Derek Abbott* ‘A personal memoir from a safe pair of hands: Steve Gower on the Australian War Memorial’, Honest History, 2 July 2019 Derek Abbott reviews The Australian War Memorial: A Century on from the Vision, by Steve Gower Steve…
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Derek Abbott* ‘A rewarding and timely book on Russians who came to Australia’, Honest History, 17 June 2021 Derek Abbott reviews Sheila Fitzpatrick’s White Russians, Red Peril: a Cold War History of Migration to Australia Immigration into Australia seems always…
Derek Abbott* ‘Geoffrey Blainey’s engaging narrative of his emergence as man and historian’, 9 August 2019 Derek Abbott reviews Geoffrey Blainey’s Before I Forget: An Early Memoir Geoffrey Blainey is one of Australia’s most highly regarded and most prolific historians.…
Tony Abbott Address to the Anzac Day national ceremony, Canberra, Friday, 25 April 2014 As someone who has never served in the armed forces, never faced a shot fired in anger, and never lost close family members in war, I…
Abbott, Tony Remarks at the 1st Brigade Welcome Home Reception, Parliament House, Darwin, 1 March 2014 The Prime Minister noted that the Afghanistan commitment had been inconclusive militarily but praised the social contribution made by Australian forces. Thanks to you,…
Tony Abbott Address to Legacy Clubs of Australia 2013 National Conference, Brisbane, 18 October 2013 The new prime minister spoke about the Anzac tradition. Yes, as all of us know, Gallipoli was in a sense, the cauldron that helped to…
ABC The Moral Compass, 27 April 2014 Geraldine Doogue talks with James Brown, author and former soldier, Leslie Cannold, ethicist, Ken Doolan, National President of the RSL, and Peter Stanley, social-military historian and President, Honest History, on issues to do…
ABC Local Radio ‘Liz Tynan on the secret history of Maralinga‘, Conversations with Richard Fidler, 9 August 2016 The ABC (actually Sarah Kanowski) talked to science journalist Elizabeth Tynan (49 minutes) about her book on the British nuclear tests at…
ABC TV ‘Anzac to Afghanistan’, Four Corners, 13 April 2015 Chris Masters intersperses interviews with Gallipoli veterans from 1988 and Afghanistan veterans from recent years, noting the similarities and differences in their experience. Also contributing are James Brown, author of…
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ABC TV ‘Bringing the war home‘, Four Corners, 9 March 2015 Article by Quentin McDermott and Mary Fallon, transcript and video of story about after-effects of war service in Iraq and Afghanistan. ‘As Australia prepares to send more troops to…
ABC TV ‘Clare Wright‘, ABC News 24 One-plus-One, 24 April 2015 (video only) Historian Clare Wright talks with Jane Hutcheon about her early life, her early work on women in the liquor industry, her Stella Prize-winning book The Forgotten Rebels…
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ABC News ‘Australian War Memorial director Brendan Nelson to step down from top job at end of year‘, ABC News, 15 August 2019 Covers announcement by Director to staff, announcement by Minister, statement by Leader of the Opposition. An end…
ABC News ‘Time for a new flag?‘ ABC News, 16 March 2014 Debate between John Blaxland, ANU academic, ex-Army officer and vexillologist, and Don Rowe, New South Wales President of the RSL, on whether Australia needs a new flag. One…
ABC Radio National ‘Shell shock: a century of silence‘, Big Ideas, 25 April 2016 The affects and significance of shell shock have been underplayed for a century, according to Yale emeritus professor, Jay Winter. (Professor Winter is also associated with…
ABC Radio National ‘Hot summer land [three parts], Earshot, 18-20 April 2016 updated Part one: anticipation; part two: fires; part three: rivers. Listeners’ stories and guest commentary (host Kirsti Melville) on how the Australian landscape changed during the three months…
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ABC Radio National ‘News dissemination in colonial Sydney‘, Media Report, 28 August 2014 Podcast (eight minutes) in which Richard Aedy and Grace Karskens discuss dissemination by word of mouth, government notices stuck on trees, ships from Britain, communication between Indigenous…
ABC Radio National ‘Feeding curiosity‘, Ockham’s Razor, 24 January 2016 Robyn Williams introduces Peter Macinnis, former science teacher and now writer of history books, who talks whimsically about he enjoys and writes history. Audio and transcript.
ABC Radio National ‘The brave women who stitched Australia’s flag of unity and rebellion‘, Bush Telegraph, 10 September 2014 Podcast (23 minutes) discussion between Clare Wright, Val D’Angri, descendant, and Jane Smith, curator, about the history of the Eureka flag,…
ABC RN ‘Everyone loves Trove‘, Late Night Live, 20 March 2019 Phillip Adams talks to Liz Stainforth, visiting researcher from the UK, and Alison Dellit, National Library officer in charge of Trove, described as a ‘digital heritage aggregator, which is…
ABC Radio National ‘Arthur Phillip and the Eora‘, Saturday Extra, 13 September 2014 Geraldine Doogue interviews Grace Karskens (audio only, no transcript) on relations between Captain Arthur Phillip and Bennelong of the Eora Nation. Notes that the precise nature of…
ABC Radio National ‘ASEAN and Australia 40 years on‘, Saturday Extra, 13 September 2014 Geraldine Doogue talks to Anthony Milner (audio, no transcript), author of an Asialink report on 40 years of Australia’s relations with ASEAN. The report is online…
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ABC Radio National ‘Military anniversaries‘, Saturday Extra, 14 March 2015 Geraldine Doogue talks with Peter Stanley about anniversaries occurring in 2015. The dates commemorated are 1815, 1915, 1940, 1945 and 1975, as well as one non-military, 1215. An event of…
ABC Radio National ‘A history of mental illness in Australia‘, The Drawing Room, 28 April 2016 Patricia Karvelas talks to Professor Katie Holmes of La Trobe and Professor Mark Finnane of Griffith on aspects of mental illness, including inter-generational impacts…
ABC RN ‘How Greeks Americanised Australia‘, The Drawing Room, 22 March 2016 A tribute (audio, no transcript) to Paragon Cafes throughout the wide brown land. Effy Alexakis and Leonard Janiszewski talk to Patricia Karvelas about their extensive work on Greek…
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ABC ‘One in 10 people sleeping rough in Melbourne are war veterans‘, The World Today, 6 January 2015 Interview (transcript, audio) with spokespersons for Homeground, a support organisation, and the RSL. Most of the veterans sleeping rough served in Iraq…
Abjorensen, Norman & James C. Docherty Historical Dictionary of Australia, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD, 4th edition, 2014; electronic version available This fourth edition of Historical Dictionary of Australia covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive…
Norman Abjorensen ‘Australia’s great political shift‘, Inside Story, 28 July 2017 On the eve of Liberal and Coalition party meetings on an issue – marriage equality – which has, for some people at least, a religious element, this piece is…
Norman Abjorensen ‘Before the triumphs and the tragedies‘, Inside Story, 2 June 2020 Review of Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin: The Making of the Modern Labor Party, by Liam Byrne. It was a time of intense political ferment [says…
Norman Abjorensen ‘Ben Chifley’s botched attempt to nationalise Australia’s banks‘, Canberra Times (Public Sector Informant), 6 June 2017 Against the background of another poke at banking power, this time by a conservative government, this is a concise summary of Chifley’s…
Norman Abjorensen ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the leader?‘ Inside Story, 18 November 2019 Marks the release of an updated edition of the author’s The Manner of Their Going: Prime Ministerial Exits in Australia. (Michael Piggott reviewed the first edition of…
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Norman Abjorensen ‘Keeping the country in the coalition‘, Inside Story, 23 February 2018 Useful background to the current upheavals within and beyond the National Party. Regardless of how this latest conflict plays out, it is just another chapter in a…
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Norman Abjorensen ‘Politicians behaving badly‘, Inside Story, 28 November 2016 If the Trump victory in the United States represented a backlash against a perceived self-interested “political class,” just as the Brexit vote did in Britain, Australia is by no means…
Abjorensen, Norman ‘Prime ministerial exits’, Honest History, 24 February 2014 Norman Abjorensen talks to Honest History about the way Australian prime ministers leave their jobs and how they feel about the process. He discusses PMs Alfred Deakin (something of a…
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Norman Abjorensen ‘The art of being prime minister‘, Inside Story, 29 September 2017 Long review of Paul Strangio, Paul ’t Hart and James Walter, The Pivot of Power: Australian Prime Ministers and Political Leadership, 1949–2016, which is the second volume…
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Norman Abjorensen ‘The long Liberal split‘, Inside Story, 8 February 2017 Triggered by the departure of Senator Bernardi to become an independent conservative, this piece by a long-time Liberal watcher looks at a century of splits and dissension on the…
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Abjorensen, Norman The Manner of Their Going: Prime Ministerial Exits from Lyne to Abbott, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2015 A study of the departures of all our prime ministers, from the one who was commissioned but never served (Lyne)…
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Abjorensen, Norman ‘The meaning of John Howard‘, Inside Story, 1 March 2016 updated Written to mark the 20th anniversary of the coming to power of the Howard Government. Abjorensen is the doyen of the rise and fall of prime ministers,…
Norman Abjorensen ‘The party switchers‘, Inside Story, 9 May 2017 Provoked by the puzzling switch of former Labor leader, Mark Latham, to the Liberal Democrats, this is a concise summary of rats, code switchers and swappers of horses, state and…
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Abjorensen, Norman ‘Tiger by the tail‘, Inside Story, 18 November 2014 Examines the changing social base of the modern Liberal Party, focusing particularly on the increasing influence of the Radical Right. It was the mid 1990s. Howard and his colleagues…
Abjorensen, Norman ‘Uneasy lies the head‘, Inside Story, 15 September 2015 Australia’s leading scholar of prime ministerial departures examines the latest one in its historical context, noting the difficulty that recent prime ministers (Hawke, Rudd, Gillard) have had in surviving…
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Abjorensen, Norman ‘The Prime Minister Who Never Was: Sir William Lyne and the politics of Federation‘ (Draft chapter of The Manner of Their Going: Prime Ministerial Exits in Australia, to be published later in 2015; draft provided by courtesy of…
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Academy of Science multiple authors ‘History and biographies‘, Australian Academy of Science Links to historical material on science, including interviews with distinguished scientists
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ACARA multiple authors ‘The Australian Curriculum“, Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) Curriculum resources and information for Australian Curriculum: History Foundation to Year 12 and for other subject areas.
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Ackland, Richard ‘Mass surveillance makes us servants of the state: that’s chilling‘, Guardian Australia, 26 May 2015 Text of the PEN Free Voices lecture at the Sydney Writers Festival, 24 May 2015. There were more than 50 comments. Censorship, control…
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Ackland, Richard ‘Welcome back to White Australia‘, Sydney Morning Herald, 28 February 2014 Places 2014 in a historical context and looks at possible policy alternatives for dealing with asylum seeker arrivals. There were more than 800 comments on the article.…
ACOSS Inequality in Australia: a Nation Divided, Australian Council of Social Services, Strawberry Hills, NSW, 2015 Summary of key findings Income Inequality Inequality in Australia is higher than the OECD average – a person in the top 20% income group…
Acquroff, Nick ‘Westography: images of a vanished suburbia‘, Broadsheet, 5 July 2016 This is a story about a book of photographs, Westography, by Warren Kirk. The pictures are taken around the inner western suburbs of Melbourne. There are a dozen…
ACT Fabians Why Things Matter and other Podcasts Podcasts (no transcripts) 2014 and back a couple of years of Wayne Swan and Bernard Keane (journalist) on why government matters, Andrew Leigh MP, Humphrey McQueen and Paula Matthewson (commentator) on why…
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Patsy Adam-Smith The Anzacs, Sphere Books, Melbourne, 1981; first published 1978; later editions Based on thousands of letters and diaries of World War I soldiers. It is time to strip the film from honour-dimmed eyes and face the uncomfortable, terrible…
Adoniou, Misty, Bill Louden & Glenn C. Savage ‘What will changes to the national curriculum mean for schools? experts respond‘, The Conversation, 23 September 2015 We have been following this issue closely, particularly in relation to the history curriculum, ever…
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AHA multiple authors ‘Resources‘, Australian Historical Association Links to many cultural institutions and archives bodies, federal and state, as well as to the National Library’s Trove resource.
Australian Human Rights Commission Working Group Leading for Change: A Blueprint for Cultural Diversity and Inclusive Leadership, The Commission, Sydney, 2016 The Working Group was chaired by Tim Soutphommasane, Race Discrimination Commissioner, and included Greg Whitwell, Rae Cooper, Ainslie Van…
Ainley, John & Eveline Gebhardt Measure for Measure: A Review of Outcomes of School Education in Australia, Australian Council for Educational Research, Camberwell, Vic., 2013 Looks at studies of reading, mathematics and numeracy, science and other subjects, with some historical…
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Ayhan Aktar * ‘Rewriting the history of Gallipoli: a Turkish perspective‘, Honest History, 25 July 2017 updated The history of the Gallipoli campaign has been contested in Turkey for many decades. The commemorations of the Ottoman naval victory of 18…
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Ayhan Aktar ‘The struggle between nationalist and jihadist narratives of Gallipoli, 1915-2015‘, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. 56, No. 2, April 2020, pp. 213-28 (paywall) There have been a number of milestones in the (re-)writing of the history of…
Kristen Alexander* ‘Readable account of Australian POWs in Japan – though it lacks a bit of context’, Honest History, 14 May 2021 Kristen Alexander reviews Mark Baker’s The Emperor’s Grace: Untold Stories of the Australians Enslaved in Japan during World…
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Kristen Alexander* ‘They also served: Australians dealing with the challenge of captivity during the Great War’, Honest History, 13 March 2020 Kristen Alexander reviews Surviving the Great War: Australian Prisoners of War on the Western Front, 1916-18, by Aaron Pegram…
Mark Alfano ‘They shall not die in vain: how the Islamic State honours its fallen soldiers – and how Australians do the same‘, The Conversation, 20 August 2018 Perceptive piece from a philosopher; based on frequency analysis of Islamic State…
Allam, Lorena, et al ‘Public intimacies: The Royal Commission on Human Relationships‘, ABC Radio National, 28 April 2013 ABC program (audio only) discussing the work of a ground-breaking 1970s inquiry, presented by Lorena Allam, produced by Professor Michelle Arrow and…
Allan, Susan ‘”Governments want a history that reflects their agenda“‘, World Socialist Web Site, 8 January 2015 Long interview with Honest History secretary, David Stephens, speaking in a personal capacity. The interview covers the politicisation of the Great War centenary…
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AllDownUnder multiple authors ‘Australian songs‘, AllDownUnder.com Contains lyrics, audio and video of 100 Australian songs that ‘have captured our history’.
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Christopher Allen ‘Artists of the Great War: the pity and the propaganda‘, The Australian, 18 March 2017 A review of a current exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (closes in June). We have not ceased to be fascinated…
Liz Allen ‘Australia doesn’t have a population policy – why?’, The Conversation, 3 July 2017 updated Despite recommendations from inquiries over a number of years, Australia lacks a population policy. Includes key graphs covering decades and concludes as follows: A…
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Alomes, Stephen ‘Our national folly: war romance and the Australian national imaginary‘, Anne-Marie Hede & Ruth Rentchsler, ed., Reflections on ANZAC Day: From One Millennium to the Next, Heidelberg Press, Heidelberg, Vic., 2010, pp. 89-105 (text made available by the…
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Altman, Dennis 51st State? Scribe, Carlton North, 2006 Considers Australian identity in the context of the relationship with the United States, particularly how Australia imagines its future.
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Altman, Dennis Defying Gravity: A Political Life, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1997; Australian Public Intellectuals Network, Perth, 2004 Altman has been a gay activist and writer for more than four decades.
Altman, Dennis The End of the Homosexual, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld, 2013 The book ‘connects what has happened within the changing queer world over the past forty years to larger social, political and cultural trends. This is…
Dennis Altman ‘From a drowning to a celebration’, Inside Story, 11 December 2012 Edited version of a Dunstan Lecture, describing forty years of gender politics in Australia.
Anderson, Deb ‘Drought, endurance and ‘The way things were’: the lived experience of climate and climate change in the Mallee‘, Australian Humanities Review, 45, November 2008 Oral history piece on how experience of regular drought came together with experience of…
Fay Anderson ‘We censor war photography in Australia – more’s the pity‘, The Conversation, 4 May 2015 You may have noticed we recently marked the centenary of Anzac. One hundred years after Gallipoli, we are seeing photographs of telegenic young…
Anderson, Jaynie, ed. ‘Australian art historiography‘, Journal of Art Historiography, 4, June 2011 (special issue) Articles on the canon, Aboriginal art, Australian and New Zealand art, curators and curating, Bernard Smith, Daryl Lindsay, Ursula Hoff, Joseph Burke, photography and other…
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Anonymous. Bibliography of Australian History Wikipedia. Patchy, but has some useful entries. Links to timeline and general history entries.
