Cirrus@Austlit

'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)

'This is the final issue from the editorial team at Australian Catholic University. Following certain unexpected events, we asked the AHA to make the editorial change-over occur at mid-year instead of at the end of the year, and we think this will also suit teams going forward. We are absolutely delighted to welcome in our multi-based successors, Alecia Simmonds from University of Technology, Sydney, Yves Rees from La Trobe University, and Laura Rademaker from The Australian National University. We know that this diverse and experienced group will continue all that we love about this journal but add innovations and fresh twists as they progress. We are pleased to hand them a healthy pipeline of brilliant new historical scholarship, including at least two special issues.'  (Publication summary)

'This editorial was penned during western New Year and the print version will probably appear during Lunar New Year. It is fitting that our special issue on ‘Ruptured Histories: Australia, China, Japan’ spans both festivities, incorporating the two poles that haunt this collection: (largely) white Australia and an ever-surging Asia.' (Editorial introduction)

'Like all good things, this issue begins and ends in Victoria. Specifically, it opens with a research article by Robert Tyler on the Welsh in Ballarat in the second half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Eisteddfod, Tyler explores the contours of the small but important community of Welsh people in gold-rush Victoria. He discusses the gains and losses of the predominately working-class Eisteddfod becoming a popular festival for all comers in less than 30 years. He conjures eloquently a time when ‘Gymraeg a siaradir, a ysgrifenir, a bregethir, ac a genir yno, a rhoddir cerddoriaeth Gymreig [Welsh is spoken, written, preached and sung, and Welsh music is written]’.' (Kate Fullagar, Jessica Lake, Benjamin Mountford & Ellen Warne : Editorial introduction)

'We write this editorial during the coldest Easter in Melbourne since 1943. And while our journal is agnostic – despite its current home at the Australian Catholic University – we are reminded that one of the messages of Easter is sacrifice. Which leads us to acknowledge the enormous amounts of unpaid and unrecognised labour that contributes to the production of each issue of History Australia. So we thank – upfront – the generosity of our anonymous reviewers for sacrificing their time and energy to pen reviews for their colleagues at a time of ever increasing demands and uncertainties attending academic work.' (Jessica Lake, Kate Fullagar, Ben Mountford  & Ellen Warne, Editorial introduction)

'We are twenty! This year the journal is delighted to mark 20 years of publication, making us classic zoomers. We salute our Gen-X parents, too, the Australian Historical Association, on turning 50 this year. We congratulate them on deciding to produce us in 2003, back when they were 30.' (Kate Fullagar, Jessica Lake, Benjamin Mountford  & Ellen Warne: Editorial introduction)

'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)

'In early 2022, we know that most readers yearn for a reprieve from living in ‘interesting times’. Under the cloud of a continuing pandemic, we have watched in horror as floods threaten so many fellow residents in Australia and as war wreaks havoc and worse in Ukraine. The editorial team as a whole extends its heartfelt sympathies to the current victims of climate change and of Vladimir Putin’s megalomania. On social media we have been at least gratified to share with followers the store of excellent articles we have published over 19 years on environmental disasters and the Ukrainian-Australian relationship.' (From the Editors : Introduction)

'We are delighted to welcome readers to a new year of History Australia and to a new team to manage it. Before introducing ourselves more fully, we would like to express our gratitude to Catharine Coleborne and James Dunk for being our special issue editors. It has been wonderful to have a safe pair of hands help us out during our tricky triennial change-over period. For more than a year they have planned and managed a brilliant collection of articles about the history of madness and marginality. Their introduction gives an excellent summary of the field, an outline of their contributors’ interventions, and a discussion of future directions on this topic. We are pleased to publish here their nine pieces. They span the history of madness in Australia and its supposed marginality, from convict times to the present. The articles delve into particular regions, like Western Australia, and into connections between the Australian colonies and other settler societies, such as South Africa. Together these articles show, as Coleborne and Dunk argue, how mental illness has been history’s ‘constant companion’ far more than it has ever really been on the margins.' (Kate Fullagar, Jessica Lake, Benjamin Mountford and Ellen Warne : Editorial introduction)

