Home page features – once and future

Assiduous followers of Honest History will know that we have links on our home page to sections of the site that we try to update reasonably regularly. Apart from the venerable ‘Centenary Watch‘, which we know is a favourite read for the commemoration industry, there is ‘Teaching children about war‘, which we have sometimes thought of renaming ‘Teaching war to children’, and ‘First Peoples, Frontier Wars and the Queen’s uniform‘, which keeps track of commentary on relations between people in this Wide Brown Land and in the khaki-uniformed sections of it.

More recently, we have added ‘Ataturkery’, which is not meant to be disrespectful of anyone but includes a quick link to the work we (and Guardian Australia, through Paul Daley) have done on the provenance of some ubiquitous words. We are still working quietly in this area and there is more to come. One thing we discovered recently was the proposal in 1984-85 to rename as ‘Ataturk Parade’ the section of Limestone Parade, Canberra, in front of the Australian War Memorial. Instead, we got the Ataturk Memorial in Anzac Parade.

Then there is ‘Spratlyswatch’, rather a catchy title for events in the South and East China Sea, which links to material which evokes (in those of us old enough to remember) feelings a bit like those we felt in October 1962. Elements of the Australian media seem to find this issue a bit hard to follow and have been leaving it alone. We are trying to make up for this, given our continuing interest in the area since late 2013 when we did an interview with Hugh White from ANU. Events around the Spratlys (and the evergrowing sandcastles in their vicinity) are eminently contemporary, as well as ringing lots of bells regarding Australia’s historical place in Asia and its relations with big players there.

We hope soon to add to the list of front page featured links by adding a link on inequality. This topic is again one that has exercised us in the past but we are working on a piece that looks closely at some work done in 1916 which is directly relevant to the topic of disparities in wealth and income and which threw up some surprising results. Watch this space.

Finally, as well as all of the above, remember that new material on the Honest History site appears regularly in ‘Latest posts’ (right hand side of the home page), then usually slips to recent posts and recent reviews in the middle of the page, then can be found using our small but perfectly formed search engine, or viewed on our tagged lists or linked to our introductory essays.

We also have a general introduction to how the site works. A recent count has us with just under 1400 unique posts and over 3200 items in our tagged lists (most posts get more than one tag) but we know that these numbers are less important than the quality of the material and the ease of finding it. We aim to please – but let us know where we can do better.

The Honest History Elves

9 June 2015