The Australian Historical Association
The site for and about historians working in or on Australia.
Congratulations to Miranda Johnson on the recent publication of her book. It tells the story of Indigenous legal activism at a critical juncture in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, as these three countries sought out new postcolonial identities in the Asia-Pacific region. The book examines how Indigenous peoples opened up the space of law for the recognition Read more …
Just out is Penny Edmonds, Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings (Palgrave Macmillan) which uses case studies from the USA, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand to trace the prehistory of reconciliation’s present in settler states, a contested political process, which is especially salient where formal decolonisation cannot occur.
Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell’s edited collection Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-Century Victoria (ANU Press, 2015) is a serious re-examination of existing work on the Aboriginal history of nineteenth-century Victoria, deploying the insights of postcolonial thought to wrench open the inner workings of territorial expropriation and its historically tenacious variability.
This issue of History Australia brings together several of the threads that have been conspicuous during the last few years of the journal’s career. There is the centenary of the First World War, which we recognise, in the first place, with Marilyn Lake’s valedictory address on ‘1914: Death of a Nation’, delivered at the 2014 Read more …
Robinson Crusoe’s call to adventure and do-it-yourself settlement resonated with British explorers. In tracing the links in a discursive chain through which a particular male subjectivity was forged, Karen Downing’s Restless Men: Masculinity and Robinson Crusoe, 1788-1840 reveals how such men took their tensions with them to Australia, so that the colonies never were a solution Read more …