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)