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.

As a team we would like to extend our deepest thanks to all the members of the AHA who supported us through the tumultuous period last year when ACU threatened to make more than half of us redundant. The AHA was a fierce defender of our team, and of all historians; we are happy, though tired, to report that we are all still standing in our jobs for now.

Just as sincerely we thank our support editors over the last 30 months, Claire Lowrie, Alex Roginski, Bernard Keo and Mike Jones. We were served impeccably by assistants Lorinda Cramer and, then, Karen Downing, both of whom helped to keep us on track with care and compassion.

We are proud to report that during our slightly abbreviated tenure of service we managed to publish six historiographically focused articles, three Lives in History, two Landmark History anniversary commentaries, two special issues, a commissioned 20-year history of the journal itself by Anna Clark, a range of pedagogical analyses, and a wealth of original scholarship from both senior and emerging historians. We thank everyone who submitted and worked with us, as well as the ever-generous peer reviewers along the way. We are pleased in 2024 to start, too, a monthly feature on ABC Radio with James Valentine, sharing our issues and authors with a wider audience. All this is made possible by the support of AHA subscriptions, and by other scholars who download, share, debate, and otherwise engage in our offerings.

This issue embodies the diversity and excellence we have strived to present every quarter. It is led by a special forum curated by Meg Foster on ‘The Imperial Genealogies of Crime’, an outcome of an important workshop that Meg and Katy Roscoe convened in the UK in 2022. We are so grateful to Meg for assembling for us three of the most thought-provoking papers from that event, as well as two afterwords by good friends of the journal, Alan Lester and Lisa Ford.

The forum opens with Meg’s own astute introduction to the forum, which will situate the articles in more detail than we do here for journal readers. Suffice to say that the first article, by Andy Kaladelfos and Vicky Nagy, surveys the state of historical criminology. The authors analyse the ‘epistemological and methodological focus’ of the field, challenging it to ‘widen its vision for research, method, ethics, impact, and highlight[ing] the risks of not doing so’. Kate Bruce-Lockhardt and Tolulope Akande follow with a self-reflective examination of social-history approaches to colonial prison archives, focusing especially on colonial Africa. They argue that while colonial prison records ‘can provide valuable information, engagement with these documents needs to be grounded in a recognition of their “person-ness”’. They go on to explain how such a praxis ‘can not only play a key role in furthering our knowledge of colonial carceral systems but can also help to challenge these systems and their afterlives’. The final article, by Nishant Gokhale and Meg Foster, offers a rare insight into the ways that the Indigenous Bhil people of western India engaged with the East India Company in the early nineteenth century. The authors’ sensitive discussion of the Bhils’ construction in the criminal records, as well as their counterintuitive reading of Bhil acts of resistance in those same records, is an example to all scholars of colonisation. Our pair of esteemed commentators at the end round off our series of paired authors throughout. Once more, we thank Meg for delivering this eight-person collection to us with such expert editorial nous.

We have three research articles to follow the forum. The first, uncannily, follows the imperial crime theme. Mark Finnane generously offers us what he calls the ‘first study of the historical prosecution and sentencing of perjury in Australia’. The piece explores the characteristics of cases that were committed for trial in the Supreme Court in colonial Victoria, centring especially on ‘what was at stake when private citizens as well as public officials sought to punish those perceived as failing to tell the truth under oath’.

The last two articles were both originally winners of AHA prizes. First, we have Harrison Croft on women gauge readers in postwar Victoria. Croft analyses here the informal remarks left by those readers on the forms they supplied to Victoria’s State Rivers and Water Supply Commission. He finds intersections that further add to the dynamic histories of working-class Australia. This article grew out of the essay that won the Jill Roe Prize for postgraduate students last year. The judges’ citation for the essay was as follows:

The judges commend the author on this fascinating article revealing the historical significance of little-known rural Victorian water gauge readers and their utilisation of remarks columns to the Melbourne Commission on water to campaign for better labour conditions. The rich archival detail reveals compelling stories of these workers, many of them young women exercising what little agency they had, and their unique contribution to rural labour relations in mid-twentieth-century Victoria. This is an extremely well researched, carefully written, thoughtful and original contribution to labour history, gender history and environmental history with a particular focus on periphery/centre relations and dynamics that Jill Roe would delight in.

Finally, Geraldine Fela’s article here grew out of the work she presented to win last year’s Ann Curthoys Prize for early career researchers. It uncovers the under-examined history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community response to HIV and AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. It spotlights particularly the work of Aunty Gracelyn Smallwood, a proud Birrigubba, Kalkadoon and South-Sea Islander woman and registered nurse who helped shape and implement a world-leading approach. The judges of the Curthoys prize wrote:

This article opens up the history of Australia’s HIV and Aids crisis to include the story of the response of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workers and leaders to the threat HIV and Aids posed to their own communities. It follows the story of healthcare worker Aunty Gracelyn Smallwood, and documents her role in shaping the highly successful approaches to HIV Aids adopted in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. This illuminating article investigates the various frames imposed on the perceived threat to Indigenous communities by high-profile medicos, public servants and politicians. But more importantly, it brings to the fore how leaders like Smallwood resisted these frames, as they persevered with the development of programs that reflected their own local and deep understandings of the particular threat of HIV Aids in their communities. By drawing on oral histories, government documents, medical and public health literature, and media reporting, the author conveys the crucial role Indigenous leaders played in effectively managing this stigmatised health crisis, placing their innovations in both national and international contexts. ‘The low rate of HIV among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to this day’, the author concludes, ‘is an important lesson. It shows that when Indigenous health is in Indigenous hands, the results can be extraordinary.’

Our final item, before our usual array of insightful reviews, is our last Life in History. It is more than apt that this year’s chosen memoirist is Emerita Professor Shurlee Swain. Shurlee first came to our own institution, ACU, in 1993: she has been recognised by successive generations of historians at ACU as the stalwart inspiration behind their camaraderie, as well as a driving force for social history everywhere. Her description of coming to a historical career against several odds, and her determination to collaborate with the groups she most cared for, is a story of uplift needed by all in the profession today. She notes poignantly at the end: ‘I am acutely aware that being able to work as a historian has been a privilege to which few of my postgraduate peers have had access’.

On that note, we as a team recognise that the last few years for historians have been trying and, for many, dispiriting. This was triggered by the last government’s atrocious Jobs Ready Package, which raised the cost of studying undergraduate history by more than 100 per cent. We have all suffered the flow-on lack of funds, resources and national respect. In an era when Indigenous Australians are asking the nation to centre truth telling about the past, such a rebuff appears especially retrograde. Two years after winning power, the new government has yet to repeal the Act. We continue our campaign to remind the country of the power to be found in knowing one’s own history and that of the wider world.

Supporting History Australia is one part of that campaign. In order to survive, readers need to cite its articles in publications, circulate its insights on social media, and, whenever feasible, review for the editors in order to maintain its high quality. We will remain steadfast helpmates to incoming editors as they take on the tasks of both maintaining excellence and adapting to change.