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Ansara, Martha The Shadowcatchers: A History of Cinematography in Australia, Austcine Publishers, Artarmon, NSW, 2012 The Shadowcatchers, a comprehensive history of Australian cinematography, presents over 380 photographs of working cinematographers from 1901 to the present, with a ground-breaking, highly readable…
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David Stephens ‘Anzac and Anzackery: speech to Kogarah Historical Society, 14 May 2015′, Honest History, 9 June 2015 I acknowledge the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of this land, and their elders past and present. I…
Anzac Centenary Advisory Board Report to Government: 1 March 2013, Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Canberra, 2013 The Board’s Chair is Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston (Ret’d), former Chief of the Australian Defence Force. The report is of great interest for…
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APH multiple authors Australian Politics and History An enterprise based at Deakin University, which partners with the Australian National University, the University of New England, the History Council of New South Wales and the Australian Historical Association. The site includes…
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Graeme Aplin, Graeme, SG Foster & Michael McKernan, ed. Australians: A Historical Dictionary, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, Broadway, NSW, 1987 A collection of short (and a few long) articles on people, institutions and events, with well-chosen illustrations from a…
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Graeme Aplin, SG Foster & Michael McKernan, ed. Australians: Events and Places, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, Broadway, NSW, 1987 One of the volumes in Australians: A Historical Library, containing a chronology of events from 1788 and timelines of Aboriginal…
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APO multiple authors Australian Policy Online Policy Online is a research database and alert service providing free access to full text research reports and papers, statistics and other resources essential for public policy development and implementation in Australia and New…
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Gabrielle Appleby & Sean Brennan ‘The long road to recognition‘, Inside Story, 19 May 2017 updated Updated 24 May 2017: Paul Daley in Guardian Australia: Given the disparate experiences [says Daley] of delegates and their divergent views (on recognition versus…
Appleby, Gabrielle ‘What say do our elected representatives have in going to war?‘ The Conversation, 10 December 2015 updated The authorisation of military force is one of the most serious and consequential powers that governments possess. This power should be…
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Arango, Tim ‘At Gallipoli, a campaign that laid ground for national identities‘, New York Times, 26 June 2014 An American views the Gallipoli legacy from both Turkish and Australian perspectives. He interviews Rupert Murdoch on the role of his father,…
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Arbuckle, Alex Q. ‘1965-1975 another Vietnam: unseen images of the war from the winning side‘, Mashable, 5 February 2016 Next month, 8 March, is the 50th anniversary of the Australian government’s announcement that its commitment to the Vietnam War would…
Archer, Robin, Joy Damousi, Murray Goot & Sean Scalmer, ed. The Conscription Conflict and the Great War, Monash University Publishing, Melbourne, 2016 Collection with articles by the editors, Douglas Newton, Frank Bongiorno, John Connor and Ross McKibbin. While the Great…
Archives A.C.T. Find of the Month 2008- This is a treasure trove of local (in this case, Canberra and A.C.T.) history as found in files in the A.C.T. Archives. The idea is simple: pull out a file and present the…
Fred Argy Australia at the Crossroads: Radical Free Market or a Progressive Liberalism? Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW, 1998 An adviser to governments of both sides expressed concern about the effects of economic liberalism, freeing up trade and investment…
Fred Argy Where to From Here? Australian Egalitarianism under Threat, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2003 Looked at the effects of economic policy on Australia’s traditional ‘fair go’, the impact of globalisation, the attitudes of the community, politicians and…
Kate Ariotti & James E. Bennett, ed. Australians and the First World War: Local-Global Connections and Contexts, Palgrave-Springer, New York & Heidelberg, 2017; e-book available by chapters This book contributes to the global turn in First World War studies by…
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Armstrong, Mick ‘Disturbing the peace: riots and the working class‘, Marxist Left Review, 4, Winter 2012 In this article [Mick writes] I want to look at the long and proud history of riots in Australia and take on the arguments…
Mick Armstrong ‘The radicalisation of the campuses 1967-74‘, Australian National University course material for ‘Marxist interventions’ course Based on a chapter from Armstrong’s (now hard to get) book, One, Two Three, What are We Fighting For? (Socialist Alternative, Melbourne 2001).…
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Michelle Arrow & Frank Bongiorno ‘The real “history war” is the attack on our archives and libraries‘, Brisbane Times, 16 September 2022 (and other Nine Newspapers) updated; pdf from our subscription Chronicles the gradual running down of our national cultural…
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Arrow, Michelle ‘Damned Whores and God’s Police is still relevant to Australia 40 years on – more’s the pity‘, The Conversation, 21 September 2015 The article marks four decades since Anne Summers’ book. A conference is under way. Anne Summers’…
Michelle Arrow Friday on Our Minds: Popular Culture in Australia since 1945, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2009 Looks at popular culture since World War II through the lenses of consumerism, the impact of technological change and the…
Michelle Arrow ‘The Making History initiative and Australian popular history’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 15, 11, 2011, pp. 153-74; reprinted in Jerome de Groot, ed., Public and Popular History, Routledge, London & New York, 2012 [The…
Michelle Arrow The Seventies: The Personal, the Political and the Making of Modern Australia, NewSouth, Sydney, 2019; electronic version available In 1970 homosexuality was illegal, God Save the Queen was our national anthem and women pretended to be married to access the…
Art and design ‘1930s Australia: the art deco designs ushering in a brave new world – in pictures‘, Guardian Australia, 14 July 2017 We normally try to find an author for our posts. No luck this time, but we’ll still…
Susan Arthure, Fidelma Breen, Stephanie James & Dymphna Lonergan, ed. Irish South Australia: New Histories and Insights, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2019 Irish South Australia charts Irish settlement from as far north as Pekina, to the state’s south-east and Mount Gambier. It…
Linden Ashcroft, David Karoly & Joelle Gergis ‘Delving through settlers’ diaries can reveal Australia’s colonial-era climate‘, The Conversation, 10 February 2017 ‘To really understand climate change’, the authors say, ‘we need to look at the way the climate behaves over…
Ashenden, Dean ‘The Australian wars that Anzac Day neglects‘, Eureka Street, 21 April 2013 Notes that the frontier wars are not recognised at the Australian War Memorial and other memorials and argues that ‘public and popular history should record the…
Dean Ashenden ‘Saving the War Memorial from itself‘, Inside Story, 15 January 2019 updated Long article canvassing many aspects of the War Memorial’s current direction, from its refusal to recognise the Frontier Wars, to the composition of its Council, and…
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Ashenden, Dean ‘The educational consequences of the peace‘, Inside Story, 28 July 2016 Long article on the history of education policy from the nineteenth century, through the Labor Split of 1955, the Goulburn schools boycott in 1962 to the Karmel…
ASHET multiple authors Australian Society for History of Engineering and Technology Links to material about aspects of this sector, including articles on aviation, locomotion, bridges, telephones, frozen meat and sheep shearing.
ASSH multiple authors Australian Society for Sports History (website) Links to publications and other resources.
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Atkins, Jon ‘Gallipoli Centenary Peace Campaign: its genesis and objectives’, Honest History, 1 September 2014 This article describes one example of community activity which is questioning the received, official view of Anzac, as set out in, for example, the Australian…
Alan Atkinson & Marian Aveling, ed. Australians 1838, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, Broadway, NSW, 1987 Twenty-five contributing authors describe Australia around 1838, looking at Aborigines, families, work, markets, government, justice and other topics. The diversity of Australian history –…
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Atkinson, Alan The Europeans in Australia, Volume 3: Nation, NewSouth, Sydney, 2014 Follows Volume 1: The Beginning (1997) and Volume 2: Democracy (2004). This is the third and final volume of the landmark, award-winning series The Europeans in Australia that gives an…
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Bain Attwood The Good Country: The Djadja Wurrung, the Settlers and the Protectors, Monash University Publishing, Melbourne, 2017 A local history of the Djadja Wurrung people of Central Victoria, looking at the relationship between the people of this Aboriginal nation,…
ATUA multiple authors Australian Trade Union Archives Portal to archival resources, published material and information about Australian industrial organisations, mainly including trade unions and also employer bodies.
Kate Aubusson ‘Why my generation grew up thinking it was un-Australian to question Anzac‘, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 April 2015 Article from a young journalist, presaging presentation of her TV documentary Lest We Forget What? (Iview for limited time) She…
Austin, AG & RJW Selleck, ed. The Australian Government School, 1830-1914: Select Documents with Commentary, Pitman, Carlton, Vic., 1975 Pioneering study in education history.
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Austin, AG Australian Education, 1788-1900: Church, State, and Public Education in Colonial Australia, Pitman, Carlton, Vic., 1961; online version available Pioneering study of early education in Australia. Does not mention Aboriginal education. See also this on the Education Acts of…
Australia. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade FOI disclosure log reference nos 15/25024 and others, Freedom of Information This material was disclosed under FOI to Vache Kahramanian on behalf of the Armenian National Committee of Australia. Reference number 15/25024 is…
Australia Australian Dance Portal site with brief history and many links to relevant sites and material.
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Australia Australian Inventions Portal site linking to many resources about the history of Australian inventing. Australian inventions have assisted with everyday activities such as hanging out the clothes to dry on a rotary washing line, putting food into the fridge…
Australia Film in Australia Portal site with brief history and many links to relevant sites and material.
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Australia Science and Technology Web portal to official sites in this field, including the National Library’s list of science and technology sites, the CSIRO, Questacon, defence science, and links to material on all branches of science, including from a historical…
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Australia in the 21st Century (A21C) ‘We need a transformational foreign policy: Submission to the Minister for Foreign Affairs for the White Paper on Foreign Affairs and Trade‘, Pearls and Irritations, 9 December 2016 The submission is headed ‘FILLING THE…
Australian Bureau of Statistics ‘GDP growth moderates as dwelling investment and exports detract from growth‘ (Media release, 7 June 2017) Growth actually slowed in the March quarter (0.3 per cent) and the ABS presser was ‘just the facts’ but those…
Australian Council of Trade Unions 75th Anniversary Commemorative Booklet, ACTU, Melbourne, 2002 Basic illustrated history of union activity from the viewpoint of the peak body.
Australian Government Government Response to the Report of the Anzac Centenary Advisory Board on a Program of Initiatives to Commemorate the Anzac Centenary The response accepted 22 recommendations in full and three in principle. (The ‘in principle’ responses were to…
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Australian Medical Association More Than Just a Union: A History of the AMA, AMA, Canberra, 2012; downloadable A brief history, describing the development of the profession, changes in medicine and the role of the AMA in politics. 10 October 2013
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Australian Music History multiple authors Australian Music History A compendium popular music website with news items and comprehensive listings of bands, musicians and related information.
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Australian National Film Board ‘Postcards from Perth‘, historypunk Jo Hawkins of historypunk resurrected this wonderful 10 minute promotional film of Perth and surrounds, complete with great photography, lush soundtrack and equally lush BBC style voice-over. Comes with insightful text from…
Australian National University Noel Butlin Archives Centre The Noel Butlin Archives Centre (NBAC) collects business and labour records from Australian companies, trade unions, industry bodies and professional organisations. We are a national organisation interested in material from all states and…
Australian Quarterly 85 Years in 85 Days – AQ Celebrates Australian Quarterly, which claims to be Australia’s oldest current affairs magazine, temporarily lowered its paywall early in 2014 to give free access to articles published from 1929 to 1989 (which…
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Australian Screen multiple authors ‘All music‘, Australian Screen Online audio archive.
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Australian Screen multiple authors Australian Screen: History of Australian Film and Television Dozens of clips from Australian productions with teacher’s notes for some.
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Australian Screen multiple authors Australian Screen: Historical Collection of video and audio clips dating back to c. 1900, including rare footage of troops embarking for overseas, at Gallipoli, in France and returning home in 1918.
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Australian Teachers of Media Metro Magazine Screen Education Study Guides The site contains links to many resources, notably study guides to many Australian television productions, including The War That Changed Us, Gallipoli, and Australia: the Story of Us, all reviewed…
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Australian War Memorial Afghanistan: The Australian Story Online version of exhibition at the Memorial opened August 2013. Stresses the impact on soldiers and families. Contains many short videos of soldiers’ and families’ stories. Honest History noted the exhibition here (under…
Australian War Memorial Australians at War Massive store of materials, under concise summaries, relating to the colonial period and 14 theatres of war. Includes links to the complete text of the official histories of the two World Wars, the Korean…
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Australian War Memorial Reality in Flames: Modern Australian Art & the Second World War Opened on 3 July 2015, this is ‘the first exhibition dedicated exclusively to exploring how Australian modernist artists responded creatively to the Second World War’. Modern…
Why did the Australian War Memorial spend $366 000 on a painting depicting a massacre of Indigenous Australians by white settlers (when it refuses to commemorate the Frontier Wars)? The Australian War Memorial has acquired and unveiled the 1985 painting…
Australian War Memorial multiple authors ‘Education publications‘, Australian War Memorial Portal to small selection of AWM publications, including posters, teachers’ notes, and the substantial booklets M is for Mates: Animals in Wartime from Ajax to Zep, Forever Yours: Stories of…
Vicken Babkenian & Judith Crispin ‘Australia’s Armenian Story‘, Inside Story, 6 April 2017 This is a long extract from chapter 3 of The Honest History Book, published by NewSouth. It deals with the Armenian Genocide, which commenced 24 April 1915…
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Vicken Babkenian & Peter Stanley Armenia, Australia and the Great War, NewSouth, Sydney, 2016; available electronically Australian civilians worked for decades supporting the survivors and orphans of the Armenian Genocide. 24 April 1915 marks the beginning of two great epics of…
Babkenian, Vicken ‘Gallipoli’s inconvenient “other side”‘, Pearls and Irritations, 10 April 2015 The author is an independent scholar at the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Sydney. The article examines the history of the Armenian genocide, looking at the…
Vicken Babkenian ‘Gladys Berejiklian, the Great War, Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide‘, Independent Australia, 30 January 2017 Marks the election of Australia’s first premier of Armenian ethnicity. Ms Berejiklian’s grandparents were among those liberated by Allied forces in 1918, surviving…
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Bach, Willy Britain, Australia, the United States and Agent Orange in the Indochina Wars: Re-defining Chemical-Biological Warfare: research paper (6 March 2015) This article re-examines the sanitised history of Agent Orange and other defoliants used in the Indochina War between…
Bach, Willy ‘Anzac-ed out 2015‘, Honest History, 5 May 2015 Willy Bach is a postgraduate research student, School of History, University of Queensland. He says this poem was written ‘in response to the tidal wave of ANZAC promotion’. He has…
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Willy Bach ‘Britain, Australia, New Zealand, SEATO, the secret war in Laos, and counter insurgency expert Colonel “Ted” Serong’, Honest History, 13 June 2017 updated Update 28 June 2017: Willy Bach died yesterday. Honest History sends condolences to his friends…
Bacon, Wendy ‘Getting Scott McIntyre: lest we forget the role of pundits, politicians and a social media mob‘, New Matilda, 6 May 2015 (updated) The author exhaustively analyses Twitter streams leading up to the sacking of SBS journalist, Scott McIntyre,…
Bain, Kevin ‘Review: Klaus Neumann’s Across the Seas: Australia’s response to refugees: a history‘, Independent Australia, 19 March 2016 Long, descriptive review of this book, published last year by Penguin, also reviewed in Fairfax, The Australian, Resident Judge blog, Sydney…
Mark Baker ‘Last posts’, Inside Story, 11 November 2022 This article is mostly about the difficulties the National Archives of Australia (NAA) has experienced in funding the digitisation of military service records from World War II. Baker notes the inevitable…
Baker, Mark Phillip Schuler: The Remarkable Life of One of Australia’s Greatest War Correspondents, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2016 A biography of The Age war correspondent, who reported unofficially from Egypt in 1914-15, spent time at Gallipoli, producing two ground-breaking…
Baker, Mark ‘Taken for a ride?‘ Sydney Morning Herald, 7 March 2013 Report on the federal government inquiry into whether John Simpson Kirkpatrick, the Man with the Donkey, should posthumously receive a Victoria Cross. The article describes how journalists, false…
Mark Baker The Emperor’s Grace: Untold Stories of the Australians Enslaved in Japan during World War II, Monash University Publishing, Melbourne, 2021 The Emperor’s Grace is the story of the men of C Force – the first contingent of Australian, British…
