Showing papers in "Australian Historical Studies in 2017"

The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800–2000

Abstract: This monumental book explores New Zealand’s most uncomfortable, and therefore forgotten, war on New Zealand soil, a war fought between British forces, settlers, and the Waikato tribes Its closest

The Myth of the Flogging Parson: Samuel Marsden and Severity of Punishment in the Age of Reform

Abstract: In 1817, Governor Macquarie alleged that Samuel Marsden was an especially severe magistrate, a claim widely repeated in subsequent histories. And yet, if measured against other magistrates in the Macquarie era, Marsden sentenced convicts to a flogging less frequently and ordered typical numbers of lashes. The myth of Marsden as the flogging parson developed in the writing of Marsden's political enemies, grounded in his popular reputation as a brute and a hypocrite. In a context of growing humanitarian and criminological opposition to corporal punishment, Marsden's incongruous responsibilities to preach and punish convicts became a scandalous anachronism.

Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling

Abstract: Little of Eliza Fraser’s life was spent in Australia, but her name has become part of its colonised landscape So, too, has her story Shipwrecked off the coast of Australia in 1836, she lived for

The Place of Anzac in Australian Historical Consciousness

Abstract: There is an ever-greater popular attachment to the commemoration of Anzac Day in Australia, with growing commercial, popular and institutional support around the country. This resurgence has also g...

Making Chinese Australia: Urban Elites, Newspapers and the Formation of Chinese-Australian Identity, 1892–1912 / White Ghosts, Yellow Peril: China and New Zealand 1790–1950

Abstract: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries China’s Qing dynasty was falling, the Australian colonies were united as a Federation, and New Zealand was beginning to assert its own national ...

A History of New Zealand Women

Abstract: When the elite member of the National Council of Women, Lady Anna Stout, suggested in 1908 that Māori girls should be trained as domestic servants, a Māori woman sought to explain the cultural reas...

‘Just another start to the denigration of Anzac Day’ : Evolving commemorations of Australian LGBTI military service

Abstract: This article examines key historical moments in 1982, 1996, 2013 and 2015 when current or formerly serving gay military personnel have publicly asserted their membership in Australia’s Anzac legend and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community. Through using the public spaces of Anzac Day and Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, LGBTI service organisations have strategically positioned gay service personnel as past, present or future members of Australia’s Defence and LGBTI communities. Their public demonstrations have challenged Australians’ constructs of gay men’s masculinity, the Anzac legend, digger mythology and the Australian Defence Force.

The Sexual Abuse of Children: Recognition and Redress

Abstract: Sydney, and Tom Griffiths’ environmental histories and historiography, From the Edge is a volume of great natural beauty and historical significance. Indeed, McKenna argues these places reveal great omissions in the historical understanding of non-Indigenous Australia. That initial and halting precariousness of the colony has been forgotten, as has its violence, its desperation, and (most critically) recognition of the vast knowledge of its Indigenous peoples. Peering up at the etched engravings of Yaburara on the large boulders surrounded by mining industry, McKenna reaches both into the past, and into the nation’s collective historical consciousness: ‘To stand surrounded by art that stretched far into antiquity, inscribed with a cultural significance that would forever remain obscure, was to be reminded of how little Europeans understood of Australia’s deep past’ (150). That rock art, including images of violence and dispossession, is the Yaburara’s ‘history book’, McKenna writes. ‘They can never forget’ (109). These site-based narratives demonstrate how histories of place present an opportunity to redress the imbalance of the historical archive – Australian colonial historiography is still overwhelmingly dependent on historical sources with a non-Indigenous providence. And Australians’ ‘failure to “see” is rooted in the long history of prejudice that we have yet to fully overcome’, McKenna contends (162). Yet this collection also raises important questions about site-based ‘ways of seeing’ and its possible limitations: while From the Edge provides a powerful method of place for telling histories of contact and colonisation, for places that have been irreparably altered, like the suburbs of Brisbane or Perth, or bulldozed savannahs of central Queensland, place becomes a rather moremurky concept. How do we tell these histories when place is a palimpsest? Given that a second volume of this work is due to appear (which will extend the diversity of places examined), however, it seems slightly premature to be critiquing McKenna’s placebased method. And despite those caveats, this first foray is indeed impressive: as McKenna concludes, ‘It now seems impossible to separate the landscape from the stories that inhabit it’ (212). Australian historians cannot ignore the power of place as a vital component of its national archive.

Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art

Abstract: ‘The crucial starting point of this book’, art historian Ian McLean states in his introduction to Rattling Spears, ‘is that Indigenous art has a modern history; it is one of the many modernisms pro...

