AustLit

'Over the last decade or so settler colonial studies has become a key prism through which to interpret the colonial cultures and histories of former British colonies where Indigenous people have since become a marginalised minority in their own homelands, ‘replaced’ by European settlers who sought to ‘eliminate’ them and their connections to the land. Yet, in recent years this approach has been subject to more critical evaluations, key amongst them, by some First Nations scholars. In this article I explore how Indigenous scholars advocate, interrogate, critique or challenge settler colonial studies as an emerging field of enquiry. I conclude by discussing Indigenous-authored extra-colonial histories, which bypass colonial expropriation and exploitation to focus on Indigenous worlds.'  (Publication abstract)

'On 20 July 1900, an Aboriginal man named Jimmy Governor murdered two white women and three white children at Breelong in northwest New South Wales. Despite the plethora of information on Governor, there is a story that remains to be told: how did the Breelong murders affect Governor’s Aboriginal family at Wollar? This article pieces together the experiences of the Aboriginal people of Wollar alongside settler responses to Governor’s crimes. It demonstrates not only that the law proved malleable in the fall-out of the murders, but the profound fear of warfare that overshadowed the push towards Federation. By tracing the lives of this group of Aboriginal people as well as settler Australians, we can see the interface of settler colonialism, nation-building and protection at a crucial moment in Australian history, as well as the precariousness of white Australia at a time when it was meant to have been triumphant.'  (Publication abstract)

'For many years, when teaching both international and domestic students about Australian history, politics and culture, I began by showing the class a copy of Richard Broome’s book Aboriginal Australians: A History since 1788 (first published 1982, latest edn 2010), only changing the book as new editions were published. I always told students that this was the most reliable, informative and up-to-date text on this subject, and his work was essential reading if they wished to really understand Australian history and politics. My positive impression has been further bolstered by the publication of Conflict, Adaptation, Transformation. I believe that this collection honouring Richard Broome’s path-breaking work in Aboriginal history is important and timely. I highly recommend this book.'  (Introduction)

'It is both fascinating and revealing to read these two books together. Sendziuk and Foster's volume, a narrative history of South Australia (SA), is the first for some decades, and tells the state's story in a traditional format. The second is a book of essays, in which a diverse bunch of historians and a historical novelist with some new material challenge several of the South Australian foundational beliefs (‘fictions’). Read together they offer new perspectives on the old question about South Australian history: how different was South Australia? They also offer interesting synergies as Sendziuk, for example, is the author/editor of both volumes and he and Foster clearly take into account, where possible, the contrary arguments of the essay writers.' (Introduction)

'The abstract of Darren Jorgensen and Ian McLean’s edited monograph Indigenous Archives promises two key goals set within the context of Australian Aboriginal art: first, to share knowledge about ancient Indigenous recordkeeping practices, and second, to examine the powerful intersections between ancient recordkeeping and the impact of colonialisation in Australia.' (Introduction)

'In 1911, while visiting London, Australian suffragist Vida Goldstein was embroiled in a heated debate with a male correspondent to the British Anti-Suffrage Review about the relative merits of British and Australian women voters. The British man was exasperated by Goldstein’s claims to parity. Australian women, voting as they had been since the early 1900s, voted only on provincial matters. If women were to vote in England, they would have a hand in directing the affairs of a vast and troublesome empire. Surely, he said, ‘not even the most enthusiastic Australian would dream of suggesting that the Imperial Parliament was not far more important than the Commonwealth Parliament’. It is precisely this enthusiasm – through which Australian women voters counselled their British ‘cousins’ to adopt their progressive democratic practices – that directs the narrative in Clare Wright’s recent book, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World.' (Introduction)

'In his article from 2007, ‘Anzac: The Sacred and the Secular’, Graham Seal explores the status of the Anzac as a ‘talismanic mythology [that is] powerfully associated with dominant concepts of nation and cultural identity (Journal of Australian Studies 31, no. 91, 135). In the story of Australia, the Anzac is courageous, resilient, cheerful and bound together with his comrades in a comforting, homosocial brotherhood. He is also, as the myth would have it, white, male, heterosexual and wholly sacrosanct. Thankfully, this has not prevented historians and others from taking aim at the pernicious homogeneity of the Anzac stereotype. Recent work by Yorick Smaal, for example, exposed the intricate worlds and identities of men who desired other men in Australia during World War II. Smaal begins his monograph by recalling the reaction to an attempt by a group of veterans to lay a wreath at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne in 1982. It was a gesture that was meant to acknowledge queer men and women who had served and died during World War II. It was ultimately prevented however, because, according to Bruce Ruxton, the President of Victoria’s Returned and Services League, it denigrated Anzac Day. Ruxton went on to comment that he ‘could not remember a single poofter from World War Two’ (Y. Smaal, Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939–45: Queer Identities in Australia in the Second World War (2015), 172). It is curious to note just how much mileage this unfortunate denial has. Fast forward to 2015, and to an incident highlighted in the Introduction to Serving in Silence?, when the Defence LGBTI Information Service arranged to lay rainbow wreaths on Anzac Day. Their actions were ridiculed by a comment left by a reader of Gay News Network who remarked that ‘There were no gay Anzacs … There weren’t any homosexuals … Keep your fantasies in house and stop defaming the Australian Army’ (7).'  (Introduction)

'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)

'The Bible in Australia does a wonderful job of revealing the ubiquity of the Christian Bible in Australian history. Meredith Lake moves dextrously between temporal and geographical interactions with the biblical text. She understands the text read and worshipped by ‘bible-bashers’, but she also notices and taxonomises the scriptural references that infuse ostensibly secular cultural products, such as a Nick Cave song or a Tim Winton novel. That Lake’s book begins with the image of Koby Abberton emerging from the surf at Maroubra with the words ‘My brother’s keeper’ tattooed across his chest, tells us much about the range and the remit of this book. This is not a history of exegesis or of religious institutions. It is the history of the uses to which the Christian Bible has been put in the making of Australia. And she argues that ‘The Bible still gets under Australian skin’ (3).' (Introduction)

'In the mid-1960s pioneering media scholar Henry Mayer famously complained that Australian historians had shown little interest in the press. So, while primarily a political scientist, Mayer felt compelled to do his own historical spadework to document Australian press history. The result was his ground-breaking The Press in Australia (1964) which remains to this day a much-consulted classic of Australian media studies. Since then there have been numerous scholarly works on aspects of press history – works on individual newspapers and press proprietors, state-based histories, histories of the country press, a history of the Australian Journalists Association, and volumes on the press and politics amongst them. There has, however, been nothing quite so ambitious and wide-ranging as the volume under review, which covers nearly 140 years of corporate and political press history across all Australian states. It begins with the establishment, in 1803, of Australia's first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, and ends (somewhat arbitrarily) with an analysis of the role of the press in forcing the resignation of Prime Minister Menzies during World War II.' (Introduction)