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Baker, Mark ‘The myth of Keith Murdoch’s Gallipoli letter‘, Inside Story, 26 July 2016 Extract from the author’s new book, Phillip Schuler: The Remarkable Life of One of Australia’s Greatest War Correspondents, just published. A brief biographical note on Schuler…
Baker, Patrick, Chris Turney & Jonathan Palmer ‘500 years of drought and flood: trees and corals reveal Australia’s climate history‘, The Conversation, 4 December 2015 The authors have published in a recent paper the most detailed record of Australia’s droughts…
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Phillip Baker ‘Fat nation: the rise and fall of obesity on the political agenda‘, The Conversation, 26 May 2017 Tackling obesity should be a political priority but it is a tough challenge: many causes, no quick fix, lack of regulatory…
Ball, Martin ‘Pro patria mori’, Meanjin, 63, 3, Spring 2004, pp. 3-12 Often in times of war, art and literature can become part of a number of forces that legitimate or sugar-coat warfare. In this essay, the author discusses first…
Ballantyne, Hugh & Lisa Matthews (dir.) Australia: the Story of Us, Essential Media & Entertainment, 2015 Eight part documentary series on the history of Australia from 50 000 years ago to now. The first four episodes are reviewed by David…
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Banivanua Mar, Tracey ‘Remember the Pacific’s people when we remember the war in the Pacific‘, The Conversation, 19 August 2015 Summarises the story of war in the Pacific from the point-of-view of the people who lived there and had to…
Bannerman, Colin ‘Making Australian food history‘, Australian Humanities Review, 51, 2011 The importance that food and eating have assumed as components of popular culture in Australia has not yet been matched by thorough historical analysis. This essay briefly surveys existing…
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Stephen Bargwanna ‘Australian War Memorial needs to tell stories of Frontier Wars in colonisation of Australia‘, Canberra Times, 29 July 2022 (pdf from our subscription) The author is a descendant of WJ Wills of Burke and Wills fame, who died…
Renae Barker ‘Australians have an increasingly complex, yet relatively peaceful, relationship with religion‘, The Conversation, 21 December 2016 A good subject for a time of year in Australia when those who were nominally Christian in their youth (or perhaps a…
Karen Barlow ‘National Capital Authority finds little support or understanding: poll‘, Canberra Times, 9 August 2021 Reports poll from The Australian Institute (national poll of 1004 people) where respondents were asked whether they ‘agree or disagree that the National Capital…
Barnwell, Ashley ‘The Secret River, silences and our nation’s history‘, The Conversation, 28 March 2016 Explores the controversy surrounding the current stage adaptation of Kate Grenville’s novel, The Secret River. This controversy extends that associated with the original book: it…
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Lisa Barritt-Eyles ‘Remembering the Gulf War‘, Australian Outlook, 2 August 2018 Concise outline from a PhD student of Australia’s involvement in the Gulf War, 1990-91. On 2nd August 28 years ago, Iraq invaded Kuwait amid the uncertainty of the changing…
Bashford, Alison & Stuart Macintyre, ed. The Cambridge History of Australia, Cambridge University Press, New York & Port Melbourne, Vic., two volumes, 2013 Histories like this underline the many-strandedness of our history and the range of historians active in the…
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Bastian, Peter Andrew Fisher: an Underestimated Man, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2009 Hoping to set the record straight, this biography asks why one of Australia’s greatest reformers has sunk into obscurity. Calling for a reevaluation of Andew Fisher’s career,…
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Bates, Sonja ‘The Anzac Day legend: its origins, meaning, power and impact on shaping Australia’s identity (Master’s of Peace and Conflict Studies dissertation, Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Sydney, 2013)‘ The Anzac legend lies at the centre…
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Batt, Peter J. et al ‘Five pillar economy,’ The Conversation, 27 April-11 May 2015 The articles take up a 2013 theme of prime minister Abbott (‘the five pillar economy’) and look at agriculture (Batt), education (Michael Coelli), mining (Anne Garnett),…
Battistella, Edwin ‘How to write a compelling book review‘, OUPBlog, 11 August 2015 We normally write and/or publish the things but this seemed such good advice we thought we’d post it for the edification of all. The author kicks off…
Carol Baxter The Fabulous Flying Mrs Miller, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2017 When the young Jessie left suburban Melbourne and her newspaperman husband in 1927, little did she know that she’d become the first woman to complete an England to…
Beams, Nick ‘Foreign policy dilemmas confront new Australian PM over China‘, World Socialist Web Site, 18 September 2015 Long article dissecting the new prime minister’s attitudes to China taking note of some key speeches. A useful addition to whatever analysis…
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CEW Bean Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-18: Vol. 1 The Story of Anzac, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, ninth edition, 1939; first published 1921 Takes the story from the outbreak of war to the end of the…
Bearlin, Margaret with the assistance of Cynthia James and Mary Ziesak ‘Women’s power to stop war: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom 1915 to 2015‘, Honest History, 14 April 2015 The article marks the centenary of the International Congress…
Joan Beaumont, Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien & Mathew Trinca, ed. Under Suspicion: Citizenship and Internment in Australia during the Second World War, National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra, 2008 Stories of internees, revealing ‘the sometimes disturbing nature of how the nation…
Beaumont, Joan, et al. ANU Archives Annual Lectures The ANU Archives and the Friends of the Noel Butlin Archives Centre sponsor an annual lecture in Canberra and podcasts or vodcasts of recent ones are available. They include: 2014 Professor Joan Beaumont,…
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Beaumont, Joan, Evelyn Goh, Michael Wesley, Hugh White, ‘Asia today – 1914 redux?’ ANU School of International Political and Strategic Studies seminar, Canberra, 18 March 2014 Notes of the seminar were prepared by David Stephens. Read more… 258 Asia Today…
Beaumont, Joan, Lachlan Grant & Aaron Pegram, ed. Beyond Surrender: Australian Prisoners of War in the Twentieth Century, Melbourne University Press, Carlton Vic. 2015; available electronically Over the twentieth century 35,000 Australians suffered as prisoners of war in conflicts ranging…
Joan Beaumont ‘ANZAC Day to VP Day: Arguments and interpretations’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 40, February 2007, pp. 1-7 Historiography of war in Australia, including many references in notes. Beaumont asks what are the roles of historians and…
Joan Beaumont ‘Australian citizenship and the two world wars’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 53, 2, June 2007, pp. 171–82 This article surveys Australian citizenship: its distinctive characteristics in the first half of the twentieth century, and how these…
Joan Beaumont Australia’s Great Depression: How a Nation Shattered by the Great War Survived the Worst Economic Crisis it has Ever Faced, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2022; electronic version available How a nation still in grief from the Great War…
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Beaumont, Joan Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2013 The Great War is, for many Australians, the event that defined our nation. The larrikin diggers, trench warfare, and the landing at Gallipoli have…
Beaumont, Joan ‘Comment: declining sense of grief over Anzac‘, SBS News, 25 April 2013 ANU historian Joan Beaumont says that, with the passage of time Anzac Day grief may have been replaced by a ‘much more sentimental nostalgia about the…
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Joan Beaumont ‘Gallipoli and Australian national identity’, Neil Garnham & Keith Jeffery, ed., Culture, Place and Identity, University College Dublin Press, Dublin, 2005, pp. 138-51 The article notes ‘the degree to which a conservative state continues to see Anzac as…
Joan Beaumont ‘Prisoners of war in Australian national memory’, Bob Moore & Barbara Hately-Broad, ed., Prisoners of War, Prisoners of Peace: Captivity, Homecoming and Memory in World War II, Berg Publishers, Oxford & New York, 2005, pp. 185-94 In a…
Joan Beaumont ‘The second war in every respect: Australian memory and the Second World War’, Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, 14, 1, Fall 2011, pp. 1-15 Shows how ‘the Second World War is relegated to a secondary place in…
Margaret Beavis ‘A Nobel Peace Prize born in Australia‘, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 October 2017 updated Discusses the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to an Australian-founded organisation. The winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, the International Campaign to…
Margaret Beavis ‘US militarism: what are the costs to Australia?‘, Pearls and Irritations, 31 October 2017 It is time to reflect on the close enmeshment of Australian and US foreign policy, and the real costs of such close military ties.…
Mark Beeson ‘Trump triggers overdue policy debate‘, The Conversation, 8 February 2017 Whatever else Donald Trump’s election may have done, it’s had at least one welcome effect: it has finally sparked a long-overdue debate about the possible costs and benefits…
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Beggs-Sunter, Anne ‘Eureka: gathering “the oppressed of all nations”‘, Journal of Australian Cultural History, 10, 1, 2008 Over the last one hundred and fifty years, the meaning of the Eureka Stockade has been characterised in different ways. To some it…
Behrendt, Larissa ‘Indigenous Australians know we’re the oldest living culture – it’s in our Dreamtime‘, Guardian Australia, 22 September 2016 Responds to recent material on DNA-based research on Indigenous culture. More. ‘Scientific research often reaffirms what is in an oral…
Diane Bell* ‘Read and savour the salt of Bruce Pascoe’s stories and essays of our land’, Honest History, 1 November 2019 Diane Bell reviews Bruce Pascoe’s Salt: Selected Stories and Essays Bruce Pascoe’s dedication of Salt, ‘For the three rivers…
Benbow, Heather Merle ‘Feeding the troops: the emotional meaning of food in wartime‘, The Conversation, 30 September 2015 Food is central to experiences of war [the author says], and not just for the soldiers for whom it is a daily…
Mervyn F. Bendle ‘Gallipoli: second front in the History Wars‘, Quadrant Online, LIII, 6, June 2009 Lengthy article with many citations taking to task historians like Joan Beaumont, Marilyn Lake, Mark McKenna, Robin Prior and Peter Stanley and commentators such…
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Bengsen, Andrew ‘The rabbits of Christmas past: a present that backfired for Australia‘, The Conversation, 22 December 2014 Examines the history of rabbits in Australia from their introduction in 1859 to now, when they are present in 70 per cent…
Bentley, Tom & Jonathan West ‘Time for a new consensus: fostering Australia’s comparative advantages‘, Griffith Review 51 supplement, March 2016; available as pdf and electronically Australia has emerged from a spectacular resources boom without any clear approach to achieving growth…
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Berzins, Hannah ‘Lest we forget the Frontier Wars‘, Vimeo (video, 2014) The 2o minute video describes massacres at Murdering Island and Poison Waterholes Creek, near Narrandera, NSW, and considers how such events, and the Frontier Wars generally, should be commemorated.…
Bible House, Constantinople The Orient, 2 June 1915 Our final insight into expatriate missionary life in the Ottoman Empire of 1915. Previous editions: 28 April, 5 May 1915, 12 May 1915, 19 May 1915, 26 May 1915. Again, thanks to Vicken Babkenian for unearthing…
Bible House, Constantinople The Orient, 5 May 2015 This is the complete edition for the date shown of an English language weekly newsletter published by the American missionaries in Constantinople. The issues from 1915 provide great insight from the ‘other side’…
Bible House, Constantinople The Orient, 12 May 1915 We continue our presentation of these fascinating insights into expatriate missionary life in the Ottoman Empire of 1915. Previous editions: 28 April, 5 May 1915. Our colleague, Vicken Babkenian, who has sourced…
Bible House, Constantinople The Orient, 19 May 1915 We continue these insights into expatriate missionary life in the Ottoman Empire of 1915, presenting a different, English-language, view of the Dardanelles campaign. Previous editions: 28 April, 5 May 1915, 12 May…
Bible House, Constantinople The Orient, 26 May 1915 More insights into expatriate missionary life in the Ottoman Empire of 1915. Previous editions: 28 April, 5 May 1915, 12 May 1915, 19 May 1915. In this edition: [Translated from Ikdam:] While the English papers…
Bible House, Constantinople The Orient, 28 April 1915 An unusual post for Honest History but a fascinating one, this is the complete edition for the date shown of an English language weekly newsletter published by the American missionaries in Constantinople. The…
Nicholas Biddle ‘First results from the 2016 Census paint a picture of who the “typical” Australian is‘, The Conversation, 11 April 2017 For the statistical agency of a supposedly diverse country to bother presenting a picture of ‘a typical Australian’…
Bird, Jacqueline: In the matter of Agent Orange: Vietnam veterans versus the Australian War Memorial
Bird, Jacqueline* ‘In the matter of Agent Orange: Vietnam veterans versus the Australian War Memorial‘, Honest History, 15 March 2016 A detailed account of more than twenty years of history, leading up to the agreement by the Australian War Memorial…
John Birmingham ‘A time for war: Australia as a military power‘, Quarterly Essay 20, December 2005 Traces a revival of Australian militarism in the 1990s and early 2000s, partly associated with the increase in ‘breathless idolatry’ and ‘nostalgic urgency’ accorded…
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Black Inc. The Wisdom of Oz: Australian Aphorisms from the Profound to the Profane, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2017 A little book about truth, in a world defined by insidious lies. The Wisdom of Oz presents the finest pearls of wisdom from…
Blackwood, Gemma ‘Pass the iced vo-vos: the resurrection of Australiana‘, The Conversation, 26 November 2014 The author notes an emerging trend in Australian popular cultural forms, involving a reinvigorated interest in Australiana – material visual culture that is visually themed…
Blainey, Geoffrey This Land is All Horizons: Australia’s Fears and Visions: Boyer Lectures, ABC Books, Sydney, 2001 This is a discussion of equality and equality of opportunity in Australian history, and of the changing way in which Australians see their…
Geoffrey Blainey Before I Forget: An Early Memoir, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 2019; electronic version available Before I Forget is the long-awaited memoir from Professor Geoffrey Blainey – Australia’s most significant and popular historian – that tells the story of the first…
Blainey, Geoffrey ‘The centenary of Australia’s Federation: what should we celebrate?‘ Australia. Senate: Papers on Parliament, 37, November 2001 Touches on some early history, including Australia’s pioneering political and social reforms, then answers the question by reference to one hundred…
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Blainey, Geoffrey The Rush That Never Ended: A History of Australian Mining, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 5th revised edition 2003; first published 1964 ‘This text tells the story of Australia’s mineral discoveries, describes the giants of its mining history…
Blainey, Geoffrey The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1966; numerous later editions The book ‘describes how distance and isolation have been central to Australia’s history and in shaping its national identity, and will continue…
John Blaxland & Rhys Crawley The Secret Cold War: The Official History of ASIO, 1975-1989, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2016 The blurb reveals that the book deals with espionage by foreign agents, terrorist attacks, the underground Cold War of tensions…
Blaxland, John ‘Flying the flag for a fresh start‘, Canberra Times, 1 February 2014 Few realise that the overwhelming majority of Australia’s 102,000 war dead fought and died for the British Empire under Britain’s Union Jack as their national flag.…
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John Blaxland ‘Twenty years in Afghanistan‘, Wartime [Australian War Memorial] No. 96, Spring 2021, pp. 10-16 John Blaxland is a distinguished academic, specialising in war and strategy. He is also a former member of the Australian Defence Force. For both…
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David Blight ‘The Battle for Memorial Day in New Orleans‘, The Atlantic, 29 May 2017 Examines the recent Memorial Day oration of Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans, at a time when the former Confederate states of America are again…
Robert Bollard In the Shadow of Gallipoli: The Hidden History of Australia in World War I, New South, Sydney, 2013 Bollard urges us to revise the accepted “distorted, or at least unbalanced” view of the Great War. He looks at…
Geoffrey Bolton ‘The Gluckman Affair 1960: a bystander’s view‘, Labour History Canberra, 16 November 2017 Max Gluckman (makinganthropologypublic) John Myrtle, Honest History volunteer, author of our Online Gems, retired librarian and facilitator of this article’s republication explains its provenance: In…
Catherine Bond Anzac: The Landing, The Legend, The Law, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2017 The year 2016 marks an ‘Anzac’ anniversary of a different kind: the centenary of legal regulation over use of the term ‘Anzac’ in Australia and internationally.…
Bond, Catherine ‘Is it time to repeal Australia’s century-old laws on the use of the word “Anzac”?‘ The Conversation, 1 November 2016 Article marks the centenary of Australian restrictions on the use of the word ‘Anzac’. (The author has a…
Catherine Bond ‘Tyrannical power exercised untyranically?‘ Inside Story, 1 April 2020 updated Law has always been crucial to Australia’s involvement in war, whether through existing defence legislation or new provisions designed to deal with a developing incident or conflict. Law…
Frank Bongiorno & Grant Mansfield ‘Whose war was it anyway? Some Australian historians and the Great War’, History Compass, 6, 1, January 2008, pp. 62-90 Examining the debate over the Australian response to the outbreak of war in Europe in…
Bongiorno, Frank, Rae Frances & Bruce Scates, ed., Labour and the Great War: The Australian Working Class and the Making of Anzac, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Special edition, Labour History, 106, May 2014 Examines the awkward…
Frank Bongiorno ‘An Iced Vovo and a broken heart‘, Inside Story, 5 January 2018 Honest History president and ANU professor, Frank Bongiorno, reviews volume I of former PM Kevin Rudd’s autobiography. The two Rudd prime ministerships were probably not the…
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Frank Bongiorno ‘An obedient nation of larrikins: why Victorians are not revolting‘, The Conversation, 10 September 2020 Update 21 September 2020: Dave Milner in The Shot newsletter on the low-key Melburnian cope. Speculates about what (mostly supportive) Victorian attitudes to…
Frank Bongiorno ‘A nursery of unconventional ideas – sex radicalism in Australia‘, The Conversation, 11 December 2017 Honest History’s president and ANU professor, Frank Bongiorno, presents a historical smorgasbord of sex pioneers from William Chidley to Benjamin Law, via Germaine…
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Frank Bongiorno ‘Australian labour history: contexts, trends and influences’, Labour History, 100, May 2011, pp. 1-18 Labour history’s relationship to the labour movement and to the practice of history generally.