From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories

Abstract: How much of Australian history remains quietly embedded in the places it played out? Stories of colonisation, contact, exploration and contest have been amassed in public and private archives aroun

Asian Servants for the Imperial Telegraph: Imagining North Australia as an Indian Ocean Colony before 1914

Abstract: In the late nineteenth century, the officers of the Eastern Extension Australasia and China Telegraph Company provided north Australia with a cable connection to London via Java, Singapore, and India The telegraph project prompted a new era of colonisation in tropical north Australia and the officers of the company sought to ensure that the north would be shaped according to their notions of Indian Ocean colonial culture They insisted on employing Asian domestic servants in opposition to White Australian nationalists who advocated restrictions on Asian migration Like the pearling industry, which was permitted ongoing access to Asian labour, the telegraph company drew on the support of liberal parliamentarians, and leveraged their privileged position as providers of imperial telecommunications to develop an elite colonial counter-culture in north Australia

Australian Religious Thought

Abstract: dence of polio per 100,000 population in Australia was between 1951 and 1953; many readers, whether children of the vaccine era or otherwise spared, may well know people who manage their polio-induced paralysis today or who live with other effects of their much earlier polio infection. Finally, the author, with characteristic lightness of touch, invokes the paralysed body. In one respect, this invocation follows the ‘turn to the body’ in scholarship over the last generation, scholarship that handles past and present cultures of health and disease. But in this book ‘the body’ is more than a now standard academic convention. The pathos and plight of the paralysed body remind readers acutely of the experience of polio, so often a child’s, and so often marginal to the focus of medical histories. While the author demonstrates scientific mastery and an extensive research base, it is her sensitivity to lived experiences and to legacies of polio, her judgement, and her ability to draw together so many threads that impressed this reviewer. Highley gave the word ‘cripple’ new meanings for me. Fault-finding is hard. Yes, once or twice the author repeats some lines of expression, and occasionally one might wonder where a work cited in the bibliography was used. But these quibbles are trivial. Overall, the book certainly rewards a second read. Many are the ironies worth reflecting upon, not least those of gender suggested by the opposition between Macnamara and Kenny themselves. Yet the voices of polio-sufferers transcend all else. The polio kids on Manly Beach have been honoured.

Fragile Settlements: Aboriginal Peoples, Law, and Resistance in South-West Australia and Prairie Canada

Abstract: verent’ (256). Griffiths also discusses Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land, a much earlier attempt by a novelist to reckon with ‘frontier violence’ at a time when professional historians and settler public culture had little to say about it. Dark’s historical fiction also ‘explored time as a shared cultural and historical property’ (29): as in the Davison chapter, questions of temporality come into view in contexts where we might not otherwise look for them. Spending time at Dark’s house in the Blue Mountains, now run as a writers’ retreat, Griffiths goes through her library and notes how thoroughly she marked up copies of her own novels with references and citations. ‘She wanted to honour the known past as well as to inform it with her imagination’ (29). Griffiths’ book honours the past and its investigators with warmth and with insight.

Lessons from Australia: Persia Campbell and the International Afterlives of Federation-Era Welfarism

Abstract: This article uses the career of Australian-born economist and United Nations lobbyist Persia Campbell (1898–1974) to track the influence of Federation-era Australian welfarism into the postwar inte...

The Power of Humanity: 100 Years of Australian Red Cross, 1914–2014

Abstract: These two commissioned histories focus on national centenaries of the Red Cross. The commissions attracted fine authors and historians. In their careers, Oppenheimer and Tennant have written about ...

Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race / The Settler Complex: Recuperating Binarism in Colonial Studies

Abstract: Patrick Wolfe’s sudden death in February 2016 has left a major void in the Australian and international academic communities. Wolfe’s scholarship, counsel, and friendship both touched and influence...

Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings

Abstract: I often introduce the concept of historical memory to my undergraduates, explaining that all peoples shape understandings of the past to suit present and future needs Many examples in settler colo

Seeking a new materialism in Australian history

Abstract: Labour and economics are traditional strengths of Australian history, though in recent decades cultural history has instead dominated historical practice. This article discusses the relationship between the economic and cultural in Australian history, utilising our own research as case studies that explore reasons to combine the structural and discursive. Inspired by settler colonial studies and other developments internationally, we propose a new historical materialism for Australian history. In particular, we argue for an increased attention to economic questions and data in combination with cultural history sources and analysis; for the greater historicisation of capitalism as itself a specific and contingent phenomenon; and for the application of Marxist tools, without discarding the lessons of the cultural turn and their specific value to Australian history.

