'In this issue of Australian Historical Studies, recent scholarship highlights the ways that Australia and Australians have been shaped by global connections and influences – so that ‘looking back’ to our history is also an exercise in ‘looking out’ to the world. In the opening section on ‘Music and Dance’, two articles chart the history of international connections and local adaptations that occurred in the arts across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.' (Editorial introduction)
'From 1950, ‘ethnic dancer’ Beth Dean made her living on a lecture-demonstration touring circuit of the dance traditions of Australia, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and North America. To assert her expertise, she claimed to have studied Māori and Australian Aboriginal cultures for a number of years. This article investigates how Dean’s didactic performances drew on American traditions of ethnic dance to present apparently authoritative representations of Indigenous cultures, supported by Adult Education Boards in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia and national arts organisations. I argue that Dean exploited the symbolic potential of ‘corroboree’ as a performance of intercultural communication to establish her authority to speak about and perform Australian Aboriginal dance.' (Introduction)
'I try to comfort myself with the thought that Jill might smile at this gesture towards an Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) entry, in homage to her tireless efforts to sustain the dictionary over many years: her first entry in 1969, longstanding membership of the New South Wales Working Party, and appointment to the Editorial Board, which she chaired from 1996 to 2006.' (Introduction)
'Even if The Art of Time Travel were not a generous, thoughtful, and perceptive book, its appearance would still be cause for celebration. A trade publisher has taken on a long book exploring general questions about the nature of historical thinking. More than a few readers of Australian Historical Studies will have sat through or taken part in panel discussions on ‘why history matters’; Griffiths and Black Inc. have had the confidence to trust that readers know history matters and will be interested in the questions it poses about time, change, and perspective.' (Introduction)
'The intriguing image of an early twentieth-century English gentleman bicycling around Tasmania with his tent to collect Aboriginal stone tools and interview descendants of the island’s first people will likely capture readers’ imaginations. The man was Ernest Westlake, a learned and eccentric Quaker who travelled extensively in pursuit of his intellectual goals.' (Introduction)
'‘The crucial starting point of this book’, art historian Ian McLean states in his introduction to Rattling Spears, ‘is that Indigenous art has a modern history; it is one of the many modernisms produced from modernity’s global reach’ (8). The book is not a compendium of definitions and interpretations for the general reader, or an anthropological account of Indigenous art, or an attempt to situate it within an Australian art historical narrative. Instead, it is founded on the concept of transculturation – of cross-cultural pollination, influence and exchange, enabling a stimulating and sometimes challenging reading of key figures in the field. McLean’s text makes an important departure in identifying and foregrounding the agency of Indigenous artists in their encounters with colonisers and in their contact with the modern world, presenting a ‘history of how Indigenous artists engaged with, and responded to, this meeting with modernity and in the process became modern artists’ (11). In short, it is not the history of this subject but a history, a thoughtful study which insists on resisting the inclination to interpret the output of Indigenous artists as being somehow diminished for having been created post-contact, demonstrating instead the inventiveness, resilience and defiance intrinsic in ‘contact art’. The rattling spears of the title, McLean explains, ‘is a chilling sound that calls ancestors from their sleep. It is also a strategic manoeuvre to reclaim authority’ (130).' (Introduction)
