AustLit

'One of the concerns of the newly federated Commonwealth of Australia was a fear of invasion by Asia from the north, either by force or through immigration. In the lead-up to World War I, white Australia saw national security and border security as intertwined. Historians have often separated these concerns, with military and diplomatic historians focusing on the defence strategies of Australia in the early 1900s and their links with the security concerns of the British Empire, while immigration historians have focused on the use of the border control system to maintain the ‘White Australia Policy’ and exclude non-white migrants. Peter Cochrane’s book Best We Forget: The War for White Australia, 1914–18 looks to synthesise these two histories. This is not an entirely new endeavour – Anthony Burke wrote a book in the early 2000s on the history of Australia’s fear of invasion, bringing together these ideas of defence, national security and border control. But Cochrane’s book is aimed not just at an academic audience and was written with the general public in mind.' (Introduction)

'In the official history of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), there is only one mention of the women’s liberation movement, amongst a collection of other social movements that emerged in Australia in the late 1960s and early 1970s, alongside the anti-Vietnam War and Aboriginal rights movements. However, we know from files released by the National Archives of Australia that ASIO heavily monitored the women’s liberation movement in Australia, just as it did with most social and protest movements that existed at the time. Concerned about the crossover between the women’s liberation movement and other protest movements, ASIO were particularly worried about the entry of the various far left groups, such as Communists, Trotskyists and Maoists, into the women’s liberation movement, even though these groups were very much divided about the issue of women’s rights during this period. This article examines the ASIO files on the Australian women’s liberation movement and the anxiety that the authorities felt about the ‘threat’ of the personal becoming too politicised.' (Publication abstract)