Navigating this site
Honest History’s objectives
Honest and dishonest: a clarification
Honest History’s history
Structure and committee
The Honest History association cancelled its incorporation in February 2019. The Honest History website continued under Dr David Stephens as Editor.
The final Honest History committee (to February 2019; some biodata updated) was:
President: Professor Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University, Canberra, and has held appointments at Kings College London and the University of New England. His books, The Sex Lives of Australians: A History and The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia, both won ACT Book of the Year. He has also written books and articles on labour history and Australian politics and served on a number of boards in the arts and history fields. He is a regular contributor to Inside Story and The Conversation. He is president of the Canberra and Region Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History.
Past President: Professor Peter Stanley of the University of New South Wales, Canberra, a former Principal Historian at the Australian War Memorial, is one of Australia’s most active military-social historians and has published more than thirty books, most recently The Crying Years: Australia’s Great War. His book, Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Murder, Mutiny and the Australian Imperial Force, jointly won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian history in 2011.
Vice President: Dr Alison Broinowski, formerly an Australian diplomat, has written and edited 11 books and many articles on Australia’s interface with Asia and the world. She is working on a collection of historical essays involving Asian-Australian fiction, Australian public diplomacy and the operations of the ‘deep state’. Dr Broinowski is vice president of Australians for War Powers Reform. She is a co-editor of The Honest History Book.
Secretary and Editor: Dr David Stephens is a former Commonwealth public servant, consultant and lobbyist. He has post-graduate qualifications in political science, law and French, has published a number of articles in journals and the Canberra Times and was involved in a Canberra campaign 2010-12 against proposed war memorials which would have rivalled the Australian War Memorial. He is editor of the Honest History website and co-editor of The Honest History Book.
Treasurer: Michael Piggott AM is a retired archivist living in Canberra, Australia. He has postgraduate qualifications in library science, archives and history. Between 1971 and 2008 he worked for the National Library of Australia, the Australian War Memorial, the National Archives of Australia and the University of Melbourne. A foundation member and Laureate of the Australian Society of Archivists, he has received its Mander Jones award four times and a President’s Award in 2013. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2017 Queen’s Birthday honours list ‘for significant service to the community as an archivist with national and international educational and cultural institutions, and as an author’. In 2012 an anthology of his writing appeared as Archives and Societal Provenance: Australian Essays (Chandos). During 2018-19 he was a Senior Research Fellow with a Deakin University-led project ‘Representing multicultural Australia in national and state libraries’ and in 2020 completed a three-year term as Chair, Territory Records Advisory Council. His recent writing has appeared in Community Archives, Community Spaces (Facet, 2020), “All Shook Up”: the Archival Legacy of Terry Cook (SAA/ACA, 2020), Archival Silences (Routledge, 2021) and Archivaria (Fall/Winter 2023) and he is completing a new history of the Australians in German New Guinea, 1914-21.
Pamela Burton was a solicitor and barrister in Canberra for many years, has served on government boards and tribunals and is the author of a biography of Justice Mary Gaudron and of a prize-winning book on the Waterlow killings. She is a member of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia.
Dr Carolyn Holbrook is (from March 2017) Alfred Deakin Research Fellow, Deakin University, Victoria. She is also working with Professor James Walter on a history of policy making in Australia. She is the author of Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography (New South, 2014), which won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Prize, jointly won the NSW Premier’s History Prize and was shortlisted for the CHASS Prize and Asher Literary Award in 2015.
Dr Carole Wigg MB BS MBioeth is a retired medical practitioner who migrated to Australia in 1985. She has been a peace activist since joining Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rallies in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and is active in the Medical Association for Prevention of War. She has a keen interest in history, developed through reading, travel and study of world affairs.
Supporters
Honest History has received the support of many distinguished individuals, including Michelle Arrow, Joan Beaumont, Frank Bongiorno, Judith Brett, Alison Broinowski, Pamela Burton, Richard Butler, Burcin Cakir, Anna Clark, Liz Conor, Ann Curthoys, Paul Daley, Tom Griffiths, Gideon Haigh, Carolyn Holbrook, Stuart Macintyre, Mark McKenna, Robert Manne, John Menadue, Douglas Newton, Melanie Oppenheimer, Glenda Sluga, Peter Stanley, Christina Twomey, Sue Wareham, Ben Wellings, Carole Wigg, Damien Williams, Angela Woollacott, Clare Wright and many others.
Where individuals or associations are described publicly as ‘supporters’ of Honest History they have agreed to be so described.
Our editorial and moderation policy
Joint action policy
Acknowledgements
Contact
For all enquiries please contact:
Dr David Stephens
Editor
Honest History website
email: admin@honesthistory.net.au
Privacy and legal
Honest History will not pass on to third parties names and addresses or other details provided to it in the course of its activities, unless this action is expressly permitted by the person concerned.
Where individuals or associations are described publicly as ‘supporters’ of Honest History they have agreed to be so described.
Please see also our editorial and moderation policy.
This page and links from it updated February 2019