Bongiorno, Frank ‘Gallipoli: an exhibition of photographs by Charles Snodgrass Ryan: Manning Clark House, launch speech, 4 p.m., 6 April 2014’, Honest History, 30 April 2014 Associate Professor Bongiorno addresses aspects of the commemoration of World War I, including the…
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Bongiorno, Frank ‘Doing the dirty work‘, Inside Story, 19 February 2014 Places industrial relations policy choices in 2014 in historical context by recalling events in this field in the 1980s. Attempts to probe trade union governance have implications for the…
Frank Bongiorno ‘Donald Horne’s “lucky country” and the decline of the public intellectual‘, The Conversation, 11 July 2017 updated Honest History’s president reviews Donald Horne: Selected Writings, edited by Nick Horne. Horne’s message [in his most famous book, The Lucky…
Frank Bongiorno ‘Hell-Bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War, by Douglas Newton, Scribe, 2014: Canberra Launch, Australian National University, 28 November 2014’, Honest History, 7 December 2014 There is a powerful myth concerning the way Australia behaves in international affairs.…
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Frank Bongiorno ‘From “Toby Tosspot” to “Mr Harbourside Mansion”, personal insults are an Australian tradition‘, The Conversation, 29 June 2018 ‘Political name-calling and insults are sometimes like water off a duck’s back. But others can stick.’ A useful survey. Frank…
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Frank Bongiorno ‘Historical constructions of knowledge: Pymble Ladies College address, 12 September 2017‘ This address was delivered to History Extension students from Pymble and other schools. (Honest History representatives do these engagements frequently: contact admin@honesthistory.net.au to discuss possibilities.) All documents,…
Frank Bongiorno ‘Is Australian history still possible? Australia and the global Eighties: Inaugural Professorial Lecture, Australian National University, 10 May 2017‘, Honest History, 15 May 2017 This lecture canvasses some of the themes and subject matter in the author’s prize-winning…
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Bongiorno, Frank ‘Labour and Anzac: historical reflections: Honest History lecture, Manning Clark House, Canberra, 15 June 2014’, Honest History, 8 July 2014 Associate Professor Bongiorno spoke to help launch his co-edited book (Labour and the Great War) on the same…
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Bongiorno, Frank ‘Lessons from history in how to run a good election campaign – or how to avoid a really bad one‘, The Conversation, 9 May 2016 Don’t make yourself a big target, don’t write a (policy) book – or…
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Frank Bongiorno ‘On marriage equality, Australia’s progressive instincts have been crushed by political failure’, The Conversation, 18 September 2017 In the context of the forthcoming postal survey, the author looks at aspects of the history of sexuality in Australia. He…
Bongiorno, Frank ‘Politicians’ inability to speak freely on issues that matter leaves democracy all the poorer‘, The Conversation, 21 June 2016 The author notes the poor quality of political debate in Australia, particularly during the current election campaign, but also…
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Bongiorno, Frank The Sex Lives of Australians, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2012 ‘Cross-dressing colonists, effeminate bushrangers and women-shortage woes – here is the first ever history of sex in Australia, from Botany Bay to the present-day. ‘ The book shows how…
Frank Bongiorno ‘The Australian history boom has busted, but there’s hope it may boom again‘, The Conversation, 25 January 2017 First in a series on Australian identity, this piece from one of Honest History’s distinguished supporters, Frank Bongiorno, looks at…
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Bongiorno, Frank The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia, Black Inc, Collingwood, Vic, 2015; hardback and electronic It was the era of Hawke and Keating, Kylie and INXS, the America’s Cup and the Bicentenary. It was perhaps the most controversial…
Frank Bongiorno ‘The year some things changed‘, Sydney Review of Books, 3 December 2018 updated Head of the ANU School of History (and Honest History president) reviews The Year Everything Changed: 2001 by Phillipa McGuinness, author (and publisher of The…
Frank Bongiorno ‘This storied land‘, The Monthly, February 2017 An essay riffing off Mark McKenna’s book, From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories, which tells four stories of encounters between Indigenous and settler Australians. Bongiorno divides histories of Australia into pre-…
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Frank Bongiorno, Iain Spence & John Moses, ed. ‘Mars and Minerva: Australian intellectuals and the Great War’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 53, 3, September 2007 (special edition) Covers the fields of science and technology, literature and literary criticism,…
DH Borchardt, ed. Australians: A Guide to Sources, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, Broadway, NSW, 1987 One of the volumes in Australians: A Historical Library (other volumes have separate posts on the Honest History site). Dozens of contributors provide brief…
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Bosler, Danae ‘Labour in vain: the forgotten novels of Australia’s radical women‘, Overland, 16 June 2015 Brief survey of novels by Betty Collins, Jean Devanny, Dorothy Hewett, Amanda Lohrey and others. These novels are seminal Australian texts because of their…
Bottoms, Timothy Cairns: City of the South Pacific: a History 1770-1995, Bunu Bunu Press, Cairns, 2015 The township of Cairns was established in the wake of the Palmer River Gold rush of 1873, and established as a port for the…
Timothy Bottoms ‘Massacre recollections Elder stories of Frontier Wars in FNQ‘, YouTube, 16 July 2019 North Queensland-based historian, Tim Bottoms, has posted this 13 minute video in which Aboriginal Elders recount specific instances of frontier violence. The late Kenny Jimmy…
Bottoms, Timothy ‘Myall Creek Memorial Talk, Sunday 8 June 2014’, Honest History, 23 June 2014, updated This item is relevant to the history of relations between Indigenous and White Australians but also to the way we have suppressed and distorted…
Leigh Boucher ‘Only Heaven Knows brings 1940s queer Sydney roaring back to life‘, The Conversation, 6 June 2017 A revived musical gives an insight into a Kings Cross lifestyle that flourished during the war years, then faded for a while. The…
Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey & Katherine Ellinghaus, ed. Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of an Identity, RMIT Press, Melbourne, 2007 Around sixty articles originally conference papers on Australian and international cases. Subjects include whiteness before White Australia, race…
Chris Bowen ‘The case for engagement with Asia‘ (speech to the Asia Society), Chris Bowen, 29 September 2017 updated Labor Shadow Treasurer says: Australia needs a step change in our economic relationship with Asia. Our economic relationship with Asia has…
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Claire Bowern ‘The origins of Pama-Nyungan, Australia’s largest family of Aboriginal languages‘, The Conversation, 13 March 2018 The approximately 400 languages of Aboriginal Australia can be grouped into 27 different families. To put that diversity in context, Europe has just four…
Mike Bowers ‘Anzac Cove and Gallipoli: then and now – interactive‘, Guardian Australia, 25 April 2015 We missed it earlier but are running it now as it, briefly, won an award, until it was realised there had been a mistake.…
Bowers, Mike Battlefields of France and Palestine: a portfolio of photographs, 2009 and 2011 Maltzkorn Farm crucifix near Trones Wood, The Somme, France. Maltzkorn Farm was destroyed by the fierce battles which took place here 1 July-5 August 1916…
Bowers, Mike ‘So much to remember‘, The Global Mail, 24 April 2012 Photojournalism ‘from a lifetime of wondering and wandering amid the Anzacs’. Depicts ‘the long shadow of Australia’s great war’ with images from France, Palestine and Gallipoli.
Sharon Bown One Woman’s War and Peace: A Nurse’s Journey in the Royal Australian Air Force, Exisle Publishing, Wollombi, NSW, 2016 In 1999, idealistic 23-year-old Registered Nurse Sharon Bown left her comfortable family life in Tasmania and joined the Royal…
Braganza, Karl & Steve Rintoul ‘State of the Climate 2016: Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO‘, The Conversation, 27 October 2016 Summarises the main points in the report and provides links to it, to a summary video and the portal Climate…
Braithwaite, Richard Wallace Fighting Monsters: An Intimate History of the Sandakan Tragedy, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2016 Only six escapees survived the Sandakan death marches of 1945 in North Borneo, the worst atrocity ever inflicted on Australian soldiers. 1787 Australian…
Bramston, Troy, ed. The Whitlam Legacy, Federation Press, Annandale, NSW, 2013 Wide-ranging collection of essays under general headings the Whitlam ascendancy, the Whitlam years and political style, managing government, policy, the dismissal, reflections and assessments, true believers. Authors include historians,…
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Brandstrom, Annika, Fredrik Bynander & Paul t’ Hart ‘Governing by looking back: historical analogies and crisis management‘, [originally published] Public Administration, 82, 1, 2004, pp. 191-210 A common misunderstanding about crises – understood here as epochs of profound uncertainty and…
Brangwin, Nicole, Nathan Church, Steve Dyer & David Watt Defending Australia: a History of Australia’s Defence White Papers: Parliamentary Library Research Paper 2015-16, 20 August 2015 This is a timely publication, given the recent extended commitment to Iraq-Syria, defence spending…
Sarah Brasch ‘Our national cathedral?‘ Honest History, 15 March 2015 Describes the Last Post ceremony held almost every evening at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The author finds the ceremony ‘has a liturgy all of its own and a…
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Brayley, Annabelle Our Vietnam Nurses, Penguin, Sydney, 2016 When Australia joined the Vietnam War, civilian and military nurses were there to save lives and comfort the wounded. With spirit and good humour, they worked hard and held strong, even though…
Sally Breen ‘Friday essay: the 90s – why you had to be there‘, The Conversation, 9 June 2017 Review of – and thoughts provoked by – a new exhibition, Every Brilliant Eye: Australian Art of the 1990s, at the National…
Brennan, Frank ‘Deja vu for Timor as Turnbull neglects boundary talks‘, Eureka Street, 21 March 2016 Looks at the history of and recent developments in the boundary dispute between Timor Leste and Australia. Oil and gas lies beneath the sea…
Brent, Peter ‘And the rest say “no”‘, Inside Story, 17 July 2014 The author examines the history of referenda in the run-up to a possible referendum on constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australian occupation of the country prior to European settlement.…
Judith Brett & Anthony Moran Ordinary People’s Politics: Australians Talk about Life, Politics and the Future of their Country, Pluto Press Australia, Melbourne, 2006 Ordinary Australians interviewed about politics and its place in their lives during the Depression, the post…
Judith Brett Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2003 From middle-class liberal independence under Deakin to conservative populism under Howard, with lots of nuances in between.
Judith Brett Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, new edition 2007; first published 1992 Explores the links between Menzies’ values and language and the people he represented and who voted for him in the years after the World…
Judith Brett From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia got Compulsory Voting, Text, Melbourne, 2019; electronic version available It’s compulsory to vote in Australia. We are one of a handful of countries in the world that enforce this rule…
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Brett, Judith ‘Relaxed and comfortable: the Liberal Party’s Australia‘, Quarterly Essay, 19, August 2005 Describes how John Howard as Prime Minister (ultimately for 11 years to 2007) kept his government attuned to ‘the moderate middle of national experience’. (p. 74)…
Judith Brett ‘The country, the city and the State in the Australian settlement’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 42, 1, 2007, pp. 1-22 (full reprint) Argues that ‘the [post-Federation] settlement between the country and the city, mediated by the state,…
Judith Brett The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2017, e-book available This insightful and accessible new biography of Alfred Deakin, Australia’s second prime minister, shines fresh light on one of the nation’s most significant figures. It brings out from…
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Bridge, Carl, Frank Bongiorno & David Lee, ed. The High Commissioners: Australia’s Representatives in the United Kingdom, 1910-2010, Australia. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra, 2010 Full text (340 pages) of collection of articles on the London connection, brought…
Bright, Denis ‘The income divide in Australia: the return of class-based politics?‘, Australian Independent Media Network, 19 May 2016 Gets beyond the politics of campaigning to look at some statistics – some of which have been used previously in the…
Michael Brissenden, et al ‘Importance of Anzac Day‘, ABC Lateline, 25 April 2013 (video, transcript) Participants are Michael Brissenden (ABC), Bob Hawke (former Prime Minister), Brendan Nelson (Director, Australian War Memorial), Clare Wright (author). Hawke and Nelson support the role…
Michael Brissenden ‘Afghanistan: the war we hardly knew‘, ABC The Drum, 14 November 2013 Discusses Department of Defence attitudes to media coverage of the war in Afghanistan. Attracted 145 comments. The culture of secrecy that has built up over recent…
Michael Brissenden ‘Should Anzac Day inspire more than just fervour?’ ABC The Drum, 25 April 2013 Includes 100 comments showing a wide spectrum of views. Quotes Clare Wright, historian, that ‘Anzac Day has grown in appeal in inverse proportion to…
Peter Britton Working for the World: The Evolution of Australian Volunteers International, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2019 Since 1951 thousands of volunteers from all over Australia have worked in developing countries across the world. This is the story of the…
Harvey Broadbent ‘A simple epic’: Gallipoli and the Australian media (The 2009 Lone Pine Anniversary Lecture) Media includes newspapers, radio and television, internet, cinema, theatre and books. The article covers the whole period 1915-2009. ‘Media … was involved from the…
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Broadbent, Harvey Defending Gallipoli: the Turkish Story, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2015; electronic version available Based on exclusive access to Turkish archives, Defending Gallipoli reveals how the Turks reacted and defended Gallipoli. Author and Turkish-language expert Harvey Broadbent spent five years…
Harvey Broadbent ‘Gallipoli: One great deception?’ ABC The Drum, 24 April 2009 Considers geopolitical motivations for the Gallipoli invasion. ‘The proposition is that it was the intention of the British and French Governments of 1915 to ensure that the Dardanelles…
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Brock, Peggy & Tom Gara, ed.: Colonialism and its Aftermath: A History of Aboriginal South Australia
Peggy Brock & Tom Gara, ed. Colonialism and its Aftermath: A History of Aboriginal South Australia, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2017 The colonial process in South Australia began decades before formal annexation with unregulated interactions between coastal Aboriginal people and European…
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John Brockman, ed. Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future, Harper Perennial, New York & London, 2011 From the Edge Foundation. Not explicitly Australian but global and included here as a…
Nick Brodie The Vandemonian War, Hardie Grant, Melbourne, 2017; available electronically The Vandemonian War had many sides and shades, but it was fundamentally a war between the British colony of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and the Aboriginal people who lived…
Broinowski, Alison ‘Abbott’s dark state: war powers, invigilation and trust‘, Independent Australia, 4 December 2013 National security issues viewed from a particular perspective, with comments from readers.
Alison Broinowski ‘A foreign affairs Alt-White Paper‘, Independent Australia, 27 October 2017 Dr Broinowski suggests what should be in the foreign policy White Paper due for release soon. The themes are independence and innovation. For other material on this subject…
Alison Broinowski* ‘A novel about war on the home front and in the Middle East’, Honest History, 12 May 2019 Alison Broinowski reviews Julie Janson’s The Light Horse Ghost Julie Janson knows about the other Australia. Descended from the Darug…
Alison Broinowski ‘Anzackery and the preening peloton‘, Pearls and Irritations, 24 April 2018 Honest History vice president weaves together Australian Defence Force duchessing of politicians, MSM Anzac cliches, critiques of Anzackery, culminating in praise for Richard Flanagan’s recent NPC speech.