Claiming Their Own Space: Australian Women Missionaries in Korea, 1891–1900

Abstract: The first group of Australian women missionaries arrived in Korea in 1891, representing the Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union of Victoria. Their pioneering work was soon hindered by tensions th...

White Men in Quarantine: Disease, Race, Commerce and Mobility in the Pacific, 1872.

Abstract: In July 1872, the steamship Hero underwent quarantine at Sydney's North Head after a case of smallpox was diagnosed. This article brings together the histories of quarantine, white subjectivity and Pacific mobility through an analysis of the Loganiana newspaper produced by the passengers of the Hero during their confinement. The Loganiana provides a unique insight into the formation of white identities through discussions of race, commerce, science and inter-colonial politics. The case provides an important perspective on a transformative period in Australia's border history, and also illuminates the tensions accompanying the transition from an older imperial order to political autonomy in the nineteenth-century Pacific.

Quarantine: Local and Global Histories

Abstract: popular sovereignty, and the values represented by the Southern Cross flag (31–2). ClareWright’s chapter makes the case for a transnational examination of Eureka, alert to the role and ideas of British Chartists and American republicans and to the Europeans present – Eureka, she suggests, should be seen as part of the ‘long dusk of Europe’s age of revolutions’ (48). The ‘flamboyant’ American merchant George Francis Train is introduced in her chapter. David Headon also explores the American influence in general and George Francis Train in particular. Like Wright, Headon mentions Train’s later support for women’s suffrage but not that he is most wellknown for his strident opposition to black suffrage after the Civil War and the assistance he gave Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to campaign for white women’s suffrage; nor do the paeans to the Anglo-Saxon race in Train’s 1859 Spread-Eaglism feature in Headon’s account of his democratic and republic zeal. Headon writes illuminatingly of the ready availability of American novels and books in Victoria. Wright and Headon together persuasively make the case that one cannot understand Eureka without considering the spirit of 1776 that infused it. Paul Pickering’s chapter surveys British press coverage of Eureka, showing the range from conservative to liberal and radical responses. He points to the importance of including the trials of the Eureka rebels in the history and memory of the event, emphasising the importance of ‘a popular radical interpretation of the rights supposedly bestowed by the venerable “British Constitution”’ (82). Benjamin T. Jones’ valuable chapter discusses Eureka in the context of ‘civic republicanism’, that communal sense he finds evidenced in the use of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ in the Eureka rebels’ oath. Jones, like Pickering, emphasises constitutionalism; he also discusses the importance of Canadian experience (in particular the rebellions of 1837–38) to the Eureka rebels. James Warden analyses the Eureka rebels’ oath. Jeff Brownrigg writes knowledgeably of the music and poetry about Eureka. Frank Bongiorno writes perceptively and entertainingly about the political and cultural invocations of Eureka in the 1980s. The volume attests to Eureka as a living tradition (at times protesting too much about it) and this is perhaps what makes it scrappier, more shorttempered and more nostalgic than the Otago volume.

Endeavouring Banks: Exploring Collections from the Endeavour Voyage 1768–1771

Abstract: The catalogue to a major exhibition held in Lincoln, UK, this sumptuous publication about the Endeavour’s collections also serves as a valuable contribution to eighteenth-century Pacific history. T...

The history of emotions in Australia

Abstract: In the last two decades, emotions have increasingly featured in Australian historical scholarship. This article reviews the history of emotions in Australia by examining the various ways in which historians have engaged with and mobilised the emotions in their research. It argues that, for most Australian historians, the emotions are a tool of investigation in projects with historical interests that are largely directed elsewhere. Historical scholarship in Australia suggests, then, that the emotions are most useful as a category of analysis in the service of a range of other historical agendas.

Inflation and the Making of Australian Macroeconomic Policy, 1945–85

Abstract: This is a scholarly and in many respects impressive book, derived from the author’s doctoral thesis. Readers will require a good grasp of economics to follow the text in a number of places. For exa...

‘A Stronger Man and a More Virile Character’: Australian Prime Ministers, Embodied Manhood and Political Authority in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract: In 1907 Andrew Fisher was evaluated as a ‘stronger man … and more virile character’ and therefore a better Australian Labor Party leader than Chris Watson. A key aspect of this assessment was his...

