How unearthing Queensland’s ‘native police’ camps gives us a window onto colonial violence
Reading time: 7 minutes
This government-funded paramilitary force operated from 1849 (prior to Queensland’s separation from New South Wales) until 1904. It grew to have an expansive reach throughout the state, with camps established in strategic locations along the ever-expanding frontier, first in the southeast and then west and north. While staffed with non-Indigenous senior officers, the bulk of the force was made up of Aboriginal men and, sometimes, boys.
Auxiliary power: in wartime, Australian women fought germs, fired shells – and took on gender norms
Reading time: 5 minutes
Sheila Sibley enlisted in the Australian Army in 1942 with a vision of becoming a wartime nurse – “an angel of mercy, the wounded man’s guide … the Rose of No-Man’s Land”, in her own words. Many women wanted to “do their bit” during the second world war, and nursing had previously been the only avenue for women to join the military. They had historically been excluded from traditionally masculine roles within the armed forces.
Are we learning the wrong lessons from history?
Reading time: 6 minutes
At the very least, we need to ensure there are avenues of transmission and communication between the one and the other, as well as between the historical profession and policymakers. Historians must never cease to be themselves, but nor do they have the luxury of being able to shut out a world they have a deep professional and moral obligation to interpret as well as change.
Damien Parer, Australia’s Iconic WW2 Photographer – Podcast
Parer was selected as an official war photographer for the Department of Information. He would go on to record many of the iconic images of Australian troops in that war.
Remember El Alamein
Reading time: 5 minutes
Exactly 75 years ago, Australians dressed in steel helmets and khaki shorts, and often not much else, sat in weapon pits in the Egyptian sun about 120 kilometres west of Alexandria. They were preparing for what history would call the second battle of El Alamein, the great offensive planned by Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery. In the summer heat of July 1942, his predecessor, Archibald Wavell, had held the German–Italian drive towards Egypt, a battle in which the 9th Australian Division had played a notable part. Now, after gathering more troops, tanks and guns, Montgomery was ready to launch his Eighth Army against General Erwin Rommel’s Panzer Armée Afrika, a commander and a force admired and respected even by their adversaries.
Are Aussie pubs really filled with tiles because it’s easier to wash off the pee? History has a slightly different story
Reading time: 6 minutes
You may have heard the myth that the six o’clock swill – and the excessive drinking it supported – led to the tiles which are so common in Australian pubs. According to architectural historian J.M. Freeland in his 1966 book, after this early closing time was introduced, pubs became “no more than high-pressure drinking-houses”.
Linguistics locates the beginnings of the Austronesian expansion – with Indigenous seafaring people in eastern Taiwan
Reading time: 5 minutes
The study of Indigenous languages spoken in maritime South-East Asia today has shed new light on the beginnings of the Austronesian expansion. This was the last major migration of people spreading out across the Pacific Ocean and, ultimately, settling Aotearoa. Scientists all agree that people speaking Austronesian languages started out from Taiwan and settled the Philippines around 4,000 years ago. They used sails as early as 2,000 years ago. Together with other maritime technologies, this allowed them to disperse to the islands of the Indo-Pacific ocean.
5,700 years of sea-level change in Micronesia hint at humans arriving much earlier than we thought
Reading time: 4 minutes
Sea levels in Micronesia rose much faster over the past 5,000 years than previously thought, according to our new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This sea-level rise is shown by the accumulation of mangrove sediments on the islands of Pohnpei and Kosrae. The finding may change how we think about when people migrated into Remote Oceania, and where they might have voyaged from.
Home Made Wings – Australian Military Aircraft Manufacturing – Video
This documentary explores the history of Australian military aircraft manufacturing. Australia had just completed its industrialisation in 1939, becoming a full war economy very rapidly.
The Chipilly Six by Lucas Jordan – Capturing the Australian military spirit at its best
Jordan tells the story of ‘extraordinary men in extraordinary times’, a group of six Australian soldiers who operated well ahead of the Allied advance to clear critical high ground of German troops and machine guns, allowing the main advance to continue.
A slave state – how blackbirding in colonial Australia created a legacy of racism
Reading time: 46 minutes
The French historian Ernest Renan described forgetting as “an essential factor in the creation of a nation”, since patriots do not want to remember the “deeds of violence” at the origin of all political formations. In the Australian context, a strange contradiction contributes to the ongoing amnesia about slavery and its consequences. From the very beginning, enslavement shaped white settlement in Australia – and so, too, did abolitionism. That paradox, a peculiar entwinement of two ostensibly antagonistic impulses, makes for a complicated narrative, one that cannot be grasped simply as a local version of the better-known American story.
Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536, what historians and scientists believe was the ‘worst year to be alive’
Reading time: 5 minutes
536 is the current consensus candidate for worst year in human history. A volcanic eruption, or possibly more than one, somewhere in the northern hemisphere would seem to have been the trigger. Wherever it was, the eruption precipitated a decade-long “volcanic winter”, in which China suffered summer snows and average temperatures in Europe dropped by 2.5℃. Crops failed. People starved. Then they took up arms against each other.
