The Australian Historical Association
The site for and about historians working in or on Australia.
Marian Quartly and Judith Smart’s Respectable Radicals: A History of the National Council of Women of Australia, 1896-2006 (Monash University Publishing) tells the story of mainstream feminism in Australia, of the long struggle for equality at home and at work. In these days we still need something of the optimistic vision of the leaders of Read more …
William Cuffay, grandson of an African slave and son of a West Indian slave joined the Chartist movement in 1839 and soon became well known for his oratory and sense of humour. Arrested, tried and convicted, for his participation in a planned uprising in London, he was sentenced to transportation for life in Tasmania. Cuffay’s Read more …
Heidi Norman’s ‘What Do We Want?’: A Political History of Aboriginal Land Rights in New South Wales (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2015) tells a story full of possibility, tensions and entanglements as Aboriginal people took up the political demand of self-determination and worked to address their community disadvantage, all the while grappling with the expectations of Read more …