Editorial

Notwithstanding the defeat of the Voice referendum in October 2023, a demand for ‘truth-telling’ remains. Australian Historical Studies is pleased to host an ongoing discussion about what historical scholarship can contribute to truth-telling. In August 2023 (volume 54, no. 3), Mark Finnane and Jonathan Richards used the instance of Samuel Griffith to consider how to contextualise individual responsibility for the colonial state’s killing of Aboriginal people. In this issue we are pleased to publish a very different comment: Matthew Fitzpatrick’s reflections on lessons from the historiography of Germany. Fitzpatrick’s starting point is that Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars differ in their investments in and approaches to critical narratives of colonisation. There is an ‘Indigenous space’, he cautions, that ‘should not be unthinkingly co-opted by non-Indigenous scholars’. The likely impetus of such co-option is a desire for truth-telling to be healing, redemptive, and decolonising. Advising non-Indigenous scholars to be suspicious of ‘all attempts at assimilation, reconciliation or relativisation’ of the pasts that they produce, Fitzpatrick enjoins historians to facilitate ‘the perpetual problematisation of irreducibly traumatic pasts’. The lesson from recent German historiography is that ‘multi-vocality’ – encouraging histories from many standpoints – militates against hopes of an ‘end point where the work of truth-telling is finished and differing historical experiences can be reconciled and transcended’. In Australian historiography, that multiplicity is more likely, he suggests, if we privilege the ‘local’ and question the possibility of a ‘national’ colonisation story. Fitzpatrick sees promise in ‘increasingly vocal and heterogeneous Indigenous voices’. (The heterogeneity of the ‘Indigenous space’ was amply demonstrated, after his paper was written, in the 2023 debate about constitutional recognition.) As well, he champions ‘voices from Australia’s own migrant community’ – to which Australian Historical Studies (vol. 53, no. 4, November 2022) has recently given a platform in the Themed Issue ‘Their Own Perceptions: Non-Anglo Migrants and Aboriginal Australia’.

One of the most savoured stories of the settler-colonial historical imagination is about Australia’s belated embrace of aesthetic Modernism. Emplotting this story has included peopling it with heroic characters such as John and Sunday Reed, but art historian Traudi Allen wonders whether we should admire the transgressions of the Reeds and their friends, and why we feel the need to. Presenting reasons for questioning the ‘entrenched mythology’ of the generative bohemianism of the Reeds and their Heide milieu, her revisionist essay takes aim at Richard Haese’s Rebels and Precursors (1981) in particular. Collaterally, she invites critical attention to a state cultural policy that has enabled Heide (gallery and garden) to become emblematic of an ‘anti-bourgeois’ sensibility, now sentimentally indulged. Allen points to lineages, patrons, and sites of Australian modernism that have not acquired the cachet of the Reeds at Heide and that are no less entitled to our respect and gratitude.

Janet Butler calls our attention to a painter – James McBey – of a milieu vastly different from bohemian Melbourne in the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, she presents McBey in two milieux: that of the subjects and that of the viewers of his paintings. It was McBey’s achievement, Butler argues, to mediate the experience of nine Australian soldiers patrolling the Sinai Desert over three days during the Great War to a public distant from theatres of combat. Thus, she combines her own reading of Mc Bey’s images with a study of the paintings’ reception in London. Though McBey’s art was representational (and photos were one step in his process) he strove for feeling more than for precise detail, conveying both the peace and the vulnerability of Cameliers depicted against indistinct horizons and vast skies. Art history, Butler suggests, may be conceived as contributing also to the history of emotion. In this paper, the emotions in view are not only the Cameliers’ but those of a patriotic public, both during the war and after it. Indeed, her paper’s central idea is that art is a means of emotional connection – both then and (for us, as historians) now.

Daniel Reynaud and Aleta King are also interested in the history of emotions occasioned by war, and they approach this elusive topic by studying the popularity of the ‘Sunshine Song’ – a four-line chorus taken from the hymn ‘Sunshine’. It was ‘both typical and exceptional among the hundreds of AIF [Australian Imperial Force] songs’ in that it remained in circulation long after World War I. Reynaud and King point not only to the lyrics but also to the song’s formal properties. They celebrate the energy and courage of its promoter, Fourth Battalion Chaplain William McKenzie, and they adduce testimonies to the Sunshine Song’s tonic effect on weary, fearful and cynical men: ‘rousing emotions where pep talks may have fallen flat’.

Scarred by World War I’s ongoing masculine mortality and morbidity, Australia was open to talk of healing, and some outstanding women stepped forward in the interwar period to lead a ‘natural health movement’. This cause was particularly attractive to women such as Portia Geach, Thea Gardiner argues, ‘as its knowledge base operated outside of the male-dominated medical field’. Gardiner positions Geach within a feminist historiography about the changing forms of women’s authority, including their quotidian practices of bodily sovereignty, as housewives. Because Geach participated in, and was enabled by, ‘the burgeoning of nutrition science and the dietetics professions’ it became feasible for her and her allies to say that to eat rationally was to enact a civic duty. To let science guide our daily life in this way was the message promoted by organisations such as the Housewives’ Association of New South Wales, over which Geach presided for many years. Gardiner’s article enriches our knowledge of ‘progressive’ thought in Australia.

