'Our first issue of 2020 kicks off with some powerfully pertinent items. The president’s report acknowledges the urgency of our discipline’s work while the country struggles to comprehend the scale of the fire disaster and to forge an adequate public response. As Prof. Damousi points out, historians are critical to both tasks, and this will be underscored especially at the next Australian Historical Association (AHA) annual conference at Deakin University, entitled ‘Urgent Histories’.' (Kate Fullagar , Michelle Arrow & Leigh Boucher : Editorial introduction)
'In recent years Australian historians have begun to show the ways in which Australia’s black history has simultaneously been concealed and disclosed over a long period of time. This article focuses on one such example of this phenomenon – a 1937 fictionalised family history by the Western Australian writer Henrietta Drake-Brockman – and seeks to uncover the unusual set of biographical, historical, intellectual and generic factors that spurred her to raise questions about this black history rather than look the other way. At the same time, we examine the ways in which Drake-Brockman herself turned a blind eye to the Drake-Brockmans’ entanglement with another racial history.' (Publication abstract)
'Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan tells the story of the battle of Long Tan, one of the largest battles fought by the Australian Task Force during the Vietnam War. Although considerable attention has been paid to getting the details right in the mechanics of the battle, the movie depicts the battle devoid of its political or military context.' (Introduction)
'In Hunters and Collectors (1996), his classic study of antiquarianism in Australia, Tom Griffiths captured something of the Victorian zeitgeist, especially its attitude to the first Australians. The book is populated with an extraordinary array of fanatical collectors, hellbent on acquiring every stone and bone they could lay their hands on. Some gathered artefacts by the cartload. The museums that would in time acquire many such collections were enriched by these labours. But Aboriginal people knew the violence of extracting patrimony from its place of belonging. The acquisition of material culture, nominally in the service of science, marked a tertiary phase in the process of colonisation.' (Introduction)
