'As we write this editorial and send the latest batch of outstanding research articles and reviews off to the publisher, we do so having had the chance to engage (virtually at least) with many of you at the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Australian Historical Association (AHA). As we noted in our first editorial for 2021, ‘From the President’ will now appear annually in the issue after the AGM, which in terms of production timelines means it appears in the final issue of the year. There was, moreover, some good news to celebrate at this meeting. That very morning the Morrison Government announced it would provide funding for the National Archives (NAA) to preserve records in danger of falling off the digital cliff. ‘Dragging their feet’ would be a generous way to describe the response of the Government to the Tune Review, which was only publicly released in March 2021, more than a year after the Government received it. This review confirmed what many historians of Australia already knew; namely, that the archives are woefully understaffed and working through an incredible backlog of requests for researchers. More disturbingly, the Tune Review confirmed that many records were in a perilous state, requiring urgent preservation work if they were not to decay beyond repair. The AHA, both as an organisation formally and from its membership, led the charge on trying to force the Government to revise its initial choice to essentially ignore this crisis; after the May federal budget, a paltry $700,000 was allocated to meet needs. According to the Government this was ‘nothing to be embarrassed about’, even as the Tune Review recommended that over $65 million was required.' (Leigh Boucher, Michelle Arrow and Kate Fuillagar, Editorial introduction)
'Two recent song compilation projects draw our attention in powerful ways to how songs are an (often overlooked) vector for oral history. Released as static studio recordings, these songs are also very much part of living practice. They capture poignant first-person accounts of history and are a medium for tradition and story to be carried in the present enabling future inter-generational transmission.' (Introduction)
'The blurb for Adrian Mitchell’s Where Shadows Have Fallen promises a sensational account of the prominent colonial poet Henry Kendall (1839–1881). Yet despite the claim on the back cover that Kendall ‘had every reason to dread it being made public’, the broad contours of his short but complex life are no secret. At the same time as writing three collections of poetry—Poems and Songs (1862), Leaves from Australian Forests (1869), and Songs from the Mountains (1880)—and numerous prize-winning poems for public occasions, he also struggled with alcohol addiction and experienced a prolonged mental health crisis following the death of his first child in infancy from ‘a combination of fever brought on by bad teeth, and malnutrition’ (133). In telling this grim story, Mitchell follows in the wake of Michael Ackland’s definitive biography, Henry Kendall: The Man and the Myths (The Miegunyah Press, 1995). While Mitchell disputes Ackland’s emphasis on Kendall’s Calvinistic family heritage, he primarily positions his account in response to a series of much older works by Agnes Hamilton-Grey—who Mitchell describes as ‘more a hagiographer than a biographer’—written in the 1920s (12). What distinguishes Mitchell’s account from those of all his predecessors, however, is the minimal attention that it pays to Kendall’s writing.' (Introduction)
'Archives are the meat and drink of the historian. The pursuit through the archives can be tedious and exhausting: ‘Turn every page’, LBJ biographer Robert Caro exhorts. But it is also thrilling – the intense emotion of finding the lock of hair from a long-dead lover or the torn-up shreds of the letters of a discarded husband; or the ‘a-hah’ moment when a scribbled note provides the final piece of a jigsaw you have been carefully putting together.' (Introduction)
