AustLit

'History journals are disciplinary time capsules. Like textbooks and syllabuses, their usefulness extends beyond the currency of their content. Taken together, their volumes reveal radical breaks, methodological challenges and changing historical focus across generations of historians. They also expose the inheritance of disciplinary values over time, showing how certain methods and practice endure as others are augmented. This review of History Australia’s first 20 years explores research and disciplinary trends advanced by the journal, as well as its contribution to understanding the role and function of Australian history.' (Publication abstract)

'High school education underwent a radical change in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, commensurate with the major changes experienced within other institutions and social environments. This article is an exploration of Australian television’s use of the schoolroom within drama during the 1970s, with a focus on three productions: 290 half-hour episodes of Class of ’74/’75, 39 hour-long instalments of Glenview High and a pilot for Jackson High, a one-hour show that was not developed but which proved to be a forerunner for Glenview High. The article demonstrates that such shows provide insight into attitudes to both schooling and to teenage life in Australia in the 1970s, as well as being in themselves important and engaging examples of early Australian television drama.' (Publication abstract)

'Historians have long understood ocker cinema in terms of a more distinct and assertive national identity in Whitlam’s 1970s, yet only recently have begun to consider the context of the women’s liberation movement unfolding at the time. Adding to this emerging body of scholarship, this article reads the rise of ocker cinema both in the context of, and as a response to, second-wave feminism. Turning to the films Stork (1971), The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) and Alvin Purple (1973), this article argues that the cinematic articulation of the ocker in the 1970s not only asserted a masculinist national identity, but also positioned this national masculinity as the victim of (and in danger from) threatening feminist challenges.' (Publication abstract)

'Silence is a powerful concept that many read in stark metaphorical, binarised and/or ahistorical terms. By contrast, sound historians can show how metaphors like silence take on specific historical power, but elide complexity in the heard world, and how they change. This article uses Robyn Davidson’s popular travelogue, Tracks (1980), to investigate how the non-Indigenous meanings of the iconic motif of Central Australian silence were shifting in the 1970s, in line with acoustic ecology and second-wave feminism that positively valorised certain sorts of quiet and/or listening. But silence is multivalent and it also developed negative metaphorical connotations in the 1970s, especially as shorthand for the way many Australians had obscured Indigenous presence. By reconceiving 1970s silence as entangled with noise, we can better understand complexity and change in these non-Indigenous soundscapes.' (Publication abstract) 

'The 2019–20 bushfires which ravaged Australia have intensified interest in Indigenous burning practices and their contribution to contemporary Australian land management. This recent interest builds upon a base established by Indigenous activism and well-circulated academic works which propose ‘Grand Unified Theories’ to explain the pre-European impact of Indigenous peoples upon environments. In this paper, I critique these theories as reliant upon binaries which either underemphasise or overemphasise impact. Just over a decade since its publication, it is timely to re-examine Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth and its influence upon policy and environments. Gammage’s model shares significant features with earlier popular works depicting Indigenous environmental impacts. Numerous theories incorporating ideas of overhunting have been proposed to explain the rough correlation of human arrival and the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna in Australia and North America. These Grand Unified Theories were shaped by similar tropes; they were all proposed with an eye to the present, and they have all influenced contemporary politics. I present an alternative model for conceptualising Indigenous environmental relationships that will work to advance understandings while minimising harmful repercussions and avoiding undermining Indigenous aspirations.' (Publication abstract)

'My grandparents and their baby, my uncle, arrived in Melbourne aboard the RMS Mooltan on 16 February 1939. They were met by the Australian Jewish Welfare Society, formed only two years before to assist Jewish refugees upon their arrival. It is possible that either Leo or Mina Fink, or both, were among those who greeted them off the boat. It stuck in my grandparents’ minds for the rest of their lives, the kindness shown by these Jewish strangers, and their gratitude. Leo and Mina Fink had been in Australia less than 10 years before my grandparents arrived, yet in this short time were already spearheading the relief and reception of Jewish refugees from Europe. After the war, Leo Fink also gained the ear of Australia’s first immigration minister Arthur Calwell, travelling regularly to Canberra determined to plead the case for the acceptance of Jewish survivors in Australia’s first mass immigration intake. For decades, the Finks were synonymous with Jewish life in Melbourne. Even today, as Margaret Taft notes in her history of this remarkable couple, it is impossible to venture far in the Jewish community of Melbourne without stumbling across their names engraved on plaques or enshrined in education and philanthropic endowments.' (Introduction)