AustLit

'Any historian who researches the role of religion – particularly Christianity – in Australian history will be aware of the fundamental challenge of convincing audiences that this is an interesting topic. The importance of religious institutions in Australia, particularly prior to the 1970s, may go without saying. But in much contemporary historical analysis, religious belief and practice appear simply as the background noise of conservatism, an indistinguishable hum against which the important matters of politics and culture play out. In Australian history, as Phyllis Mack has written in relation to the field of gender history, religion is largely seen as ‘a secondary phenomenon’, in which religious belief and concepts are significant only as they point to the more profound categories through which hierarchies of power are maintained and expressed. Alternatively, accounts of religious history by confessional historians often go to the opposite extreme of interpreting theological debates and religious experience entirely on their own terms, with no wider critical frame of reference. These various approaches to religious history – some of which I have adopted myself – may have their uses, but they do not make for particularly interesting reading.' (Introduction)

'Mischka’s War defies genre. Readers of Fitzpatrick’s two previous books in this vein – My Father’s Daughter (2010) and A Spy in the Archive (2013) – will recognise the artful weaving of memoir, family history and historical scholarship. She is not alone among historians, particularly late in their careers or in retirement, to turn their well-honed skills to subjects close to home. Fitzpatrick’s contributions are a model for how to craft an intimate, highly readable and deeply informed narrative.' (Introduction)

'In his latest work, Aboriginal People and Australian Football in the Nineteenth Century: They Did Not Come from Nowhere, Roy Hay critically examines a popular origin story of Australian football and details the nature and extent of early Aboriginal involvement in the code throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In doing so, Hay finds no evidence to support the tradition that holds Australian football to be partially derived from Aboriginal games like marngrook, but seeks to offer an alternative origin story to Aboriginal Australians’ involvement in the code. To this end, he details the scale and substance of early Indigenous involvement in the sport on the missions and stations of Victoria and southern New South Wales and, to a lesser extent, South and Western Australia. Hay draws on recently digitised newspaper archives and employs demographic analyses to explore the development of the code at specific stations and missions and he uncovers the successes and triumphs of numerous Aboriginal sporting teams and individuals in a context that was not conducive to that success. In this way, Hay fills an important lacuna in the history of sport in Australian society.' (Introduction)