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 […]

2023 HTAV Annual Conference – Dr Carolyn Holbrook Keynote Recording

History Education for the Citizens of the Future Dr Carolyn Holbrook, Deakin University Keynote Recording The discipline of History has always been concerned with educating the citizens of the future. For the first decades of Australian nationhood, this largely consisted of inculcating young Australians in the virtues of British imperial liberalism—the kind of citizenship education […]

Book Review – Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country

James Watson reviews Ryan Cropp’s Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country (Collingwood: La Trobe University Press, 2023) Did Donald Horne have anything meaningful to say? It’s a harsh question of a man who wrote more than two dozen books, edited multiple literary journals at once, and published countless articles, essays, and reviews; […]

Book Review – Everything you need to know about the Voice

Tim Rowse reviews Megan Davis and George Williams’s Everything you need to know about the Voice (NewSouth Publishing 2023). This book is a sequel to the authors’ Everything you need to know about the Uluru Statement from the Heart (2021). The ‘Voice’ sequel includes much that was in the ‘Statement’ book: a history of […]

The Myths and Meaning Behind Long Tan Day in Australia – and in Vietnam

By Mia Martin Hobbs On 18 August 1966, D Company of 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (6RAR) clashed with National Liberation Front (NLF) forces in a rubber plantation near the village of Long Tan. Seventeen Australians and one New Zealander were killed, and twenty-four soldiers were wounded, marking the highest single-day loss of life […]

History Education for the Citizens of the Future – HTAV Conference, Melbourne 27 July 2023

*This is an edited version of a speech delivered by Dr Carolyn Holbrook to the History Teachers’ Association of Victoria annual conference in Melbourne on 27 July 2023. History teachers hold a special place in my heart. Like many of you, I was drawn to study history because I had the privilege of […]

Book Review – Media Monsters: The Transformation of Australia’s Newspaper Empires

Lyndon Megarrity reviews Sally Young’s Media Monsters: The Transformation of Australia’s Newspaper Empires, (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2023). The underlying theme of this fine publication is “Perception becomes reality”. Whereas twenty-first century journalists and media moguls have created a self-fulfilling prophecy by repeatedly talking down newspapers as “a dying medium”, newspaper owners between 1941 and […]

Book Review – Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity?

Joshua Black reviews Richard King, Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity? (Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2023). “I don’t know how to rearrange society to make it just and sustainable” says author, critic and poet Richard King in the final chapter of his new philosophical treatise Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our […]

Book Review – The Morrison Government: Governing Through Crisis, 2019–2022: Australian Commonwealth Administration Series

Lyndon Megarrity reviews Brendan McCaffrie, Michelle Grattan and Chris Wallace’s (eds) The Morrison Government: Governing Through Crisis, 2019–2022: Australian Commonwealth Administration Series, (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2023), pp. viii +304. The Morrison Government: Governing Through Crisis, 2019–2022 is the fourteenth volume in the Australian Commonwealth Administration series of publications. This series brings together the contributions […]

Vale Allan Gyngell

By Meg Gurry Allan Gyngell made a lasting impact on many around him. I was fortunate enough to be one of them. I came across Allan most directly through his work at the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA). As President, he, with then National Director, Melissa Conley Tyler asked me to join a […]

Your body is a temple: The politics of junk food in Australia

By Richard Trembath I cannot advise all more spiritual natures too seriously to abstain from alcohol absolutely. Water suffices . . . No eating between meals, no coffee . . . Tea beneficial only in the morning. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1888), from the section called ‘Why I Am So Clever’. In this […]

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