, the decision, and the public debate that followed it, also spurred significant discussion in the discipline of Indigenous history about how to write and represent Indigenous history, and the place of Indigenous history in national historical narratives. For some, Mabo encouraged an emphasis on negotiation and reconciling Indigenous and settler experiences to create new narratives about Australia's history and nationhood. For others, Mabo and the politics of reconciliation constituted a further appropriation of Indigeneity by settler Australians, underscoring the historical continuity of invasion and the need to transform the discipline of history to recognise Indigenous epistemologies and history-making.

Development of Public History in Australia

The present article is aimed at demonstrating the importance of new for Ukrainian historiography direction of public history, for the country’s development and for strengthening its stance at the international arena. Australia is taken for an example, as it has turned from once remote Terra Incognita into one of the leading nations of the modern world. It is emphasized that, regardless of attainments, the identity issue is still as urgent as to other countries in the conditions of a global crisis. The sources of the public history trend are revealed, explained are the factors conducive to its spread planet-wise, attention is brought to the fact that this trend has become a natural result of developments in the science of history in the Western civilization, encompassing countries of Europe, the Americas, and Australia. The latter, being a ramification of the Western civilization branch, has adopted the guidelines outlined by American scholars, driven by pragmatic considerations.
 Steps are determined in the institutionalization of the said direction, a characteristic is given to the activities of the Australian Center of Public History at Sydney Technology University, of the journal “Public History Survey”, as well as to the specifics of their work in the digital era under the motto: “History for the public, about the public, together with the public”. The same motto is leading the historians working with local and family history, cooperating with the State in the field of commemoration, placing great importance on museums, memorials, monuments. Considering national holidays, particular attention is given to the National Day of Apology, reflecting the complications of Australian history. Like American public history, the Australian one began to give much attention to those groups of population that were previously omitted by the focus of research, namely, the aborigines.
 A conclusion is made regarding the importance of history in general and public history in particular for the implementation of the national identity policy – an important token of the nation’s stable and successful progress.

Confronting the Joint Legacies of the Holocaust and Colonialism in Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to apply the concept of synergy to the workings of memory in Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell (2007) by focusing on the relationship between its two main characters, Max Otto, a German professor of history, and Dougald Gnapun, an Aboriginal elder. It does so with a view to analysing the way in which fiction can weave connections between different histories of violence—in this case the Holocaust and the colonisation of Australia—while simultaneously pointing to the risks of downplaying the specificities of each case. Both men are burdened by traumatic memories of past atrocities: for Max it is his father’s complicity in the crimes of Nazism, while for Dougald it is the 1861 Cullin-la-Ringo massacre of white settlers, allegedly led by his great-grandfather. Max and Dougald meet through Vita McLelland, a young Aboriginal academic visiting Hamburg, who invites Max to a conference at the University of Sydney and then to visit her uncle Dougald in Queensland so that the professor can learn about the history of Australia’s indigenous people. Though far from one another in terms of geographical and cultural background, a close friendship develops between these two men whose only initial link is their being descendants of perpetrators. I argue that by confronting the joint legacies of the Holocaust and colonialism through Max and Dougald’s synergistic and transformative friendship, and by placing their stories/memories in a broader transnational and transhistorical context, Miller’s fictional recreation of these historical events engages with the complex relationship between victimisers and victims, perpetrators and descendants, history and fiction, remembrance and appropriation, which, as in the case of Max and Dougald, suggests the possibility of reconciliation with, and a letting go, of traumatic pasts.

“Feudal Barons Extracting Tribute”: Narratives of Market Power in the Australian Retail Property Sector during the 1980s

This article analyzes the ways that shopping center tenants deployed narratives to encourage government intervention in the Australian retail property sector during the 1980s. Tenants claimed that landlords were abusing their market power through a range of egregious and exploitative practices. Landlords responded with stories of their own, claiming that amateurish retailers were using isolated cases to make broad generalizations about the industry as a whole. Politicians retold retailers’ stories in Parliament, championed small business enterprise as a driver of economic growth, and produced retail leasing legislation aimed at protecting shopping center tenants. In the process, established conceptions of shopping centers were inverted. In the 1960s and 1970s they were seen as bastions of capitalist enterprise constructed by nation-building visionaries. Through stories, retailers captured the cultural legitimacy of entrepreneurship from their landlords, who were characterized as feudal barons blocking the free operation of markets they controlled. Exploring these developments offers new insights into the relational dynamics of preplanned retail environments, expands our understanding of postwar Australian retail history, and contributes to a growing historiography on the role of narrative in business history.

The four pillars: the architecture of the government school in Australia 1835-1885

ABSTRACT The government school has held an integral part in the Australian idea of progressive society, a locus of community definition and pride that is the backbone of social infrastructure. Yet, it took decades from the establishment of the Australian British colonies from 1788 to establish a system of general education. The Australian school had modest beginnings, founded on the Irish National School system in the 1840s. This paper examines the architecture of Australian government schools between 1835–1885, charting the evolution of their design including the use and development of common plans, the influence of rules and regulations, and their position in a civil society.