Neither a discipline nor a colony: Renaissance and re-imagination in economic history

Abstract: After years in the wilderness, economic history is becoming fashionable once more. Intellectual shifts by its parent disciplines of history and economics, the failed experiment of economic history as a separate discipline, and the impact of major economic events have conspired to produce a renaissance in the field of study in the last decade and a half. We explain these changes and show that economic history derives its main strength from its role as an interdisciplinary research field that draws upon and integrates with its closest disciplines. We analyse the nature and recent progress of economic history in Australia and offer a prospective for its future role.

Respectable Radicals: A History of the National Council of Women of Australia 1896–2006

Abstract: policy in NSW. Many layers of resistance were gradually and partly overcome through the collaborative efforts of the women of Burnt Bridge and Greenhill, the local nursing sister, the State committee of the CWA and others. Here, as elsewhere, these women predominantly worked together to achieve change via traditional feminine pursuits – in Kempsey in the form of a series of baby shows, which foregrounded the health and beauty of local Aboriginal babies. Jones’ attentiveness to the social currencies that marked out competence and respectability among country women during the 1950s and 1960s is highly productive. Importantly, she shows with great subtlety how ambivalent CWA activities were in both overcoming class divisions and re-producing them. A shared CWA-badged set of crockery had the capacity to offer uncritical acceptance to Aboriginal women of WorrigeeWreck Bay CWA as they hosted events, while at the same time, the distinction between plain sewing and expensive and time-intensive ‘fancywork’ re-inscribed a divide between the well-todowhitemembers of Nowra CWA and theirWorrigee-Wreck Bay associates. The depth of Jones’ analysis of women’s domestic and community work also creates the historical context required for understanding the courage and leadership of rural women who sought to break down the colour bar. Jones offers a fascinating portrait of the CWA, as the State committee, and diverse regional and local bodies, interacted with the big issues – migration and assimilation, the welfare state and health policy. Country Women and the Colour Bar demonstrates how, when it embraced Aboriginal women in its central goal of improving conditions for country women, the CWA could be a potent force for change in the context of the persisting rigid structures of the reserves, the combination of the Aboriginal Welfare Board’s intricate bureaucracy and lack of resources, and the physical, economic and social isolation of Aboriginal women. Personal links across communities, as well as the structures and strategies of the CWA, provided Aboriginal women with considerably expanded means for respectable public action in seeking improvements that were at once concrete and highly symbolic of communities’ capacity for assimilation – a much-needed public phone, a school bus service. Discussion of the nature of the CWA archives, and of the oral histories undertaken for the book, would have further enhanced its value for fellow historians. Part of the strength of the book is in its resolute focus on the stories of these six CWA branches. I was left wanting to know more about the social geography of these NSW towns, and the local relationships between paid domestic work and the community work of Aboriginal women – undeniably, though, Country Women and the Colour Bar itself has made me more attuned to these histories. The book makes an important contribution to Australian women’s history, Aboriginal history and an understanding of NSW assimilation policy and practice, and the history of working friendships between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous people working for social and political change.

Dancing in My Dreams: Confronting the Spectre of Polio

Abstract: industrial and media systems of production that locate country music within the political economy of its national-yet-international sensibility. Despite the criticisms, excellent new research is offered in Yodelling Boundary Riders, especially in the second half of the book about the LeGarde Twins, the rise of anti-Americanism, novelty acts such as the Schneider Sisters and Aboriginal singer Dougie Young, as well as Spurs, a magazine usefully mined by Martin for an understanding of late 1950s Australian country music. Discussion about the nomenclature of the music itself, as it traversed hillbilly to country to bush ballad to folk and on to Nashville and Tamworth, especially the annual Country Music Festival, suggests a richer set of concerns that require more analysis, especially the appeals of the bush ballad to authenticity. The book would be instructive as an introductory text for undergraduates learning about popular music history, offering suggestions for research trajectories as an introduction to country music and its meaning in Australia.

AHS Classics: Rural History and Environmental History

Abstract: Studying rural history and environmental history in Australian Historical Studies reveals a shared effort to challenge the colonial narrative of the settlement of rural Australia that continues to hold sway in popular representations of the national past. Rather than finding distinct spheres of urban and rural Australia, it reveals instead the processes by which these areas have been mutually constitutive, whether through cultural representations, economic exchanges, or the application of science and technology. Rather than confirming the dichotomy of nature and culture of the city and the bush, it highlights instead the wider cultural and ecological implications of settler Australians’ diverse engagements with an ancient and Aboriginal land. By transcending disciplinary and spatial boundaries, rural and environmental historians reveal the complexities of colonisation and the networks of exchange that have shaped Australians and their environments since 1788. In their hands, history becomes an important f...