Leadership now: what can history tell us?

James Walter Australians are ‘good at elections’ as Judith Brett has persuasively argued. Our practices of mandatory and preferential voting have saved us from the institutional entrenchment of extremes of opinion that have surfaced in the public domain, and that have pushed parties and politics in, say, the United States, to brinkmanship over positions […]

Review of the The Indigenous Voice Co-design Process: Final Report to the Australian Government

Emeritus Professor Tim Rowse reviews The Indigenous Voice Co-design Process: Final Report to the Australian Government (Canberra: National Indigenous Australians Agency) July 2021 Conservatives who are unsure what position to take on Indigenous constitutional recognition seem to be the intended audience of the Final Report of the Indigenous Voice Co-design Process, released in December […]

International Symposium on Public Health Systems: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Contemporary Histories Research Group, Deakin University and Australian Policy and History International Symposium on Public Health Systems: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives A virtual conference Tuesday 9 November 2021, Australian Eastern Daylight Time (UTC + 11) Register here (free) About this event Australian Policy and History and the Contemporary Histories Research Group at Deakin University […]

Q&A with Carolyn Collins, author of Save Our Sons: Women, Dissent and Conscription during the Vietnam War

Jacqui Baker interviews Carolyn Collins about her new book Save Our Sons: Women, Dissent and Conscription during the Vietnam War. Congratulations on the publication of your fascinating book, Carolyn! You wrote that you came across Save Our Sons while researching a different topic and time period. What were you researching at the time and how […]

Aide memoire: Swine flu in Australia, 2009-2010

Remember the swine flu? It’s the pandemic that Australia forgot, arguably to our detriment when it came to wrangling COVID-19. In this article, Dr Richard Trembath looks back on the H1N1 swine flu outbreak, and the impact on Australia, and his own family. During these times, there was a pestilence[i] Procopius On 8 May 2009 […]

Review – The Carbon Club

Jeff Hole reviews Marian Wilkinson’s recent book The Carbon Club: How a network of influential climate sceptics, politicians and business leaders fought to control Australia’s climate policy, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2020 Anyone interested in the question of whether business interests wield too much influence over politicians and policy in Australia should read The Carbon […]

Review: Biting the Clouds

Jacqueline D’Arcy reviews Biting the Clouds, a recent publication by Fiona Foley. Biting the Clouds: a Badtjala perspective on the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897, by Fiona Foley, UQP When one thinks of Fraser Island (K’gari), images of white sands, dingoes, and, more recently, bush fires, come to mind. […]

Q&A with Jenny Hocking, author of The Palace Letters

In our latest author Q&A, Jacquelyn Baker interviews Emeritus Professor Jenny Hocking about The Palace Letters, which describes her long and extraordinary campaign to gain access to the correspondence between the Australian Governor General Sir John Kerr and Queen Elizabeth II in the prelude to the dismissal of the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975. […]

Celebrating the knowledge production of Aboriginal women: Jacquelyn Baker reviews the 20th anniversary edition of Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s ‘Talkin’ up to the white woman’.

In our latest book review, Jacquelyn Baker reviews the 20th anniversary edition of Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’ up to the white woman: Indigenous women and feminism (University of Queensland Press). By Jacquelyn Baker 2020 has already been dubbed a historic year. As the new year ticked over, record-breaking bushfires continued to burn throughout New […]

Angie Sassano reviews ‘Indigenous Self-Determination in Australia’, edited by Laura Rademaker and Tim Rowse

In our latest article, Deakin University PhD Candidate Angie Sassano reviews a new collection about the history of Indigenous self-determination edited by Laura Rademaker and Tim Rowse. By Angie Sassano Despite the shift to self-determination in Indigenous policy making in 1973, Australia has faltered, with critics such as Megan Davis (2016) claiming self-determination has […]

Gwyn McClelland reviews Lesley Blume’s ‘Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World’

Dr Gwyn McClelland’s review of Lesley Blume’s Fallout describes how the US government sought to cover up the horrific effects of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Blume tells us the story of journalist John Hersey’s scoop in the New Yorker in August 1946, which signalled the beginning of a propaganda contest about the […]

The media and Indigenous political aspirations: Michael Dillon reviews Amy Thomas, Andrew Jakubowicz & Heidi Norman’s ‘Does the media fail Aboriginal political aspirations?’

What role does the media play in perpetuating social and economic disadvantage among Indigenous peoples in Australia? Michael Dillon reviews Amy Thomas, Andrew Jakubowicz & Heidi Norman’s survey of media reporting of key political moments, Does the media fail Aboriginal political aspirations? While Dillon agrees with the authors’ conclusions about the inadequacy of media coverage, […]

In Godwin We Trust: Debunk[er]ing the Hitler/Trump Analogy

Academics have been busy in the last few years calling out ham-fisted analogies between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler, and the contemporary United States and 1930s Germany. It’s easy to laugh at clumsy historical references, but harder to make informed judgements about the validity or otherwise of these references. In our latest article, Dr Mathew […]

After COVID-19: Reviews of ‘Upturn’ and ‘What Happens Next?’

