'What kinds of stories can historians tell about Australia’s past? Should poetry, a painting, a podcast or a protest be considered history? What criteria should generalist journals like History Australia use to determine what counts as history and what doesn’t?
'These are questions that we, the new incoming editors Laura Rademaker (Australian National University), Yves Rees (La Trobe University) and Alecia Simmonds (University of Technology Sydney) will be inviting historians to address in the coming years. In our opinion, History Australia is both an exciting forum for historical contestation and debate and a force for inclusion, decolonisation and democracy. Journal editors can be boundary-riders, anxiously policing the acceptable limits of their field, or they can be dream-conjurers, luring from the historian’s mind everything from utopian, creative visions of the past to careful empirically grounded research. Over the next two years, we hope to be conjurers, collaborators and collectivists in this joyful new phase of the journal.' (From the Editors)
'In 1896–1897, Louisa Lawson (1848–1920) filed a number of patent applications. This article explains how her inventions were an expression of modern feminist practice and aligned with the progressive suffragette campaign for equal economic rights for women. It plots the unrelenting opposition to Lawson’s entrepreneurship and explains why her successful litigation to enforce her legal rights was a hollow victory. This history raises significant questions of contemporary relevance about law, culture, power and political strategy demonstrating the historical resistance of all major institutions of the modern democratic state – unions, bureaucracy, parliament and the courts – to gender inclusion.' (Publication abstract)
'Ross McMullin’s new book is an engrossing multiple biography. It is a worthy sequel to his prize-winning Farewell, Dear People: Biographies of Australia’s Lost Generation (2012). The new study is similarly distinguished by impeccable scholarship and deep human sympathy. McMullin investigates three exceptional young Australians killed in the First World War – just three, from that ocean of bereavement. But he casts his net wider, exploring the lives of the families and friends of the dead soldiers.' (Introduction)
'Though the Anzac legacy remains as prominent as ever in Australian cultural identity, the experiences of Australian women in wartime often remain footnotes to the male-centric mythology. In Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend, Donna Coates aims to subvert this hierarchy by offering readers a comprehensive overview of Australian women’s fictionalised accounts of wartime from the First World War to Vietnam. In doing so, she introduces the reader to a rich body of text through which to consider how Australian women have written about war and the Anzac.' (Introduction)