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Broinowski, Alison ‘ANZUS minus NZ, again?‘ Honest History, 25 March 2015 Considers Trans-Tasman efforts to get into the war in Iraq, particularly current New Zealand actions. Dr Broinowski is a committee member of Honest History and of Australians for War…
Alison Broinowski ‘Australia, 2018: Lies, cover-ups and suppression of free speech‘, Independent Australia, 20 June 2018 Honest History’s vice president summarises the current state and recent history of freedom in the wide brown land whose young men died in the…
Broinowski, Alison, et al ‘Australians for War Powers Reform initiative‘, PerthIndyMedia, 11 May 2015 Alison Broinowski is with AWPR, is Honest History’s vice president and the co-editor of a book shortly to be published, How Does Australia Go to War?,…
Alison Broinowski ‘Beware: armed response‘, Pearls and Irritations, 19 July 2017 updated Honest History vice president comments on the government’s anti-terrorism measures. If Turnbull’s plan [National Security Statement, last month] becomes law – and the prospects of the Opposition stopping…
Alison Broinowski* ‘Can we handle the truth? Henry Reynolds’ major 2021 work is crucial reference in this year of the Voice’, Honest History, 24 August 2023 Alison Broinowski reviews Truth-Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, by Henry Reynolds Originally…
Broinowski, Alison ‘Surveillance is control: Citizenfour reviewed’, Honest History, 15 February 2015 Australia has form in surveillance. The Keepsakes exhibition at the National Library of Australia has the caption ‘A wartime police state’ on exhibits depicting the Hughes Government’s actions…
Alison Broinowski* ‘Conspiracies are not all theoretical: some letters to Trump’, Honest History, 13 August 2018 ©Alison Broinowski 2018 Before the 2016 election, candidate Donald Trump told voters he would ‘find out who really knocked down the World Trade Center’.…
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Alison Broinowski ‘Don’t ask about the war‘, Pearls and Irritations, 10 January 2017 Conservative leaders’ reputations grow over time, John Howard being an example. Howard has refused to apologise for his Iraq decision of 2003. ‘His actions and opinions have…
Broinowski, Alison ‘Silent conspirators: Fascism and Fraser’, Honest History, 22 May 2014 and updated All fascist regimes and organisations have used the power of nationalism and national security as a motivator, as Australia has increasingly done. But no other country…
Alison Broinowski ‘Incorrigible Optimist review: Gareth Evans’ account of his public life‘, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 January 2018 This book was launched by Bob Hawke and has been widely reviewed. (See especially Norman Abjorensen in the Canberra Times and Jock…
Alison Broinowski ‘Is militarism in Australia’s DNA?’ Pearls and Irritations, 6 February 2018 updated Australians who don’t live in other countries don’t realise how our self-image differs from the perception, particularly in Asia, that we were militarists from the start.…
Broinowski, Alison ‘A long way from Adelaide’, Honest History, 30 April 2014 295 Broinowski Long way from Adelaide Alison Broinowski explores connections between some Australian expatriates in China, some exotic figures from elsewhere and private schools in Adelaide and Sydney.…
Broinowski, Alison ‘Borderless war or, when you get in a hole, stop digging‘, Pearls and Irritations, 15 August 2015 The United States has formally asked for Australian involvement in Syria. Honest History vice president had already posted this article on…
Alison Broinowski ‘Murky wars and missions unaccomplished‘, Pearls and Irritations, 25 January 2018 This [Syria] longest war in Australia’s history is the latest in the list of foreign conflicts in which we have joined Americans, supposedly fighting communists or terrorists,…
Alison Broinowski ‘Now or never: Australia must develop its own foreign policy‘, Independent Australia, 3 March 2021 Surveys Australia’s foreign policy since the beginning and concludes thus: Regional solutions to regional differences will come from diplomacy, not armed force. But…
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Broinowski, Alison ‘Officially acceptable war history‘, Honest History, 11 July 2015 The article discusses the projected official histories of the Australian involvements in East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq. Dr Broinowski is Vice President of Honest History and of Australians for…
Alison Broinowski ‘Reading Room: Fighting with America‘, Australian Outlook, 8 May 2017 This is a review note of James Curran’s book, Fighting with America: Why Saying No to the US Wouldn’t Rupture the Alliance. Honest History previously linked to an…
Alison Broinowski ‘Reading Room: Russia and the West: The Last Two Action-Packed Years 2017-19‘, Australian Outlook, 14 November 2019 Review of recent book by former diplomat, Tony Kevin, in which the author offers two papers he gave to the Independent…
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Alison Broinowski* ‘Reckless self-endangerment: Clinton Fernandes on Australia as a subimperial power’, Honest History, 28 December 2022 Alison Broinowski reviews Clinton Fernandes, Subimperial Power: Australia in the International Arena Australia is supposed to be significant internationally, yet Australians are remarkably…
Alison Broinowski ‘Review: The daughters of John Burton are determined to correct the public record of their parents‘, Canberra Times, 11 June 2022 (pdf from our subscription) updated Review of Persons of Interest: An Intimate Account of Cecily and John…
Alison Broinowski* ‘State of insecurity: how government secrecy preserves power and conceals stuff-ups’, Honest History, 3 September 2019 Alison Broinowski reviews Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State, by Brian Toohey If you’re old enough to remember the National Times…
Broinowski, Alison ‘The streaker’s defence: history and the war powers’, Honest History e-Newsletter No 6, October 2013 The leaders who planned and executed the 2003 invasion of Iraq – one of the more notable disasters of recent war history – said they…
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Alison Broinowski ‘The Merkel moment: wherever that works‘, Pearls and Irritations, 30 May 2017 Chancellor Merkel’s remark that the United States is no longer reliable, and that Europe should look after itself, should also be a wake-up call for Australia.…
Alison Broinowski ‘The trust deficit in Canberra‘, Pearls and Irritations, 13 February 2018 Looks at the implications of the appointment of Admiral Harry B. Harris as United States Ambassador to Australia. The Prime Minister has said we are joined at…
Alison Broinowski ‘Till war do us part‘, Pearls and Irritations, 30 August 2017 A Fairfax readers poll of some 1300 people showed resounding opposition to Australia sending even the token additional force to Afghanistan. The article also mentions the unwisdom…
Broinowski, Alison ‘Toxic warfare: Agent Orange revisited‘, Honest History, 16 July 2015 The article comments on the decision by the Australian War Memorial Council to commission a further volume on the medical aspects of the Vietnam War. Also relevant are…
Alison Broinowski* ‘Unreliable protection from unnecessary enemies: Scappatura on the US Lobby and us’, Honest History, 25 June 2019 Alison Broinowski reviews Vince Scappatura, The US Lobby and Australian Defence Policy A blast of fresh air blew through the Australian…
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Broinowski, Alison ‘What are we willing to fight for?‘, Independent Australia, 3 July 2016 Honest History Vice President, Alison Broinowski, reviews Firing Line: Australia’s Path to War Quarterly Essay 62 by James Brown (Anzac’s Long Shadow) and expands upon the…
Alison Broinowski ‘What Australian foreign policy?‘ Pearls and Irritations, 26 April 2017 updated Discusses Allan Gyngell’s new book, Fear of Abandonment: Australia in the World since 1942. Gyngell, she concludes, ‘doesn’t endorse [former Prime Minister Malcolm] Fraser’s radical call for…
Broinowski, Anna (dir.) ‘Pauline Hanson: Please explain!‘ SBS, 1 August 2016 Full video and supporting material of the documentary shown on SBS on 31 July. Another link. The documentary moves back and forth between 1996 and more recently, interviewing many…
Richard Broinowski ‘“How to Defend Australia” is an important wake-up call‘, Australian Outlook, 14 July 2019 updated Hugh White’s latest book How to Defend Australia is reviewed by former senior diplomat, Richard Broinowski AO. ‘Hugh White should be praised’, says…
Richard Broinowski* ‘Buccaneers down through the generations: Lachlan Murdoch’, Honest History, 3 December 2022 Richard Broinowski reviews The Successor: the High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch, by Paddy Manning The tradition of swashbuckling press barons in the English-language is not new.…
Richard Broinowski* ‘Sam Roggeveen’s Echidna Strategy: priorities in foreign and defence policy’, Honest History, 2 October 2023 updated Richard Broinowski reviews The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace, by Sam Roggeveen Sam Roggeveen came from the Australian government’s…
Richard Broinowski* ‘This book will increase hostility between Australia and China’, Honest History, 19 August 2022 Richard Broinowski reviews Jim Molan’s Danger On Our Doorstep As I write, the risk of war with China over Taiwan grows exponentially. Nancy Pelosi’s…
Nicholas Bromfield ‘The genre of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day addresses, 1973–2016‘, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 64, 1, March 2018, pp. 81-97 Statistical analysis based on the author’s PhD thesis. Includes some interesting insights. The last quarter of a…
Ben Brooker ‘100 years of Anzac: ludicrous spending for nationalist validation‘, Overland, 24 April 2018 updated Sets the Monash Centre at Villers-Bretonneux against the broader context of commemorative spending, quoting Honest History estimates. Sharp points on opportunity cost and musing…
Brookes, John* ‘Constructing nationalism: telling us how it is on Anzac‘, Honest History, 15 March 2016 The article explores how nationalism is ‘a politically constructed discourse designed to delineate and reveal a community to itself. The rise of Anzac in…
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Richard Broome, Charles Fahey, Andrea Gaynor, Katie Holmes Mallee Country: Land, People, History, Monash University Publishing, Melbourne, 2019 Mallee Country tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people across southern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and…
Richard Broome Aboriginal Australians: A History since 1788, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 4th edition, 2010; first published 1982; 3rd edition 2002 had sub-title Black Responses to White Dominance Richard Broome tells the history of Australia from the standpoint…
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Broomhill, Ray ‘Australian economic booms in historical perspective‘, Journal of Australian Political Economy, 61, June 2008, pp. 12-29 Part of a special issue on The Australian Economic Boom 1992-? including a number of articles relevant to economic and social policy…
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Brophy, Kevin ‘Friday essay: Judith Wright in a new light‘, The Conversation, 28 October 2016 Everyone loves Judith Wright [Brophy begins]. Her poetry was consistently brilliant and stunningly lyrical. She opened Australian eyes in the 1940s to the possibilities of…
Brotherhood of St Laurence Generation stalled: young, underemployed and living in poverty in Australia, Melbourne, 2017 In total [says the report] more than 650,000 young people were unemployed or underemployed – defined as having some work but wanting more hours…
Brown, AJ ‘To really reform the federation, you must build strong bipartisan support‘, The Conversation, 26 April 2016 Includes results of a survey of politicians, state and federal. The survey found an issue that stood out. But where the most…
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Brown, Claire ‘What’s the best, most effective way to take notes?‘ The Conversation, 22 May 2015 Education researcher gives some useful tips for students and researchers. Also links to a later piece by the same author on taking notes on…
Brown, James Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2014; also available electronically “A century ago we got it wrong. We sent thousands of young Australians on a military operation that was barely more than…
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Martyn Brown Politics of Forgetting: New Zealand, Greece and Great Britain at War, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2019; electronic version available Greece was a poor country in turmoil and pain during the 1940s. A military dictatorship was followed by invasion…
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Peter Browne & Seumas Spark, ed. ‘I Wonder’: The Life and Work of Ken Inglis, Monash University Publishing, Melbourne, 2020 Ken Inglis was one of Australia’s most creative, wide-ranging and admired historians. During a scholarly career spanning nearly seven decades,…
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Browne, Peter ‘Postwar boomer‘, Inside Story, 18 January 2016 Long essay looking back from Sir Robert Menzies’ retirement 50 years ago to the events of his 16-year reign (and even glances at his earlier time in office in 1939-41). Menzies…
Brumby, John ‘An Australian federation for the future‘, The Conversation, 19 May 2014 Former Victorian Premier and chair of the COAG Reform Council writes about how to achieve a better balance between the Commonwealth and States and Territories. He refers…
Bruns, Axel ‘A first draft of the present: Why we must preserve social media content‘, The Conversation, 16 May 2016 History is written on the basis of records that survive and are accessible. Even journalism has traditionally been described as…
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Bryant, Nick The Rise and Fall of Australia: How a Great Nation Lost its Way, Bantam, North Sydney, 2014 Former BBC correspondent in Australia claims of Australia that ‘never before has its politics been so brutal, narrow and facile, as…
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Buch, Neville ‘Do professional historians have a future?‘ Honest History, 30 August 2016 The author, a professional historian based in Queensland, looks at statistics for tertiary history courses. He spells out the need to grow the non-academic employment market for…
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Buch, Neville ‘Why this war in this way? A note on the Great War’, Honest History, 28 August 2014 The question of whether World War I can be justified, either at the time, or looking back now, has overshadowed the…
Bruce Buchan ‘Cooking the books’, Inside Story, 14 June 2018 Looks at a British Library exhibition on Cook and contrasts it with recent Australian announcements about celebrating the 250th anniversary of Cook’s 1770 voyage. Buchan draws this conclusion. Not long…
Ian Buckley ‘”Australia’s foreign wars: origins, costs, future?! and other essays”‘, Honest History, 4 August 2015 While we have categorised this as one post, it actually links to a trove of articles by this deep-thinking now 90-year-old. (The author made…
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Ian Buckley ‘Learning from Adam Smith: help at hand today‘, Honest History, 9 June 2015 Buckley contests the view that Adam Smith argued ‘that unalloyed selfishness aimed solely at the maximisation of production, trade and profit is in the best…
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Ian Buckley ‘A case history: Britain, Empire decline, and the origins of WW1, or, might the lessons of the Boer War have saved the day?‘ Honest History, 7 July 2015 Boer women and children in a British concentration camp during…
Bueskens, Petra ‘Malcolm Turnbull, Immanuel Kant and the Conundrum of small and big L Liberals‘, New Matilda, 6 October 2015 updated The article is interesting because it juggles shades of meaning in Kant, strains of opinion in the Liberal Party…
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Gemmia Burden ‘The violent collectors who gathered Indigenous artefacts for the Queensland Museum‘, The Conversation, 28 May 2018 Detailed examination of the links between frontier violence and museum collecting. While there is no evidence of the museum being directly involved…
Burgess, Rob ‘The banks didn’t save Australia – they ate it‘, New Daily, 6 October 2016 Analysis in the context of the appearance of banking CEOs before a parliamentary committee, which was followed by a proposal for a banking tribunal…
Burgmann, Meredith, ed. Dirty Secrets: our ASIO Files, NewSouth, Sydney, 2014; e-book available Well-known Australians – mavericks, activists, movers and shakers – reflect on their own ASIO files. In this moving, funny and sometimes chilling book, leading Australians open their…
Burnside, Julian ‘What sort of country are we?‘ The Conversation, 29 September 2015 Article based on the Hamer Oration, delivered 28 September. Examines incidents in Australia’s treatment of refugees over the last decade and a half, considering Tampa, the Pacific…
Burnside, Sarah ‘What would alternatives to Anzac day look like?‘ Guardian Australia, 23 April 2014 Discusses an ‘alternative national story’ derived from social democratic reforms prior to the Great War, which were interrupted by the destruction and disruption of the…
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Burton, Pamela ‘On being an independent scholar‘, Honest History, 25 July 2014 The author, a former Canberra lawyer and now author of two books (From Moree to Mabo: The Mary Gaudron Story, The Waterlow Killings: A Portrait of a Family…
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Burton, Pamela ‘John Burton: undermined by dishonest history’, Honest History, 1 September 2014 The illustrated text of an Honest History lecture at Manning Clark House, Canberra, 18 August 2014. The author is a Canberra lawyer and writer and the daughter…
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Butler, Ed ‘Manly men v wimps: what’s behind the macho language in Australian politics?‘ Guardian Australia, 27 February 2014 Discusses ‘the masculinisation of political language in Australia’, including the conflation of manliness and competence. The use of particular language is…
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Richard Butler ‘Iraq 2003: the fabricated war of choice‘, Pearls and Irritations, 7 November 2017 Former British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has revealed a report showing that US intelligence agencies knew Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and…
Butler, Richard ‘Nuclear disarmament – Australia’s profound and cynical failure‘, Pearls and Irritations, 23 August 2016 updated The author looks at Australia’s distinguished history in nuclear disarmament negotiations, before commenting on the recent decision by Australia to insist that there…
Richard Butler ‘The Alliance: the facts and the furphies‘, Pearls and Irritations, 19 September 2017 ‘A review of how we conduct our alliance relationship with the US is urgently required’, says the author, ‘not simply because it has elected a…
Richard Butler ‘The Honest History Book (UNSW Press 2017)‘, Pearls and Irritations, 15 May 2017 A review of The Honest History Book. This is a book of singular importance [says Butler]. It provides the evidence and materials for the correction…
Richard Butler ‘The myths of Australian foreign policy‘, Pearls and Irritations, 31 March 2017 The former senior Australian diplomat surveys the scene as Australia develops a foreign policy white paper. It will be of crucial importance in the review of…
Richard Butler ‘Trump: a sideshow?‘ Pearls and Irritations, 27 January 2017 updated Update 5 March 2017: More from Butler on Trump and the implications for Australia. Update 9 February 2017: related piece by Ramesh Thakur in Pearls and Irritations on…
Richard Butler ‘Turnbull, Trump and the Alliance‘, Pearls and Irritations, 14 June 2017 updated Update 3 August 2017: Richard Broinowski in Pearls and Irritations on the broader implications of the Talisman Sabre/Talisman Saber joint military exercise. Update 31 July 2017:…
NG Butlin, A Barnard & JJ Pincus Government and Capitalism: Public and Private Choice in Twentieth Century Australia, Allen & Unwin, North Sydney, 1982 Traces Australian economic and social history up to the 1970s in chapters addressing the ‘decline of…
Clarissa Bye ‘Military heroes in fight of their lives as more veterans die through suicide‘, Daily Telegraph, 16 June 2019 Continues a campaign by Daily Telegraph, including editorially, for a Royal Commission into suicide of Australian Defence Force veterans. Earlier…
Frank Byrne with Frances Coughlan and Gerard Waterford Living in Hope, Ptilotus Press, Alice Springs, 2017 A memoir of boyhood by a man who was removed as a child – from country, from culture and language, from family, from his…
Cahill, Damien & Frank Stilwell, ed. ‘Special issue on the Australian economic boom: 1992-?‘ Journal of Political Economy, 61, June 2008 Sixteen articles on this period of the Australian economy. Multiple authors address Australian economic booms in historical perspective, Australian…
Cahill, Damien & Rowan Cahill ‘The 1978 military occupation of Bowral‘, Illawarra Unity: Journal of the Illawarra Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 6, 1, 2006, pp.24-37 Describes the response to the Sydney Hilton ‘terrorist’…
Cahill, Rowan ‘Alec Campbell, 1899-2002‘, The Hummer (Australian Society for the Study of Labour History), 3, 8, Winter 2002 Gives an honest perspective on Campbell, ‘the last Anzac’, whose military career lasted less than a year (including just six weeks…
Cahill, Rowan ‘A conscription story, 1965-69‘, The Hummer, 2, 4, 1995 (Australasian Society for the Study of Labour History) Memoir of a conscription resister. Such accounts are relatively rare, though see here. Includes the reasons the author gave for his…
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Cahill, Rowan ‘The enemy within‘, Overland, 24 April 2014 Short article on how Australia’s defence forces have been deployed domestically throughout our history, in the Frontier Wars, the Rum Corps era in early New South Wales, during strikes from the…
Cahill, Rowan ‘The future of history‘, Overland, 29 October 2014 Considers former prime minister John Howard’s book on former prime minister Robert Menzies (The Menzies Era) and moves on to remarks about current politics. Cahill says the book is ‘an…
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Cahill, Rowan ‘A khaki future?‘ Overland, 1 October 2013 Brief history of Australia’s ‘martial and warlike’ history from 1788, noting military rule by the New South Wales Corps in the first days of settlement, through preparations for World War I,…
Rowan Cahill ‘Martial love’, The Guardian (London), 7 May 2003 (reprint) ‘Part of the Anzac Myth is the proposition that Australia is a Peace-loving nation, that Peace is the preferred option of the Australian people, that as a nation, Australia…
Cahill, Rowan ‘Martial matters’, Radical Sydney/Radical History, 29 August 2012 A collection of blogs 2006-09 ‘relating to the Anzac tradition, and to the Australian martial tradition generally’ which ‘represent views of the Australian martial experience at radical odds with mainstream…
Rowan Cahill ‘The Battle of Sydney’, Overland, 169, Summer, 2002, pp. 50-54 ‘Account of the wartime strike by Australian troops in Sydney, 1916, in defence of their working conditions. This action involved thousands of soldiers, mutiny, and a march through…
Rowan Cahill ‘The dirty digger’, Green Left Weekly, 451, 6 June 2001 A selective and mythologised account of the past draws young people to Anzac Day celebrations. The chief of the armed forces is the Australian of the Year. Parliament…
Rowan Cahill ‘The military solution’, Green Left Weekly, 459, 7 March 2001 Military, police and private army responses to industrial unrest in the interwar years.
