Cirrus@Austlit

'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)