'We write this Editorial fresh from the first face-to-face Australian Historical Association conference in three years, held skilfully and graciously by Bart Ziino and fellow convenors at Deakin University’s Geelong Waterfront campus in Victoria on the theme of ‘Urgent Histories’. At the conference dinner, we were delighted to award Nancy Cushing the Marian Quartly prize for best article published in History Australia the previous calendar year for her formidable piece ‘#CoalMustFall: Revisiting Newcastle’s Coal Monument in the Anthropocene’ (18.4). The citation reads:
An immediately engaging article on the history and future of the Jubilee or Coal Monument in Newcastle, New South Wales. Cushing’s work adds a critical focus on climate to recent debates about commemorative structures. It argues for the removal of the Coal Monument but not its total erasure. Instead, Cushing presents a sensitive case for the monument’s reframing elsewhere as well as for the temporary erection of a counter-monument in its place. Combining activist, archival, and theoretical approaches, her article demonstrates the multiple important uses of history – emotional, political, academic, and local.'
(Editorial introduction)
'William James Chidley (1860–1916), a ground-breaking Australian sex reformer, has been the subject of a considerable literature. When he came to public attention via his public lectures on a ‘kinder’ mode of sexual intercourse, and police attempts to silence him failed, the New South Wales (NSW) authorities brought about a series of confinements to mental asylums, supposedly to protect the public from Chidley’s obscenities. He died at Callan Park asylum in December 1916. But an attempt was made to discredit Chidley even in death, with a medical officer claiming that the post-mortem showed that he had syphilis. This article examines previously undiscovered material on Chidley’s medical examination from his first admission to the Callan Park asylum in August 1912 which strongly suggests that Chidley did not have syphilis then and could not have contracted it later. The Chidley affair signalled the development of a new, but short-lived, ‘political’ phenomenon in NSW: the willing intervention of asylums to protect the community from ideas which governments considered harmful, where the existing laws had little purchase. Continuing public discontent with asylum policies was to be a major factor in the calling of a Royal Commission into lunacy in 1923.' (Publication abstract)
'Bangarra Dance Theatre’s SandSong: Stories from the Great Sandy Desert weaves together the ‘voice and spirit’ of the late Wangkatjungka artist and activist Ningali Lawford-Wolf and stories of her Country in the Kimberley and Sandy Desert regions of Western Australia. Explored through a series of ensemble items in four acts, SandSong is impactful collective story-telling. The title, SandSong, draws our attention to Indigenous practices of performing history through cultural practice. In SandSong, as in many Bangarra productions, history is here now, and stories of the past are enacted by dancing and singing them today.' (Introduction)
'In the last ten years, family history has breached the divide between community and professional history. Increasingly, academic historians are producing scholarly work exploring their own family histories. These narratives are contexualised within broader historical forces such as empire, migration, trade, nationalism, and forms of social exclusion based on gender, race, and class. In a 2020 seminar at Princeton University, Stéphane Gerson called this variety of history, ‘history from within’ (‘A History From Within: When Historians Write About Their Own Kin’). The term ‘autoethnography’ is sometimes used.' (Introduction)
'For mostly practical reasons of time and distance, Doug Munro has relied on documentary sources and email correspondence to analyse the perplexing story of Manning Clark’s publisher defaming his prize author three years after his death. Oral history would have helped fill in some of the gaps in the account, but the book manages to explain in sufficient detail the contours of the episode, and to place it in the larger story of Australia’s History Wars. Key figures in the new Albanese Ministry promise an end to these History Wars, but, for reasons that are implicit in Munro’s account, the struggles to define Australian history and how it has been ‘manufactured’ are likely to continue unabated.' (Introduction)