Rowan Cahill ‘Two poets (Denis Kevans and Henry Weston Pryce), war and a manuscript: a review essay’, Honest History, 17 December 2015 In the Special Collections of the Australian Defence Force Academy’s (ADFA) Academic Library is a manuscript by poet…
Frank Cain The Wobblies at War: A History of the IWW and the Great War in Australia, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2017; first published 1993 Driven by Marxist ideology, the Industrial Workers of the World sought to draw the Australian…
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Cain, Frank The Wobblies at War: a History of the IWW and the Great War in Australia, Spectrum Publications, Melbourne, 1993 A simple account of an important industrial and political struggle on the home front. Frank Cain’s book traces the…
AA Calwell Be Just and Fear Not, Lloyd O’Neil, Hawthorn, Vic, 1972 Autobiography of Australia’s first Minister for Immigration (1945-49), later Leader of the (Labor) Opposition (1960-67). Includes a personal view of the commencement of the post-World War II immigration…
JCR Camm & John McQuilton, ed. Australians: A Historical Atlas, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, Broadway, NSW, 1987 A volume in the set Australians: A Historical Library. Maps, graphs and notes under the headings, ‘Place’, ‘People’ and ‘Landscapes’. Excellent illustrations.…
Campbell, Craig & Helen Proctor A History of Australian Schooling, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2014 A social history of school education in Australia, from dame schools and one teacher classrooms in the bush, to the growth of private…
Stuart Campbell ‘Realities of war never hit our TVs or our hearts‘, ABC The Drum, 21 June 2013 The author argues that after Vietnam, Western governments determined that there would never again be an uncensored TV conflict. As an Australian…
Canberra Youth Theatre & Long Cloud Youth Theatre, New Zealand Dead Men’s Wars A play by Ralph McCubbin Howell, directed by Brett Adam, a joint Aotearoa New Zealand-Australia production, which premiered in Canberra, 14 October 2015 with support from The…
Cane, Peter, ed. Centenary Essays for the High Court of Australia, LexisNexis Butterworths, Chatswood, NSW, 2004 ‘Covering the most significant High Court decisions across main legal areas and their subsequent impact on Australian life, this text also thoroughly considers and…
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Cannon, Paul ‘The characteristics of Fascism and how we might note its presence today‘, Parallax (blog), 27 January 2014 Update 2015: there is a speech here, another 1937 snapshot here and a discussion here. Compares the defining characteristics of…
Jane Carey & Claire McLisky, ed. Creating White Australia: New Perspectives on Race, Whiteness and History, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 2009 Articles by Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, Ann Curthoys and others ‘dealing with the question of whiteness in Australian history…
Bronwyn Carlson ‘“Change the date” debates about January 26 distract from the truth telling Australia needs to do‘, The Conversation, 26 January 2023 updated As every year for many years, 26 January generated debates this year, made more significant by…
Carlton, Mike ‘Staring at the abyss, thank God for Alan‘, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 April 2013 The second part of the article is a meditation on Anzac Day, which the author feels has virtually become ‘Anzac Week’. ‘The remembrance of…
Carlyon, Les Gallipoli, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2002; first published 2001 The epitome of large war remembrance books, written for a general audience. The author was a member of the Australian War Memorial Council for some years.
Carlyon, Les The Great War, Macmillan, Sydney, 2006 Winner of the inaugural Prime Minister’s Prize for History, 2007. The author was a member of the Australian War Memorial Council for some years. He discusses his work here.
Andrew Carr ‘I’m here for an argument: why bipartisanship on security makes Australia less safe‘, The Australia Institute, 22 August 2017 updated While bipartisanship seems to be an innocuous idea it is actually making us less safe by restricting policy…
Carr, EH What is History? Penguin, Camberwell, Vic., 2008; first published Macmillan, London, 1961; 2nd edition 1987 A slim classic. Some of the key passages relate to fish and they are directly relevant to the recurring battles over the nature…
Carr, Nicholas ‘When our culture’s past is lost in the cloud‘, Washington Post, 25 March 2016 A review of Abby Smith Rumsey’s book When We are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping our Future. (Perhaps significantly, some editions of…
Lauren Carroll Harris ‘The Iraq War gallery’, The Saturday Paper, 20-26 May 2023; pdf from our subscription In-depth review of the proposed Iraq War section of the new, bigger, Australian War Memorial. Includes revealing quotes from a Memorial creator and…
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Noel Carthew, ed. Voices from the Trenches: Letters to Home, New Holland, Sydney, 2002 Letters of the Carthew brothers from Gallipoli, North Africa, Palestine and the Western Front. The dedication encapsulates a familiar attitude to incomprehensible death and stout service…
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Phil Cashen ‘”Service and sacrifice” in the Great War: analysed (as it should be more often)’, Shire at War, 30 October 2022; 11 December 2022 Update 17 February 2023: Analysis of the wounded returned men from the Shire of Alberton…
Phil Cashen ‘192. Thanksgiving Sunday, 17/11/18‘, Shire at War, 12 November 2018 Another excellent microcosmic piece – Phil Cashen has done 192 of them to date – from the Shire of Alberton, this time closely examining sermons in local churches…
Cashen, Phil ‘Anti-German sentiment in the Shire of Alberton to the end of 1915‘, Shire at War, 7 November 2015 Thorough local research from this Gippsland-based blogger on the degree that people used the anti-German hysteria to flaunt their patriotism.…
Cashen, Phil ‘John Henry Adams‘, Shire at War, 11 August 2015 To further mark the centenary of Lone Pine, another cameo from the Shire at War blog from the Yarram area, Gippsland, Victoria. Adams is interesting because of his divided…
Cashen, Phil ‘Blogging the Great War from Gippsland‘, Honest History, 4 November 2014 Retired school principal and historian, Phil Cashen, writes about how he set up a blog, Shireatwar.com, on the story of the Shire of Alberton, Victoria, during the…
Phil Cashen ‘103. Enlistments in the second half of 1916: background characteristics Part 2 – religion, units and service history‘, Shire at War, 5 February 2017 We have often linked to the sterling work of Phil Cashen of the Shire…
Cashen, Phil ‘Ireland, Empire and Irish-Australians‘, Shire at War, 4 June 2016 Microcosm in Yarram, Gippsland, Victoria, of tensions playing out across Australia. The article briefly outlines the movement towards Irish Home Rule, which stalled with the outbreak of war…
Cashen, Phil ‘Pressed to enlist in the first half of 1915‘, Shire at War, 1 July 2015 From the excellent Shire at War blog, out of Alberton, Gippsland, Victoria, comes this forensic examination of a war of letters to the…
Cashen, Phil ‘Soldiers’ farewells‘, Shire at War, 18 February 2016 Another well-researched piece from Gippsland, this one analysing local newspaper reports on 30 farewells to local soldiers during 1915. Many more men enlisted than received farewells (which is interesting in…
Phil Cashen ‘Spanish flu. Part 1‘, Shire at War, 29 October 2018 updated Update 25 April 2019: Glenn Davies in Independent Australia on Sister Rosa O’Kane, who nursed sufferers from the flu. Good general coverage on the epidemic. *** A…
Phil Cashen ‘The war against drink‘, Shire at War, 9 December 2016 Another post from the excellent Shire at War blog from down Alberton way in Gippsland. This one is about local efforts to defeat the demon drink during the…
Phil Cashen ‘The White Australia Policy: always in the background‘, Shire at War, 28 July 2020 From down Alberton, Gippsland, Victoria way comes this detailed post from blogger-historian, Phil Cashen. It looks at the treatment of the White Australia Policy…
Michael Cathcart Defending the National Tuckshop: Australia’s Secret Army Intrigue of 1931, McPhee Gribble/Penguin, Melbourne, 1988 Describes the anti-socialist vigilantism during the Great Depression, activities which were backed by secret armies with thousands of members. Ex-servicemen were deeply involved as…
Michael Cathcart Manning Clark’s History of Australia, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1995 One volume abridgement.
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Michael Cathcart The Water Dreamers: The Remarkable History of Our Dry Continent, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2010 The book ‘offers an archaeology of our national psyche… and exposes the cultural forces that still powerfully shape our plans for this land’. (Tom…
Caulfield, Michael The Vietnam Years: From the Jungle to the Australian Suburbs, Hachette Australia, Sydney, 2007 Contains many extracts from interviews with both Vietnam veterans and Australians who opposed our involvement in the war. There are recollections of both the…
Committee for Economic Development of Australia Addressing Economic Disadvantage in Australia, CEDA, Melbourne, 2015 This report was released on 21 April 2015. It was described as ‘a policy perspective examining issues associated with the economics of disadvantage’. In other words,…
Cheeseman, Graeme & St John Kettle, ed. The New Australian Militarism: Undermining our Future Security, Pluto Press, Leichhardt, NSW, 1990 Collection of articles driven by a concern that the Hawke Labor Government at the time, driven by then Defence Minister,…
Chubb, Ian ‘There are no free rides to the future: Australia’s Chief Scientist‘, The Conversation, 13 August 2014 and updated Speech mapping current state of play in science – Australia is in only the middle of the pack = and…
Chynoweth, Adele ‘Forgotten or ignored Australians? The Australian museum sector’s marginalisation of Inside – Life in Children’s Homes and Institutions‘, International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 6, 2, pp.171-182 In 2009, the Australian Government announced as part of the National Apology to…
Adele Chynoweth ‘The history wars are over, now it’s time to get politics back in our museums’, The Conversation, 6 March 2013 Australia’s museums should ‘take heart and more importantly show courage to tell the truth, the whole truth, and…
Michael Clanchy ‘In search of “civilised” capitalism: a non-neoliberal approach‘, Independent Australia, 28 February 2017 Socialism is not the answer, as it tends towards totalitarianism, but the ills of neoliberal capitalism still need tackling. These include boom-bust, inequality, underemployment, climate…
Clark, Anna & Paul Ashton, ed. Australian History Now, New South, Sydney, 2013; electronic version available The authors in this anthology include the editors and Alan Atkinson, Tony Birch, Leigh Boucher, Ann Curthoys, Graeme Davison, Tom Griffiths, Paul Kiem, Marilyn…
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Anna Clark ‘Friday essay: the “great Australian silence” 50 years on‘, The Conversation, 3 August 2018 updated Marks the 50th anniversary of the famous Boyer lectures by anthropologist WEH Stanner, which drew attention to Australian reluctance to confront our Indigenous…
Clark, Anna ‘Inheriting the past: historical consciousness across generations‘, Historical Encounters, 1, 1, 2014, pp. 88-102 Despite significant research into the meaning and operation of historical consciousness, there is still much to be understood about its hereditary function. For example,…
Anna Clark History’s Children: History Wars in the Classroom, NewSouth, Sydney, 2008 ‘The classroom has become the battleground of the “history wars”, yet no-one ever asks the children what they think about Australian history and what they like – or…
Clark, Anna ‘Friday essay: on listening to new national storytellers’, The Conversation, 2 September 2016 The author reminds us that ‘each piece of history has a message and context that depends on who wrote it and when. As the US…
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Anna Clark ‘Plenty of fish in the sea? Not necessarily, as history shows‘, The Conversation, 3 October 2017 A look at the history of fishing in Australia, from pre-1788 and going back thousands of years, to now, with draft plans…
Clark, Anna Private Lives, Public History, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2016 The past is consumed on a grand scale: popularised by television programs, enjoyed by reading groups, walking groups, historical societies and heritage tours, and supported by unprecedented digital…
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Clark, Anna ‘Teaching national narratives and values in Australian schools‘, originally published, Agora (History Teachers Association of Victoria), 43, 1, 2008, pp. 4-9 Discusses the Howard Government’s education agenda, attitudes to it and the varying attitudes of students to the…
Clark, Anna Teaching the Nation: Politics and Pedagogy in Australian History, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2006 Starts from Prime Minister’s Howard’s well-known remark in 2000 at Gallipoli that ‘history was not being taught as it should be in Australia’s…
Anna Clark ‘Trench warfare: The Honest History Book‘, Sydney Review of Books, 19 September 2017 Review of The Honest History Book (long read). [The authors, says Clark] provide a powerful argument against the superficial, the commercial, and the celebratory aspects…
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CMH (Manning) Clark A History of Australia, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., six volumes, 1962-87; later editions The sub-titles of some of the volumes attest to the deep themes running within the work: The Earth Abideth for Ever, 1851-1888 (Vol.…
Clark, Ian D, Luise Hercus & Laura Kostanski, ed., Indigenous and Minority Place Names: Australian and International Perspectives, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2014; print and downloadable editions, including print on demand This book showcases current research into Indigenous and…
Clarke, Patricia & Niki Francis ‘Canberra women in World War I: community at home, nurses abroad‘, Women Australia, December 2015 An essay about the role played in the Great War by the women of Canberra – the town was one…
Clarke, Patricia ‘Bias for good or ill? Australian Government overseas propaganda in the 1950s‘, ISAA Articles The author was a journalist in the Australian News and Information Bureau (ANIB) in the 1950s, particularly writing news and features for publication in Asia.…
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Patricia Clarke ‘Jennie Scott Griffiths: a Texas-born red ragger‘, NLA Unbound: the National Library of Australia Magazine, June 2017 A biographical article on this feminist and anti-conscription campaigner during Australia’s Great War. She was an indefatigable worker in radical causes…
Stephen Clarke* ‘What nations remember: Martyn Brown on what happened in Crete in 1941’, Honest History, 30 November 2019 Stephen Clarke reviews Martyn Brown’s Politics of Forgetting: New Zealand, Greece and Britain at War On 20 May 2011, I was an…
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Chris Clarkson, Ben Marwick, Lynley Wallis, Richard Fullagar & Zenobia Jacobs ‘Buried tools and pigments tell a new history of humans in Australia for 65,000 years‘, The Conversation, 20 July 2017 updated A report of work in the Kakadu area…
Claven, Jim ‘From Asia Minor to Anzac Cove: the Odyssey of Peter Rados‘, Neos Kosmos, 11 August 2014 Story of an Anzac born in Ottoman Asia Minor, a member of Sydney’s Greek community. Landed at Gallipoli, 25 April 1915; killed…
Clements, Nicholas The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2014 Between 1825 and 1831 close to 200 Britons and 1000 Aborigines died violently in Tasmania’s Black War. It was by far the…
Peter Cochrane Best We Forget: The War for White Australia, 1914-18, Text, Melbourne, 2018 In the half-century preceding the Great War there was a dramatic shift in the mindset of Australia’s political leaders, from a profound sense of safety in…
Cochrane, Peter Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2006 Colonial Ambition tells the story of the politicians and would-be politicians of Sydney, who were driven by a determination to lift themselves and their new colony…
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Cochrane, Peter Industrialization and Dependence: Australia’s Road to Economic Development, 1870-1939, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld, 1980; downloadable Shows how Australian industrial development in these years was built on close economic integration with Britain.