The Austrian economic historian’s Walter Scheidel’s 2017 book, The Great Leveler, argues that gross inequality is the natural state of human affairs. This structure is only interrupted by events such as mass war, revolution, state failure and pandemic disease. Does COVID-19 present an opportunity to halt growing inequality and reset our economic and social order? These […]

Australian Soldier Atrocities in Afghanistan: Why We Should Not Be Surprised

By Dale Blair The allegations of atrocities committed by Australian special forces in Afghanistan may be shocking, but they suggest continuity rather than rupture with our military past. In this article, Dr Dale Blair outlines Australia’s past involvement in war crimes, and the exalted status of Australia’s soldiers and official patronage that have obscured the […]

Managing the Federation During a Pandemic: Spanish Influenza and COVID-19

Global health pandemics, it would seem, make us reach for local remedies and cling to local identities. As state borders have closed and parochialism has increased, COVID-19 has made Australians more aware of their federal system of government than they have been for a long time. In this piece about the 1919 Spanish influenza outbreak, […]

Ever-present possibilities and the status quo.

This piece is part of the Urgent Histories forum which has been organised by the Australian Historical Association. Klaus Neumann has written an engaging response to the articles in this forum, which can be found in History Australia. Humankind needs to tackle climate change. Urgently. Historians may want to reconsider their professional practices in light of this […]

Book Review – Preparing a Nation? The New Deal in the Villages of Papua New Guinea

Rosita Henry reviews Brad Underhill’s Preparing a Nation? The New Deal in the Villages of Papua New Guinea, (Canberra: ANU Press, 2024). I find most policy histories rather dry reading, so was a little reluctant to review this book when approached, but I have no regrets! I found the book compelling to read and […]

Carolyn Holbrook’s Address at the Ballarat Reform League Charter’s 170th Anniversary

This is an edited version of a speech given by Associate Professor Carolyn Holbrook to the Ballarat Reform League Charter 170th Anniversary St Paul’s Church Ballarat, Monday 11 November 2024 Thank you very much for this invitation to address you on this important occasion of the 170th anniversary of the declaration of the Ballarat […]

Book Review – Rex Patterson: A Voice for the North

Sybil Nolan reviews Lyndon Megarrity’s Rex Patterson: A Voice for the North (Connor Court Publishing, 2024) Gough Whitlam made the early 1970s an exciting time to be an idealistic teenager in country Queensland. Whenever his large head loomed into view on our small black-and-white TV at home, we waited for him to say something […]

Book Review – Repeat: A Warning from History

Wayne Bradshaw reviews Dennis Glover’s Repeat: A Warning from History (Black Inc, 2024) Dennis Glover’s new book, Repeat: A Warning from History, is the latest work to take its place in the committed tradition of polemical writing against the resurgence of a worldview that Umberto Eco called ‘Ur-Fascism’ in his 1997 essay of the […]

Book Review – Campus: Building Modern Australian Universities

Andrew G. Bonnell reviews Andrew Saniga and Robert Freestone’s (eds) Campus: Building Modern Australian Universities, (Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2023). There is a growing literature on the history of Australian universities, albeit one that is uneven in quality, with some recent commemorative works closer to public relations puffery than scholarly history. In this literature, […]

Q&A with Rose Butler and Eve Vincent, authors of Love Across Class

Jacquelyn Baker interviews Rose Butler and Eve Vincent about their book Love Across Class (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2024). Congratulation on the publication of your book, Rose and Eve! I found it to be an insightful and thought-provoking read that sparked conversations about class with my partner. This is not just a book about […]

‘Survival sex’, ‘mob justice’ and more: the first independent study of abuse in the Australian Defence Force is damning

Mia Martin Hobbs, Deakin University “Participants expected the costs of war, but they were not prepared for the costs of service,” explain Ben Wadham and James Connor in their new book, the first independent study of military institutional abuse in the Australian Defence Force. Warrior, Soldier, Brigand draws on interviews with nearly 70 survivors and […]

Book Review – The Chinese in Papua New Guinea: Past, Present and Future

Claire Lowrie reviews Anna Hayes, Rosita Henry and Michael Wood’s (eds) The Chinese in Papua New Guinea: Past, Present and Future, (Canberra: ANU Press, 2024) China’s increasing engagement with countries across the Pacific region is cause for concern amongst policy makers in Australia and the US. It is also the subject of regular, and […]

Book Review – Uncertainty and Emotion in the 1900 Sydney Plague

Richard Trembath reviews Philippa Nicole Barr’s Uncertainty and Emotion in the 1900 Sydney Plague*, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024). ISSN 2632-1068 (online) I was unaware of the Cambridge Element series until I accepted the offer of reviewing this recent addition to their program. Having taught for many years in university courses based on the […]

Book Review – Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia

Richard Trembath reviews Evan Smith, Jayne Persian and Vashti Jane Fox (eds), Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia* (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2023), 266 pages including footnotes, introduction and index. Australian writer Dennis Glover states in the Guardian (25 August 2024) that ‘we are entering a new age of savagery and organised […]

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