'On 1 September 2021, Tasmanian Aboriginal artist Julie Gough’s work ‘Breathing Space’ was unveiled in Hobart. This artwork is part of the City of Hobart’s ‘Crowther Reinterpretation Project’, for which four artists have been invited to create works responding to the statue of William Crowther. The project aims to ‘acknowledge, question, provoke discussion or increase awareness’ about Crowther, especially his treatment of the body of well-known Aboriginal leader William Lanne after his death in the 1860s. In Gough’s work, the statue of Crowther has been removed from public view, boxed up in a black timber crate. Visitors can scan a QR code nearby and be directed to a webpage that provides a printable amended wording for the plinth. Gough told ABC Hobart that she had avoided walking past the statue for 20 years, but now the statue was covered, ‘I can sit here, knowing he's not looking down on us…when he was crated you could feel Hobart breathe. It was amazing.' (Editorial introduction)

'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)

'The editors look forward to the day when we do not feel compelled to open our editorial with a recent dramatic historical crisis. Today, however, is not that day. We have finalised the details of this issue in the shadow of the insurrection against the United States’ congress building on 6 January 2021. Even those most resistant to listening to historians have been unable to escape their demand to compare this event to key moments in the past – to Kristallnacht, to the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, to the many coup d’etats of the postwar world, or even to the revolution of 1776 (if racialist minority overthrows of constitutional governments are the comparisons one is after). Politicians, journalists, and punters around the world have been beseeching their advisers, audiences, inner souls, and the fathomless ether to answer their questions about the most appropriate analogy. What should we call this event? How did we get here? What can we do now? And what does it all foretell?' (Editorial introduction)

'We are delighted to bring you our first special issue in over a year, guest-edited by two close friends of the journal. Former book reviews editor Agnieszka Sobocinska (2019–2020) and former editor Melanie Oppenheimer (2016–2018) have worked on this collection since presenting together at a symposium called ‘Cultures and Histories of Humanitarianism and International Development’ at Monash University in 2019. They have selected and edited some of the voices from that event in order to offer here a cohesive anthology of recent trends and topics in the history of foreign aid.' (Kate Fullagar, Michelle Arrow and Leigh Boucher, From the Editors, Introduction)

'2020 has been a year of radical uncertainty. Many of us began the year choked by smoke from the bushfires that devastated wildlife and communities across much of Australia. Such fires had long been anticipated by climate scientists, though they seemed to take our politicians by surprise. If the bushfires were a predictable but horrifying disaster, few could have predicted the Covid-19 pandemic that has overwhelmed the world in the wake of the fire crisis. While epidemiologists have long warned of the threat of another global pandemic, it was nonetheless experienced by most of us as an unprecedented emergency. From panic buying to lockdown and home schooling, everyone felt its impact, and the history profession was no exception. Archives and libraries closed. Teaching moved online. Many casual staff found their employment had dried up overnight. Seminars, conferences and informal markers of collegiality all fell away as we heeded calls to flatten the curve. As if that wasn’t enough to contend with, academics around the country are now reeling in response to government proposals for sweeping changes to the university sector, which, among other things, would see student fees for history degrees increase by 113 per cent. The upheavals seem endless, and the ground is constantly shifting beneath our feet.' (Michelle Arrow , Leigh Boucher & Kate Fullagar, From the Editors : Introduction)

'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)

'Our first issue of 2020 kicks off with some powerfully pertinent items. The president’s report acknowledges the urgency of our discipline’s work while the country struggles to comprehend the scale of the fire disaster and to forge an adequate public response. As Prof. Damousi points out, historians are critical to both tasks, and this will be underscored especially at the next Australian Historical Association (AHA) annual conference at Deakin University, entitled ‘Urgent Histories’.' (Kate Fullagar , Michelle Arrow  & Leigh Boucher  : Editorial introduction)

'The annual AHA conference took place between 8 and 12 July 2019 in Toowoomba under the auspices of the University of Southern Queensland. The theme of the conference was the timely and pertinent concept of ‘Local Communities, Global Networks’. Across many time frames, places and spaces, this connection was explored, contested and interrogated across the week of keynotes, round tables, plenaries and sessions that collectively illuminated the complexities and intersections between the local and the global.' (Editorial introduction)