How Australians have thought about ‘national security’ is the topic of James Mortensen’s study of a corpus of Hansard and newspaper texts in the period 1881–1921. His close reading discerns four senses of that phrase: sovereign defence, financial, a ‘hybrid’ sense (both military and monetary), and a concern for ‘social cohesion’. Responding to Anthony Burke’s Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety (2008), Mortensen shows how often political leaders were referring not to ‘invasion’ but to ‘the aggregate of the nation’s wealth’ and to factors determining ‘social cohesion’ when they used the phrase ‘national security’. With Australia’s major political parties committed to AUKUS – implicating not only weapons choices but also policies on research, education, and industry – Mortensen’s attention to the dimensions of ‘national security’ is timely. His perspective aligns with Clinton Fernandes’ invitation (most recently in Subimperial Power: Australia in the International Arena 2022) to frame Australian political history as an ongoing effort to maintain the nation’s cohesion by reproducing its favourable position in the unequal global order.

That political project began, as we know, with Britain’s late eighteenth-century creation of a penal colony on the shores of the western Pacific and (later) on western Australia’s Indian Ocean coast. One incidental benefit to Britain was a pipeline of Aboriginal objects, human remains, and natural history specimens from the Antipodes to British museums. Daniel Simpson’s article brings to light a neglected archive of the British Enlightenment’s collecting practice: Customs and Treasury records of duties waived or charged on these goods’ entry into Britain between 1793 and 1823. Simpson’s paper is a fine example of a growing vector of contemporary historical practice: provenance research. Such studies – identifying not only pathways and persons but also changing regimes of value – augment the work of collecting and exhibiting institutions that now face inquiries and demands from the descendants of these goods’ originators. Simpson’s tables 1 and 2 will be a resource for museum workers and those now in dialogue with them.

The British Empire was an assiduous keeper of things, persons, and records. However, as Caroline Ingram (Ken Inglis Postgraduate Prize Winner 2022) shows, officials in Western Australia were sometimes confounded by ‘the unsuitability of the colony’s carceral spaces for women’. In the punishment policies of the nineteenth-century Empire, it mattered whether a prisoner was male or female, juvenile or adult, and, at times, whether he/she was Indigenous. While these categories were essential to the colonial state’s vision of society – evident in the prisoner returns, colonial Secretary’s Office correspondence and indictment files studied by Ingram – they were not necessarily matched by physical divisions within the colony’s prisons. The colony had a small population and a low ratio of women to men, and (unlike the penal colonies on the east coast) no female convicts had been sent there. What to do with the very few females that had to be locked up? Early release and/or release into a husband’s custody were among the solutions, and the convicted woman could be housed in an asylum if authorities could narrate her offence as an instance of insanity. Ingram has evoked the inventiveness of the penological imagination in a colony that could barely afford to have one.

Digitised sources figure prominently in some of the articles described above, so we are pleased to publish Mike Jones’ and Alana Piper’s survey of Australian and New Zealand investments (historians’ time and institutions’ budgets) in digital tools. Jones and Piper list many resources while not claiming to be definitive. Not only academics but the wider History-writing public have benefited from these resources, and Indigenous digital archives have emerged. The authors comment that the main impact on historians has been that they are ‘using digitised material provided by others for relatively traditional historical research, rather than us[ing] … computational methods, new forms of analysis, or innovative digital approaches for examining, understanding, and representing knowledge about the past’. However, they qualify this by acknowledging the impact of ‘new platforms for communicating histories to the public, including podcasts, blogs, online exhibitions, and crowdsourcing projects’. Their survey is relevant to research policy: funding models tend to assume that costs will end at some assumed project terminus, and some resources have already become inaccessible. They also address teachers of History, calling for reflection on the intellectual opportunities and hazards of this abundant and proliferating digital ‘ecosystem’.

Bridget Andresen reviews the exhibition Criminal Law – Then, Now, Tomorrow at Brisbane’s Queen Elizabeth II Courts of Law Building, which takes visitors through 120 years of Queensland’s legal history. Emily Gallagher and Michelle Staff review Feared and Revered: Feminine Power through the Ages, which was on display at the National Museum of Australia. Books reviewed in this issue include a survey of Australian women in science, histories of fascism and anti-fascism in Australia, and a biography of Donald Horne. We thank everyone who contributed their time and expertise on these reviews.

Finally, we congratulate Ruby Ekkel (ANU), the 2023 recipient of the Ken Inglis Postgraduate Prize, for her essay, ‘“Thrills! And More Thrills!!” The Meanings of a Bushwalk with the Melbourne Women’s Walking Club, 1922–1945’, judged the best paper presented by a postgraduate student to the annual Australian Historical Association (AHA) conference in July 2023. The judges commented,

The skilfully crafted opening of this paper immediately captured the judges’ attention. The engaging writing style is sustained throughout, bringing to life the attractions, and the discomforts, of bushwalking for this group of women in the first half of the twentieth century. Far from an antiquarian exercise in commemorative club history, this paper makes an original and valuable contribution to the rich history of bushwalking in a settler society, particularly where it intersects with changing attitudes to gender, the environment and leisure. Deep research and a serious vein of scholarly enquiry underpin the vivid narrative detail, tying the women’s experiences to a variety of broader trends while giving full expression to the particularity of their voices. Exploring sequentially themes of escape, domesticity, conservation, dress, harassment and emotional bonds, the paper quietly builds a layered and richly textured analysis, demonstrating the analytic potential of social history at its best.