Broadening Histories of Designed Landscapes: The Case of the Gembrook Nurseries and the Dandenong Ranges/Koran Warrabin Range

ABSTRACT This article examines how complex food production systems developed by Kulin Nation people over centuries in the physical landscape around Emerald, in the Dandenong /Koran Warrabin Range/s east of Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) were transformed in the late nineteenth century, through colonisation and, especially, the operations of C. A. Nobelius’ Gembrook Nurseries, into the largest commercial fruit tree nursery in the Southern Hemisphere. Using the colonial archive and contemporary sources, the research demonstrates shared aspects of landscape resources and infrastructures as they were used by both Kulin Nation and settler communities, and also some of the fundamental differences in modes of access to these resources. Photographic evidence in particular documents how the scale and speed of change through industrial-scale colonial horticulture massively impacted the landscape within a matter of years, if not seasons, resulting in disruption to and destruction of Indigenous landscape systems. This analysis seeks to address the ways in which Australian histories can continue to be re-framed to better acknowledge and respect Australian Aboriginal histories, and confirms the importance of revisiting historically settler-focused understandings and heritage assessments of Australian landscapes to better acknowledge the complex uses and values of these places for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land where I live and work, the people of the Kulin Nations, and pay respect to their Elders and other Aboriginal people.

Public History in Australia

Public History in Australia

Review: Cold War and Architecture: The Competing Forces That Reshaped Austria after 1945

Review: <i>Cold War and Architecture: The Competing Forces That Reshaped Austria after 1945</i>

Germ Growers in the Colonial Laboratory

ABSTRACT Written and set in the Australian colonies, Robert Potter’s The Germ Growers (1892) was amongst the earliest novels that engaged with the theme of extra-terrestrial invasion. It describes the discovery of aliens who breed ‘germs’ in a sophisticated laboratory hidden in the outback with the aim of conquering the human species. The novel’s introduction of these otherworldly interlopers into a setting already host to the political, social and scientific experiments of invaders, puts the colonial preoccupations with settlement and dispossession into sharp relief. Potter’s portrayal of relations between white settlers, aliens, exogenous and Indigenous others, accentuates how anxieties about invasion and contamination, insiders and outsiders, humans and nonhumans were accompanied by the application of scientific knowledge and technological expertise in the establishment and administration of social order. Highlighting the idea of colonies as sites for refining elaborate strategies of coercion and control, the novel provides a situated perspective upon the ways in which the affordances of the laboratory operated as central features of the imperial project and influenced its role in the development of biopolitical governance. In doing so, The Germ Growers brings attention to the archive of colonial fiction as a means of approaching the social and historical contexts that continue to undergird relations between science and culture.

Engaging transitional justice in Australian history curriculum: Times, temporalities and historical thinking

Existing research on history education’s role in agendas of transitional justice is focused on societies undertaking regime change or rebuilding after extensive conflict and often centres disciplinary competencies as part of educational reform objectives to support political transition. However, the orientation towards transitional justice in settler colonial democracies such as Australia has prompted debate about the role of history curriculum in transitional contexts where constructivist, discipline-based approaches are already prescribed. While “historical thinking” in Australia has been a pragmatic middle way between polarised single-narrative and deconstructivist paradigms, this article argues that questions of transitional justice return the subjective, contemporary, and political to history education in ways that challenge the scope of disciplinary meaning-making and complicate the civic promises of disciplinary thinking. By discussing examples of how time is presently imagined and engaged using second-order historical thinking concepts, this article engages some key limitations of disciplinary history curriculum vis-à-vis transitional justice. It suggests alternate approaches that stretch the disciplinary paradigm in new directions that carry important implications for other societies engaged in questions of transitional justice.

Unfree Labour and Australia’s Obscured Pacific Histories: Towards a New Genealogy of Modern Slavery

ABSTRACT The passage of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018 received bipartisan support and was heralded within both Houses of Parliament as a significant step towards addressing Australia’s complicity in modern slavery. Political discourse surrounding the legislation, however, exhibits a profound and disconcerting dehistoricisation, emphasising particularities of global supply chains and contemporary transnational capitalism. Australia’s own histories of slavery, slavery-like conditions and unfree labour are overwhelmingly absent from these narratives, which are framed instead by occasional references to the transatlantic slave trade. Attending particularly to histories of coerced Pacific labour within Australia, we analyse these absences as reflective of deeply rooted fissures of memory and power within Australia’s national imaginaries, and of the exercise of colonial power both within the settler state and in its entanglements with the region. Through reference to two threads of Pacific labour history in Australia—the struggle for recognition of the 19th-century Pacific labour trade, and the labour patterns of 20th-century Papuan and New Guinean domestic workers—we argue for an alternate genealogy of modern slavery, one that re-centres attention to race and coloniality, and attends more fully to the presence of the past in the exploitations of the present.