Cochrane, Peter ‘Book review: Before Rupert: Keith Murdoch and the birth of a dynasty‘, The Conversation, 13 November 2015 Cochrane reviews this new book by Tom DC Roberts. The book starts with Murdoch’s ‘Gallipoli letter’ but goes much further. It is…
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Peter Cochrane Simpson and the Donkey: The Making of a Legend, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1992; revised edition, 2014 The book explores ‘the legend’s popular appeal and its political significance, its permanent place in Australian folklore and its periodic…
Code, Bill ‘The childhood homes of Australia’s prime ministers – in pictures‘, Guardian Australia, 28 October 2014 The imminent (but then delayed) demolition of the home in Kew, Victoria, where Gough Whitlam was born (reputedly on the kitchen table) provoked…
Bruce Coe Pulling Through: The Story of the King’s Cup, Slattery Media, Melbourne, 2019 The story behind the winning of the 1919 King’s Cup by the Australian Imperial Forces No. 1 crew is fascinating. Wartime authorities created diversions for war…
Cogan, James ‘The death of Australian cricketer Phillip Hughes‘, World Socialist Web Site, 2 December 2014 and updated Thoughtful analysis of the national (and international) mourning said to be following the death of Hughes. Concedes his youth, likeability and talent…
Cohen, Roger ‘Australia’s offshore cruelty‘, New York Times, 23 May 2016 Cohen is visiting Australia. He writes on international affairs and diplomacy. This article had more than 100 comments by early on 24 May 2016 AEST. The Australian treatment of…
Colebatch, Hal GP Australia’s Secret War: How Unions Sabotaged our Troops in World War II, Quadrant Books, Balmain, NSW, 2013 Describes strikes and other industrial action on the waterfront during the war, its impact on the war effort and the…
Colebatch, Tim ‘Australia’s urban boom: the latest evidence‘, Inside Story, 5 April 2016 Sometime over the next three months, Sydney’s population will reach five million. If Melbourne keeps growing at its current pace, by 2020 it too will have five million…
Catharine Coleborne ‘The concept of “western civilisation” is past its use-by date in university humanities departments‘, The Conversation, 21 November 2017 Critiques moves driven by the new Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation to revamp BA courses around the idea of ‘Western…
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Bernard Collaery Oil under Troubled Water: Australia’s Timor Sea Intrigue, Melbourne University Press, 2020; electronic edition available In May 2018 Bernard Collaery, a former Attorney-General of the Australian Capital Territory and long-term legal counsel to the government of East Timor,…
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Sarah Collard ‘“It must all be a part of our reckoning with the truth’”: Albanese acknowledges Frontier Wars in House‘, SBS/NITV News, 16 February 2021 updated Update 23 February 2021: Paul Daley in Guardian Australia Albanese’s fine words in federal…
Alan Collins, Bo Yang & Grant Cox ‘What’s Australia made of? Geologically, it depends on the state you’re in‘, The Conversation, 21 November 2017 Tracks back billions of years to show that the western part of Australia is older than…
Paul Collins Burn: The Epic Story of Bushfire in Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2006; Scribe, Melbourne, 2009 The ‘central argument’ of the book ‘is that fire is “part of the very fabric of our continent”, a positive and renewing…
Colmar Brunton Department of Veterans’ Affairs: ‘A Century of Service’: Community Research Phase II: Report (August 2011) Report of focus group research on how Australia should commemorate the Anzac centenary. An issue raised in the report of the Anzac centenary…
St Columbans Mission Society The Way of Peace: Anzac Centenary Edition (1915-2015) A set of discussion and action sheets enabling Christian reflection and response during the Anzac centenary and beyond. The materials cover growing a culture of peace, power and…
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Connor, John, Peter Stanley & Peter Yule The War at Home: The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War Volume 4, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, 2015 The War at Home interprets the experience of the Australian people during the…
Conway, Michael ‘The problem with history classes‘, The Atlantic, 16 March 2015 Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative—a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several…
John Cook with Jon Bauer The Last Lighthouse Keeper: A Memoir, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2020; electronic version available In Tasmania, John Cook is known as ‘The Keeper of the Flame’. As one of Australia’s longest-serving lighthouse keepers, John spent…
Coombs, Anne ‘It seems like a good time to ask: what are governments for?‘ Guardian, 24 June 2016 This piece was re-run in the latest Guardian Weekly (1-7 July) where it earned the additional headline: ‘We give them power to…
Alan Cooper, Ray Tobler & Wolfgang Haak ‘DNA reveals Aboriginal people had a long and settled connection to country‘, Guardian Australia, 9 March 2017 Summarises research reported in Nature (behind expensive paywall) that used historic hair samples collected from Aboriginal people…
Anthony Cooper ‘Retracing Kokoda: in defence of historical revisionism‘, Honest History, 4 August 2014 Critics of revisionism in history, including military history, assume that there is only one version of the story. But historians should interpret evidence and new evidence…
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Jan Cooper* ‘Searching for my father: a war story’, Honest History, 8 April 2019 Recently I went in search of information about my father, Doug Cooper. Like others born in 1940 or thereabouts, I suspected that I was not alone…
Michael Coper Encounters with the Australian Constitution, CCH Australia, North Ryde, NSW, 1988 Essays by a constitutional law academic on the role of the High Court, aspects of constitutional interpretation, whether there should be a Bill of Rights in the…
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Aaron Corn ‘Friday essay: Dr Joe Gumbula, the ancestral chorus, and how we value Indigenous knowledges‘, The Conversation, 29 September 2017 An edited version of the Dr Joe Gumbula Memorial Lecture presented at the 16th Symposium on Indigenous Music and…
Costantino, Emma & Sian Supski, ed. ‘Culinary distinction‘, Journal of Australian Studies, 30, 87, 2006 (special issue) Articles on Indigenous cookery (Laurel Dyson, Colin Bannerman), Australian cuisine in the 19th and 20th centuries (Barbara Santich), Anzac biscuits (Supski), Scocth ovens…
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Cotton, James & David Lee Australia and the United Nations, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra, 2012 Comprehensive and well-illustrated publication (available in hard copy as well as online) with chapters by the editors, academics Neville Meaney, Peter Carroll,…
Cowlishaw, Gillian ‘Friend or foe? anthropology’s encounter with Aborigines‘, Inside Story, 19 August 2015 A reassessment of classical anthropological research (1890s to mid twentieth century). Condemnation of objectionable aspects of colonial power structures should not preclude appreciation of this research.…
Cox, Eva ‘Feminism has failed and needs a rethink‘, The Conversation, 8 March 2016 The author says women achieved formal legal equality ‘but moving past that into wider social equity changes seems definitely to have stalled’. Partly due to neo-liberalism,…
LF Crisp Ben Chifley: A Biography, Longmans, Croydon, Vic, 1963; first published 1961 Classic Australian political biography, though criticised by some as hagiography. Particularly useful on the period after World War II, when Chifley as Prime Minister and Treasurer dealt…
LF Crisp The Australian Federal Labour Party 1901-1951, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1978; first published 1955 Classic account of Labor’s first half century, written by a man who headed a Commonwealth public service department at the age of 32, was…
Crispin, Judith In Noah’s Country: a Roadtrip through Post-Genocide Armenia, T & G Publishing, Sydney, 2015 Australian history has been bound up with that of Armenia and the Armenians since 24 April 1915, which saw the beginning of the archetypal…
Jacky Croke ‘Old floods show Brisbane’s next big wet might be closer than we think‘, The Conversation, 10 January 2017 Historical view of flooding in the Brisbane area. It links to more detailed material done under an Australian Research Council…
Crombie, Kelvin Gallipoli – The Road to Jerusalem, Koorong Books, West Ryde, NSW, 2014 The Gallipoli Campaign which began on 25 April 1915 was one of the biggest Allied defeats of World War One. Yet it stirred the imaginations and…
Martin Crotty, Martin & David Roberts, ed. Turning Points in Australian History, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2008 Contributors consider the separation of Tasmania from the mainland, the Gallipoli landing, the Great Depression, the arrival of television, the…
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Martin Crotty & Marina Larsson, ed. Anzac Legacies: Australians and the Aftermath of War, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2010 The book explores the difficulties that returning soldiers have faced, from World War I to Iraq and Afghanistan, traces the physical…
Martin Crotty ‘In their footsteps? Anzac fun runs and the consumption of the past’, Honest History, 7 February 2017 The author, a fun runner, describes some Anzac-themed running events and what they say about the current desire of some of…
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Crowe, Russell (director) The Water Diviner, Fear of God Films and other production companies, Australia, 2014 Alison Broinowski briefly reviews the film for Honest History. A further review from Peter Stanley, including a link to an interview with the writers…
Shaun Crowe Whitlam’s Children: Labor and the Greens in Australia, MUP Academic, Melbourne, 2018; electronic version available Over the past three decades, progressive politics in Australia has undergone a gradual but unmistakable transformation. Where the Australian Labor Party once enjoyed…
Frank Crowley, ed. A New History of Australia, William Heinemann, Melbourne, 1974; later edition 1986 A multi-author history intended to take the place of the Gordon Greenwood edited Australia from twenty years earlier. Twelve authors dealt with the years 1788…
Crowther, Philip & Lindy Osborne ‘Building a nation: the state of play in Australian architecture‘, The Conversation, 1 November 2013 Brief historical survey, leading to the point where Australia now has seven of the 100 largest architectural practices in the…
Denis Cryle Behind the Legend: The Many Worlds of Charles Todd, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2017 “Telegraph” Todd [the man behind the Overland Telegraph through Central Australia] became a legend in his own lifetime for introducing Australian colonists to a…
Culture Victoria Out of the Closets, Into the Streets This project documents the very beginning of the Gay Liberation Movement in Melbourne. Through the manifestos, photographs, flyers and recollections of those who were part of the movement, this digital story…
Curby, Pauline ‘An urban myth or surfing history?‘, Honest History, 17 June 2015 The author explores the story surrounding a famous change to the rules regarding sea-bathing in pre-Great War Sydney. As this story is part of our surfing history,…
Curnoe, Darren ‘Ancient Australia: world’s first nation of innovators‘, The Conversation, 11 May 2016 Discoveries of Indigenous Australian history discount the idea that pre-European society was ‘primitive’. Instead, ‘the continent’s Indigenous people were truly pioneers in the global (collective) journey…
Curran, James & Stuart Ward The Unknown Nation: Australia after Empire, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2010 The book considers Australia’s search for national identity as ‘the receding ties of empire and Britishness posed an unprecedented dilemma as Australians lost…
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James Curran ‘Trump and the future of the US-Australia alliance‘, Daily Review, 17 December 2016 Extract from a Lowy Institute paper to be published 19 December and titled, Fighting with America. The tag line of this publication is ‘Why saying…
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Curran, James Unholy Fury: Whitlam and Nixon at War, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2015 (e-book available) In the early 1970s, two titans of Australian and American politics, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and President Richard Nixon, clashed over the end…
Ann Curthoys & Ann McGrath, ed. Writing Histories: Imagination and Narration, Monash Publications in History, Monash University, Melbourne, 2000; republished Monash University Publishing, Melbourne, 2009 (full text online free) ‘Nine historians reflect on their work as writers, exploring some of…
Ann Curthoys & Ann McGrath How to Write History that People Want to Read, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2009 ‘Aimed at all kinds of people who write history – academic historians, public historians, professional historians, family historians and students of all…
Ann Curthoys & John Docker, ed. “Genocide”? Australian Aboriginal history in international perspective’, Aboriginal History, 25, 2001, special section (downloadable) Multiple contributors on aspects of genocide and aboriginality. There is a brief survey here of instances of genocide in world…
Ann Curthoys & John Docker Is History Fiction? University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2010; first published 2005 ‘John Docker and Ann Curthoys find that history has a double character. It is both a rigorous scrutiny of sources, and,…
Curthoys, Ann & Marilyn Lake, ed. Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, ANU e-press, Canberra, 2006; free online version This volume brings together historians of imperialism and race, travel and modernity, Islam and India, the Pacific and the Atlantic to…
Ann Curthoys, AW Martin & Tim Rowse, ed. Australians from 1939, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, Broadway, NSW, 1987 One of the volumes in Australians: A Historical Library. Thirty historians, political scientists and citizens contribute to sections on Australians and…
Have your say with the National Capital Authority on the Memorial’s ‘early works’ application. You don’t need to live in Canberra. Arguments here. *** Katina Curtis ‘War Memorial redevelopment will force Anzac Day ceremonies to move‘, Sydney Morning Herald, 29…
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Cutler, David ‘“You have to know history to actually teach it”‘, The Atlantic, 10 January 2014 Eric Foner is a Pulitzer Prize winner (2011 for The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery) who has written a number of books…
John Daley & Brendan Coates ‘Why every generation feels entitled‘, The Conversation, 15 December 2016 Refers to the Grattan Institute’s report Age of Entitlement, on age-based tax breaks, which concluded ‘senior Australians get tax breaks unavailable to younger Australians worth…
Daley, Paul (with illustrations by Mike Bowers) ‘Battlefields’, Honest History, 12 June 2014 Battlefields of France and Palestine, 2009 and 2011: a portfolio of photographs by Mike Bowers Paul Daley, columnist for the Guardian Australia, has written a number of…
Daley, Paul with Michael Bowers Armageddon: Two Men on an Anzac Trail, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2011 Retraces the steps of the Australian Light Horse through Palestine with the author and photographer finding occasion for both happiness and sadness. The speech…
Paul Daley ‘As long as we always remember them…‘, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 November 2010 Compares Australian attitudes to Remembrance and Anzac Days, suggesting this grew from the early attitudes of the Diggers, who felt the former day was more…
Daley, Paul ‘25 years of reconciliation and what do we have to show for it?‘ Guardian Australia, 3 June 2016 Written in Reconciliation Week, the article argues indicators are going backwards, gaps are widening and sovereignty is unacknowledged. And, after…
Paul Daley ‘A $500m expansion of the war memorial is a reckless waste of money‘, Guardian Australia, 9 April 2018 Picks up the issue also canvassed by David Stephens of Honest History. Having spent more than half a billion dollars…
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Daley, Paul ‘Anthony Martin Fernando: the Aboriginal activist who took his people’s fight to London‘, Guardian Australia, 3 July 2015 [Fernando] is probably the first Indigenous Australian to dedicate his life to activism in Europe … His attempt to petition…
On the anniversary of the Cronulla riots between flag-draped anglo-australian and Lebanese youths, Paul Daley writes in the The Guardian online questioning the appropriation of the Australian flag and the Southern Cross motif, as well as the politicisation of race divisions…
Daley, Paul ‘Crowdsourcing is our latest weapon against nationalism and “Anzackery”‘, Guardian Australia, 29 December 2014 Daley quotes the coiner of the term ‘Anzackery’, Geoffrey Serle, writing in 1967, and goes on: Anzackery. What a word … Anzackery. Is there…
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Paul Daley ‘As the toll of Australia’s frontier brutality keeps climbing, truth telling is long overdue‘, Guardian Australia, 4 March 2019 updated Major article on our continuing neglect of killings of Indigenous Australians from 1788 till at least 1928. Examines…
Daley, Paul ‘Ataturk’s “Johnnies and Mehmets” words about the Anzacs are shrouded in doubt‘, Guardian Australia, 20 April 2015 and updated Examines the famous Ataturk words of 1934, drawing upon research by the Turkish scholar, Cengiz Ozakinci. Links to a…
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Daley, Paul ‘In the Anzac centenary, it’s time to honour Australia’s forgotten soldiers‘, Guardian Australia, 15 March 2014 The author notes the centenary expenditure of $8 million on refurbishing war graves and memorials in Australia and overseas. He refers to…
Paul Daley ‘Australian patriotism: it’s not about war, it’s in our love of the land‘, Guardian Australia, 7 May 2016 updated Daley rejects violent metaphors for election campaigns and suggests patriotism, always evoked at such times, is more subtle and…
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Daley, Paul ‘Australian War Memorial: the remarkable rise and rise of the nation’s secular shrine‘, Guardian Australia, 19 May 2015 Lengthy extracts of interview with Director Brendan Nelson. He touches on the AWM’s tourism pulling power (one ahead of the…
Paul Daley ‘Beating the khaki drum: how Australian identity was militarised‘, Guardian Australia, 1 February 2018 Pulls together the themes of Anzackery, arms manufacturers inflicting advertising on Canberra airport users, and the same manufacturers donating to the Australian War Memorial…
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Paul Daley Beersheba: A Journey through Australia’s Forgotten War, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2009; later editions Combines a history of the cavalry charge at Beersheba and the massacre at Surafend (by Australians and New Zealanders of around 137 local Arabs)…
Daley, Paul ‘Black diggers: challenging Anzac myths‘, Guardian Australia, 14 January 2014 Looks at the stories of black servicemen during World War I, in the context of a new play ‘Black Diggers’. About 400 Indigenous Australians joined up. Notes that…
Paul Daley ‘Both major parties were suckerpunched into supporting the $500m war memorial expansion‘, Guardian Australia, 22 April 2019 updated One of the signatories of the open letter against the War Memorial extensions provides a passionate but well-reasoned analysis of…
Paul Daley ‘Story of cities #17: Canberra’s vision of the ideal city gets mired in “mediocrity”‘, Guardian, 7 April 2016 Long article for London Guardian about the history of Canberra. Daley has written a book on the city also. This…
Paul Daley Collingwood: A Love Story, MUP, Carlton, Vic., 2011 Intertwines strands of family history, war and sport in the story of Collingwood footballers, Malcolm ‘Doc’ Seddon, Percy Rowe, also known as Paddy Rowan (killed in France, 1916) and Louisa…
