'We write this introduction in changed and challenging circumstances, with an acute awareness of how unevenly the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have been distributed among the AHA membership and wider readership of History Australia, even as narratives of this crisis suggest that ‘we’ are all experiencing this ‘together in lockdown’. At the same time, the Australian Historical Association, this journal and its diverse membership are working to nourish our disciplinary community in a period when our connections with each other can no longer be embodied in the physical space of departments, conferences, seminars, museums and libraries. We are, for the moment, a community enacted almost entirely through virtual and other mediums, and these are meagre substitutes. Our weekly editorial meetings, once treasured moments of connection, laughter and collegiality around a table, now take place on Zoom, with words and phrases sometimes garbled or lost in their translation from sound, to data and back to sound again. Many of us are having to learn how to work together without being together. The loss is acute. We hope that the arrival of issue 17.2 reminds our members, authors and readers of their membership in a community of historians in, of or from Australia.' (Leigh Boucher, Michelle Arrow, Kate Fullagar, From the Editors, introduction)
'As we enter the 2020s, our times are daily getting more urgent. The climate and ecological emergency, catastrophic Australian bushfires, and now the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic meltdown have launched us into a new era of seemingly incessant crisis. Through it all, history remains omnipresent. In press conferences and Zoom meetings, in newspapers and Twitter feeds, history is invoked to bring sense and meaning to our disorienting present. As public commentary mythologises the past in order to manage a destabilised and unknown future, what should the response of professional historians be? What are our responsibilities in the face of cataclysmic change? In this forum on ‘History in Urgent Times’, we present three attempts to grapple with what it means to be a historian in this alarming historical moment, and ask how historians ought to respond.' (Introduction)
'The human/nature relationship is at the heart of one of the most urgent crises of our time: climate change. What does this mean for environmental historians, trained as we are to examine the culture/nature relationship, its changing temporal expressions, to challenge the binary which underpins the discipline of history itself? This article is framed as a conversation between three environmental historians as we respond to key questions about environmental history and the climate crisis. Together we ponder the skills we bring to understanding it, the stories we have found to move us forward and our thoughts about the interface between history, science and activism.' (Publication abstract)
'The challenge of our era is to find ways to respond to the ecological, social and political breakdown our world is facing as an entwined and inseverable phenomenon. These interwoven crises are taking place in a context where fatalistic and managerialist conceptions of change enjoy almost hegemonic power in key institutions. If society is to be remade in ways that preserve a commitment to democracy, it is crucial that citizens be imaginatively equipped to be able to respond to deterministic claims that refuse their agency as members of multiple political communities. This is precisely the kind of orientation that historicity enables. Our times call upon historians to understand themselves as community-builders whose task is, through dialogue, to connect the past to the present and gather the people so that we might build a better kind of world together.' (Publication abstract)
'The next generation of Australian historians face daunting challenges: the imperative to craft new historical narratives that inform and redirect unfolding ecological, economic and political crises, while facing escalating academic precarity and associated anxiety and depression. Honours level and PhD pedagogy, which remains little changed from the mid-twentieth century, is arguably insufficient for these challenges. How might we, as educators, find creative and pragmatic ways to better train and nurture tomorrow’s scholars? Critically reflecting on our Histories of Capitalism Winter School piloted in 2019, this article argues for the potential of grassroots ‘micro-utopias’ structured around interdisciplinarity, collegiality, inclusivity and public mindedness.' (Publication abstract)
'The bushranger Ned Kelly, whose gang evaded the police along the border of New South Wales and Victoria between 1878 and 1880, has been interpreted and reinterpreted. Each configuration draws on history and myth to intervene in Australian political life, from colonial stage productions that used his story to critique institutional injustice to the use of his iconography to embody Australian culture at the 2000 Sydney Olympics Opening Ceremony. Following a limited theatrical release, Justin Kurzel’s iteration of the legend, True History of the Kelly Gang, reached the streaming platform Stan on Australia Day 2020. This choice of release date evidently sought to capitalise on the national significance of the film’s subject, a decision that sits uneasily with the film’s unease with Kelly both as a national legend and as a figure of Australian history.' (Introduction)
'The name Zora Cross was destined to become a household one, said publisher George Robertson in 1918. One hundred years on, the first Cross biography has now been published, a debut for Cathy Perkins, an editor at the State Library of New South Wales. For this, Perkins deserves a toast. Cross was a hugely significant literary figure in the Australian interwar period whose life story demonstrates, among other things, that intellectual, creative women of this period could not exhibit the same eccentricity and impracticality routinely shown by their male counterparts.' (Introduction)
'‘Some stories are hard to tell’, says the blurb of Jo Jones’ recent book on fiction and the history wars. For a debate that swirls around the limits of history and fiction to get at ‘the truth’, this statement is perhaps truest of all. While the history wars have been characterised by politicised contests over the past, arguing over terminology such as ‘invasion’ and ‘settlement’, ‘commemoration’ and ‘celebration’, it was the contest over ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ that caught historians and fiction writers off-guard. When the novelist Kate Grenville suggested that her book, The Secret River, was able to straddle the polarisation of the history wars because fiction can come to history from the perspective of empathy and imagination, several historians bristled. Rather than being bound by contests over evidence and interpretation, a ‘novelist can stand up on a stepladder and look down at this, outside the fray, and say there is another way to understand this’, Grenville insisted. In response, historians such as Mark McKenna and Inga Clendinnen refused to accept that disciplinary history might be less equipped to understand or interpret the past.' (Introduction)