Remembering Long Tan: Australian army operations in South Vietnam 1966–1971
Reading time: 5 minutes
The anniversary of Long Tan reminds most Australians that despite winning that iconic high intensity battle, the Australians and New Zealanders lost the Vietnam War. In fact, the First Australian Task Force (1ATF) fought at least 16 big battles, and through superior firepower from artillery, armor and airpower, won them all, sometimes by a narrow margin.
But most of the struggle in Phuoc Tuy province and South Vietnam was a prolonged low intensity guerrilla war. The big battles only mattered if the US and her allies had lost them, as big battle success allowed the allies to stay in the War. Enemy defeats just forced the enemy to revert to low intensity guerrilla war, which the allies had to control if they were to win.
How the Coastwatchers Turned the Tide of the Pacific War
Australian Coastwatchers brought the tide of Japanese invasive successes to a shuddering halt when two coastwatchers spotted and reported an invasion fleet of 5,500 Japanese troops sailing south. The Coastwatchers’ observation was pivotal as it precipitated the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 and thwarted the Japanese invasion of Port Moresby.
What happens now we’ve found the site of the lost Australian freighter SS Iron Crown, sunk in WWII
Reading time: 6 minutes
Finding shipwrecks isn’t easy – it’s a combination of survivor reports, excellent archival research, a highly skilled team, top equipment and some good old-fashioned luck.
And that’s just what happened with the recent discovery of SS Iron Crown, lost off the coast of Victoria in Bass Strait during the second world war.
The Cowra breakout: remembering and reflecting on Australia’s biggest prison escape
Reading time: 8 minutes
Today (August 5) marks the 81st anniversary of Australia’s largest prison escape: the Cowra breakout, in New South Wales, during the second world war. In fact, it is one of the largest prison escapes in world history, but unless you are a keen war historian you may have never heard about it. A small farming community was forever changed in 1944, when the sound of a bugle cut through the crisp night air at the Cowra Prisoner of War camp.
A short history of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy – an indelible reminder of unceded sovereignty
Reading time: 6 minutes
Often people think about the Aboriginal Tent Embassy as something historic, dating back to the 1970s. But it should also be thought of as a site of the longest protest for Indigenous land rights, sovereignty and self-determination in the world.
Eaten By Moths Defending The Defence Reserves 1970-2020 – Online Zoom Event
Wednesday 12 July 2023 7:00PM-8:00PM (Australian Eastern Standard Time) via Zoom
Speaker: Dr Andrew Kilsby
Part-time service with the militia and then reserves has been a long and honourable tradition in Australia, often closely connecting local communities with the defence of Australia itself. The evolution of the Army, Navy and Air Force Reserves has seen a huge number of changes, not always for the better, especially since World War Two.
Report from 1945 holds lessons for defence strategic review team
Reading time: 4 minutes
What defence forces should Australia maintain at a time of strategic uncertainty and rapid technological change? This is the fundamental question currently facing Stephen Smith and Angus Houston, the authors of the defence strategic review. Much has been made of the critical nature of this review and the fact it represents a ‘huge moment in Australian defence history’. Recently, however, I was going through a previous review conducted in similarly uncertain times (although for different reasons) and it was difficult not to be struck by the enduring nature of the key issues at stake.
The USAAF 49th Fighter Group over Darwin: a forgotten campaign – Video
The prelude to the campaign of the 49th Fighter Group covers some of the darkest days of the Pacific War: the fall of Singapore on 15 February; the bombing of Darwin on 19 February during which the Japanese shot down nine of the ten P-40s of Major Floyd Pell’s 33rd Pursuit Squadron; and the sinking […]
Australia’s first action in the Pacific in World War II a valiant catastrophe – Video
Just before midnight on 7 December 1941, Flying Officer Peter Gibbes stepped off the train at Kota Bharu on the coast of northeast Malaya after a long, tiring journey up the peninsula from Singapore. Gibbes, an airline pilot in peacetime, had been newly posted to the Royal Australian Air Force’s 1 Squadron, which in the ensuing hours would become the first Australian military unit to see action in the Pacific War.
What good is a new national cultural policy without history?
Reading time: 5 minutes
While there is representation from galleries and collecting institutions on the panels, there is not a single historian, publisher or archivist whose feedback will help shape Australia’s cultural policy. Given the importance of history in defining our sense of national selfhood, and the role publishers, libraries, archives and museums play in preserving, collecting and presenting Australian histories and stories, these fields being absent from the national cultural policy panels is a disappointing oversight.
The changing lessons of Vietnam
Reading time: 5 minutes
The national effort at remembering should also revisit a series of 50-year anniversaries for Australia’s entry and enmeshment in the Vietnam War.
The other assassination of November 1963
Reading time: 5 minutes
On the night of 1 November 1963, President Ngo Dinh Diem of the Republic of Vietnam (commonly known as South Vietnam), and his brother and chief political adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were assassinated during a coup executed by a military junta, acting with the knowledge and support of the United States.