Paul Daley ‘Colonial Australia’s foundation is stained with the profits of British slavery‘, Guardian Australia, 21 September 2018 Riffs off recently published book, Island Off the Coast of Asia: Instruments of Statecraft in Australian Foreign Policy, by Clinton Fernandes. Fernandes…
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Daley, Paul ‘Our major cultural institutions are in crisis – and our history is being militarised‘, Guardian Australia, 22 February 2016 updated ‘What price do we put on a nation’s memory? And what should that memory recall?’ Analyses the current…
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Paul Daley ‘Decolonising the dictionary: reclaiming Australian history for the forgotten‘, Guardian Australia, 17 February 2019 updated Long article pointing to the deficiencies in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB, located at the Australian National University), especially its earlier volumes…
Daley, Paul ‘Gough Whitlam: 40 years on, the Dismissal’s bastardry still intrigues‘, Guardian Australia, 31 October 2015 Grows out of the author’s involvement in the ‘Live Tweeting the Dismissal‘ exercise run by the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament…
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Daley, Paul ‘”It taunts us spiritually”: the fight for Indigenous relics spirited off to the UK‘, Guardian Australia, 14 February 2015 Updates the battle by Indigenous Australians to return to Australia relics taken to England by collectors in the nineteenth…
Paul Daley ‘Five factors that will shape the outcome for “recognise” at Uluru‘, Guardian Australia, 24 May 2017 updated Surveys the state of play as the Uluru conference gets under way. The ‘five factors’: the lack of interest of many…
Daley, Paul ‘Why does the Australian War Memorial ignore the frontier war?‘ The Guardian Australia, 12 September 2013 Bordered with militarily precise shrubs including the herb of remembrance, rosemary, the outer walls are adorned with a series of elaborately carved…
Paul Daley ‘The Heart of Honest History’ (Honest History Launch, 7 November 2013, Manning Clark House, Canberra), Honest History, 8 November 2013 Thanks Peter [Stanley]. Thanks Sebastian [Clark]. I, too acknowledge the traditional owners of this land [Canberra]. And thanks…
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Paul Daley ‘How do we settle the “statue wars”? Let’s start by telling the truth about our past‘, Guardian Australia, 29 June 2018 The author says colonial-era statues, properly considered, can lead us towards an honest history. The article riffs…
Daley, Paul ‘Indigenous Diggers and the new age of Anzackery‘, Meanjin, 2 April 2015 Contrasts the commemorative festival with the treatment of an atypical Indigenous Digger, caught between cultures. The opening paragraphs are a good summary of the history of…
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Daley, Paul ‘Restless indigenous remains‘, Meanjin, 73, 1, March 2014 The author explores the storage facilities of the National Museum of Australia and writes about the implications for the way we treat the dead from our wars, overseas and at…
Daley, Paul ‘Indigenous songlines: a beautiful way to think about the confluence of story and time‘, Guardian Australia, 4 July 2016 For NAIDOC Week (3-10 July), a sensitive introduction (by a whitefeller) to songlines, a central part of Indigenous Australian…
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Daley, Paul ‘It’s not “politically correct” to say Australia was invaded, it’s history‘, Guardian Australia, 30 March 2016 updated This article comments on the Daily Telegraph‘s comment on a diversity guide at the University of New South Wales, pointing out…
Paul Daley Jesustown: A Novel, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2022 From award-winning journalist Paul Daley comes a gripping multi-generational saga about Australian frontier violence and cultural theft that will capture the national imagination … Morally bereft popular historian Patrick Renmark…
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Daley, Paul ‘Lachlan Macquarie was no humanitarian: his own words show he was a terrorist‘, Guardian Australia, 5 April 2016 Discusses the strategy employed towards Indigenous Australians by New South Wales Governor (1810-22) Lachlan Macquarie. Macquarie is perhaps the most…
Daley, Paul ‘Australia’s lavish spending on Anzac memorials cloaks a more distasteful reality‘, Guardian Australia, 11 November 2015 [A] century after the first world war began, I think it is well and truly time to reflect on how it is,…
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Paul Daley ‘Military buff Tony Abbott is the wrong choice for the Australian War Memorial‘, Guardian Australia, 9 October 2019 updated The war memorial’s council lacks a professional historian and critics say it’s like a hospital being run by homeopaths…
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Paul Daley ‘Morrison says troops died “for a great cause” in Afghanistan. To quote a grieving father, that’s bullshit‘, Guardian Australia, 16 August 2021 Scott Morrison is shamelessly audacious to claim Australian service personnel died for “a great cause” in this country’s…
Daley, Paul ‘My Brother Jack at 50 – the novel of a man whose whole life led up to it‘, Guardian Australia, 23 December 2014 Covers the novel (first published 1964), the author, George Johnston (died of alcohol and TB…
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Paul Daley ‘Narcha’s remains have been repatriated. But colonialism’s malevolence lingers‘, Guardian Australia, 3 April 2017 Douglas Grant is perhaps Australia’s best known Indigenous Anzac. The remains of one of Grant’s close relatives – Ngadjon elder Narcha, also known as…
Daley, Paul ‘A contest about peace not war‘, Canberra Times, 21 April 2013 Contrasts the Anzac Day AFL match with an Anzac Day parade in a small town. My view has always been that Anzac commemoration, while largely a communal…
Daley, Paul ‘Love him or hate him, Peter FitzSimons gives republicanism a megaphone‘, Guardian Australia, 24 February 2016 Looks at the rejuvenation of republicanism under Peter FitzSimons, including the support that has been extracted from most State premiers and chief…
Daley, Paul ‘Anzac Day should be quarantined from politicians – a solemn moment to reflect on the agony of war‘, Guardian Australia, 23 April 2015 In a generation’s time the Anzacs will have slipped from living memory entirely. None of…
Daley, Paul ‘The man who renounced Australia,’ Guardian Australia, 26 August 2014 The story of Murrumu Walubara Yidindji, formerly Jeremy Geia, who has ‘left’ Australia, while remaining within it, and who believes Yidindji laws, as the laws of the original…
Daley, Paul ‘Australia spares no expense as the Anzac legend nears its century‘, The Guardian Australia, 15 October 2013 Notes the mystical place of Gallipoli in Australian history and how this is reflected in ever-increasing expenditure on the Anzac centenary.…
Paul Daley ‘Statues are not history. Here are six in Australia that need rethinking‘, Guardian Australia, 25 August 2017 Daley targets statues of Lachlan Macquarie, John Batman, Thomas Mitchell, Angus McMillan, Alfred Canning and James Cook. We do not learn…
Paul Daley ‘The Anzac skull that tells a shocking and tragic story of battlefield violence‘, Guardian Australia, 25 September 2017 updated Story of an Anzac soldier’s skull exhibited in an American medical museum’s online exhibition. The soldier was shot near…
Paul Daley ‘The Armenians and the Warlpiri: two genocides that sparked a pilgrimage to the outback‘, Guardian Australia, 8 December 2016 Describes the journey of two Armenian priests into Warlpiri country. The visit was organised by Judith Crispin, who has…
Paul Daley ‘The Australian War Memorial’s expansion money would be better spent on traumatised veterans‘, Guardian Australia, 3 July 2020 Update later: More than 85 comments by 6.00 pm AEST, most with thumbs up attached – and not one supporting…
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Paul Daley ‘The legacy reverberates: how a repulsive image reminds us of our ugly past‘, Guardian Australia, 19 June 2017 Riffs off Every Mother’s Son is Guilty: Policing the Kimberley Frontier of Western Australia 1882-1905, by Chris Owen, the cover…
Paul Daley ‘The National Picture: overwhelming reminder of wilful gaps in Australia’s history‘, Guardian Australia, 14 May 2018 Review of a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ‘The National Picture: the art of Tasmania’s Black War’. The…
Paul Daley ‘The strange case of the weapons maker and the Australian children’s charity‘, Guardian Australia, 4 December 2020 Chronicles the slow retreat of Australian charity, The Smith Family, from its involvement with arms manufacturer, BAE Systems. Persistent pressure, ultimately…
Paul Daley ‘Tim Fischer’s ties‘, Museum of Australian Democracy Old Parliament House Blog, 7 June 2017 An example of how to hang an insightful biographical piece off a clothing accessory (which, in this case, itself hangs, but hangs correctly only…
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Paul Daley ‘Uluru, reconciliation and republic: a chance to reimagine Australia?‘ Guardian Australia, 4 April 2018 There is an awakening among constitutional progressives that perhaps the Australian republic ought not be so divorced from the cry out of Uluru last…
Daley, Paul ‘“He should have died”: the Vietnam veteran who never really returned‘, Guardian Australia, 25 November 2015 Partly a review of historian Michael McKernan’s memoir (When this Thing Happened) about his brother-in-law, Joe Stawyskyj, a national servicemen, injured for…
Paul Daley ‘War and pieces‘, The Global Mail, 9 November 2012 updated Story of the pilfering (or, depending on your point of view, rescuing or taking as a legitimate trophy of war) of the Shellal Mosaic by members of the…
Paul Daley ‘Who should lead the Australian War Memorial?‘ ArtsHub, 2 September 2019 Criticises the suggestion that Tony Abbott might become Director of the Memorial, or even (perhaps) join its Council. Like Anzac, the memorial has been immune to political…
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Daley, Paul ‘Why Australia Day and Anzac Day helped create a national “cult of forgetfulness”‘, Guardian Australia, 16 October 2016 updated Update 21 August 2017: Tony Smith on Pearls and Irritations muses about the proposal by Yarra Council in Melbourne…
Damousi, Joy & Marilyn Lake, ed. Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2nd edition, 2011; first published 1995 Essays which explore ‘the inter-relationship of gender and war in Australia for the first…
Damousi, Joy Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2001; e-book available The book ‘based on oral testimonies, focuses on the shifting patterns of mourning and grief in the experiences of Australian…
Damousi, Joy The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1999; e-book available The Labour of Loss explores how mothers, fathers, widows, relatives and friends dealt with their experiences of grief and loss…
Stephen Dando-Collins Heroes of Hamel: The Australians and Americans whose WWI Victory Changed Modern Warfare, Vintage & Random House, Melbourne, 2018; e-book available The battle of Hamel was remarkable for its speed, the tactics employed, numerous acts of extreme bravery,…
Dando-Collins, Stephen The Hero Maker: A Biography of Paul Brickhill, Penguin Random House, Melbourne & Sydney, 2016 In The Hero Maker, award-winning historical author and biographer Stephen Dando-Collins exposes the contradictions of one of Australia’s most successful, but troubled, writers.…
Mark Dapin Australia’s Vietnam: Myth vs History, NewSouth, Sydney, 2019 This book should be read by anyone interested in the way myths become accepted as history.’ — Peter Edwards, author of Australia and the Vietnam War Why everything you think you…
Mark Dapin Public Enemies: Russell “Mad Dog” Cox, Ray Denning and the Golden Age of Armed Robbery, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2020; electronic version available In the Australia of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, armed robbers were the top of…
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Dapin, Mark The Nashos’ War: Australia’s National Servicemen and Vietnam, Penguin Viking, Melbourne, 2014 [O]ur ideas of national service contain strange contradictions and inaccuracies: that the draft was unpopular but militarily necessary; that the nashos in Vietnam all volunteered to…
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Darian-Smith, Kate, Patricia Grimshaw & Stuart Macintyre, ed. Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2007 Britishness Abroad explores the cultural, economic and political aspects of Britishness in Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, Canada and…
Davey, Melissa ‘Australia’s gun laws stopped mass shootings and reduced homicides, study finds‘, Guardian Australia, 23 June 2016 Over 500 comments on this piece which reports a longitudinal (20 year) study by Sydney and Macquarie University researchers. The original article…
‘When history does more harm than good: highlights reel’, Honest History, 15 March 2016 David Rieff is about to publish a new book In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies. His short work, Against Remembrance, published in 2011,…
Davidson, Alistair From Subject to Citizen: Australian Citizenship in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997 ‘The central theme is that making proofs of belonging to the national culture a precondition of citizenship is inappropriate for a multicultural society…
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Jared Davidson Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914-20, Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2019 Intimate and engaging, this dramatic narrative weaves together the personal and political, bringing to light the reality of wartime censorship. In an age of growing…
Davidson, Jim ‘The biography as periscope: exploring Australian ambiences‘, Meanjin, 73, 1, March 2014 Looks at how biography gives ‘glimpses of another world. A life will progress from one ambience to another, and at certain points the biographer can pause…
Davidson, Jim ‘Sport with guns‘, Meanjin, 67, 4, Summer 2008, pp.10-13 Suggests that Australia’s ‘celebration of the military’ has addled our consciousness, in the way that, according to Patrick White, sport had done. ‘The two things are connected. Under John…
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Davies, Alan An Eye for Photography: The Camera in Australia, Miegunyah Press & State Library of New South Wales, Carlton, Vic., & Sydney, 2004 The book ‘traces the development of photography in Australia from the earliest daguerreotypes to digital imagery…
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Geoff Davies ‘Lest we also forget‘, Pearls and Irritations, 20 November 2018 Pungent and telling piece by an author and retired scientist. He enjoins us regarding a number of important events and issues, introducing each one with the words ‘lest…
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Robin Davies & Andrew Rosser ‘FactCheck: What are the facts on Australia’s foreign aid spending?‘ The Conversation, 31 January 2017 Questions the assertion by World Vision’s Tim Costello that Australia’s best foreign aid performance was under the Menzies government before…
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Graeme Davison, JW McCarty & Ailsa McLeary, ed. Australians 1888, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, Broadway, NSW, 1987 One of the volumes in Australians: A Historical Library. The authors write about land and people, the regional mosaic, private lives and…
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Davison, Graeme, John Hirst & Stuart Macintyre, ed., with the assistance of Helen Doyle & Kim Torney The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, Vic., 1998; revised edition 2001; e-version available This superb new companion provides…
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Graeme Davison with Sheryl Yelland Car Wars: How the Car Won Our Hearts and Conquered Our Cities, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2004 War snuffs out lives and begets dreams. For servicemen and civilians alike, World War II was…
Davison, Graeme ‘Distance and destiny‘, Inside Story, 28 July 2016 Reflection on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance. The Tyranny of Distance changed our map of the Australian past. It was a bestseller…
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Graeme Davison ‘Do we belong here? Reflections on family, locality and community (Address to the Victorian Community History Awards, 16 October 2017)‘, RHSV News, November 2017, pp. 4-5 This speech was delivered in Melbourne. It asks some important questions: Do…
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Graeme Davison ‘The habit of commemoration and the revival of Anzac Day’, Australian Cultural History, 22, 2003, pp. 73-82 A recent survey on ‘Australians and the Past’ questioned the assumption that ‘public celebrations are a clue to private sentiments’. (p.…
Davison, Graeme Narrating the Nation in Australia: Menzies Lecture 2009, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Kings College London, The Australia Centre, London, 2009 Explores four narratives or foundation myths of settler societies such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa…
Graeme Davison ‘The year of living anxiously‘, Inside Story, 26 June 2018 Long review of the recently published book by Phillipa McGuinness, NewSouth publisher. The book is called The Year Everything Changed: 2001. The book offers, says Davison an understanding…
Davison, Graeme The Use and Abuse of Australian History, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2000 Wide-ranging collection on many aspects of public, local and cultural history. The first chapter, ‘Introduction: Australian history on the eve of the millennium’, is…
David Day Andrew Fisher: Prime Minister of Australia, Fourth Estate/Harper Collins, Pymble, NSW, 2008 Fisher seems to personify the fracture that the Great War wrought in the Labor Party and in Australia: from presiding over significant nation-building and social reforms…
David Day Ben Chifley, Harper Collins, Pymble, NSW, 2001; paperback edition 2007 as Chifley: A Life Draws upon 40 years of research and writing since Crisp’s Ben Chifley but still produces a largely favourable portrait. Essential reading regarding the political…
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David Day John Curtin: A Life, Harper Collins, Pymble, NSW, 1998; paperback edition 2006 Curtin played a part on the home front in World War I as an anti-conscription agitator, then led the nation as a war prime minister in…
Dean, Peter, ed. Australia 1943: the Liberation of New Guinea, Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, 2013 Includes chapters on the strategies of both sides and on army, navy and air operations in the Pacific and New Guinea. Authors include Dean,…
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Peter J. Dean, ed. Australia 1942: In the Shadow of War, Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, Vic., 2013 A collection of essays on a momentous year in Australia’s history. The authors include David Horner, Kate Darian-Smith, Ross McMullin, Alan Powell…
Dean, Peter J. ‘Commemoration, memory, and forgotten histories: complexity and limitations of Australian army biography‘, War and Society, 29, 2, October 2010, pp. 118-36 Addresses the question ‘how far has biography been utilized in understanding the history of the Australian…
Phillip Deery & Julie Kimber, ed. Fighting against War: Peace Activism in the Twentieth Century, Leftbank Press/Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Melbourne, 2015 The book includes 15 of the papers delivered at the 14th Biennial Labour History…
Defending Country Memorial Project Inc.[1] ‘Time to be honest about the Australian Frontier Wars: No. 1 in a series’, Honest History, 9 August 2023 updated The Australian War Memorial must properly recognise and commemorate the Australian Frontier Wars as an…
Defending Country Memorial Project Inc.[1] ‘Time to be honest about the Australian Frontier Wars: No. 2 in a series’, Honest History, 13 August 2023 updated The Australian War Memorial must properly recognise and commemorate the Australian Frontier Wars as an…