Australian pilots in the fight for control over the Mediterranean
Reading time: 11 minutes
The Siege of Malta, a two-year ordeal of bombs, heat and dust, was one of the most important battles of the Mediterranean theatre in World War Two. Few of the victories in North Africa and Italy would have been possible had the island fallen to the Axis. In this article, we let Australian pilots who defended Malta tell their stories.
Birth of a nation: how Australia empowering women taught the world a lesson
Reading time: 20 minutes
Perhaps, with the global challenges of the 21st century, Australia can reassert its erstwhile youthful exuberance and once again be proud to call itself a trailblazing leader – a nation where justice serves as the foundation of its moral constitution.
Where are All the Medals? Racial Bias in Military Bravery Awards
Reading time: 7 minutes
For service or for gallantry, almost all modern militaries – especially Western militaries, have issued war medals for a very long time.
But who decides who gets these medals and awards, and how?
Recent examination has brought to light a distinct lack of minority soldiers within Western militaries winning bravery awards, across many different countries, all throughout the 20th century and beyond.
Dive! Australian Submariners at War by Mike Carlton – Book Review
Reading time: 4 minutes
Dive! opens with the best description of the development and implementation of submarine technology and doctrine I have ever read. This could easily be part of a broader history of submarines, Carlton has clearly done broad and extensive research and his writing effortlessly demonstrates his command of the topic.
How Australia became a nation, and women won the vote
Reading time: 6 minutes
In April 1897, ten elected delegates from each of Australia’s colonies (except Queensland, which did not attend) gathered at Parliament House in Adelaide to map the route to nationhood, a Commonwealth of Australia.
AUTHOR OF THE ANZAC LEGEND: KEITH MURDOCH IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Reading time: 11 minutes
For a country just over a century old and whose national image is one of tough, independent action, some of the most active individuals involved in Australian nation-building have not been soldiers or stockmen but writers. Keith Murdoch was one of these, and his career and its consequences still echo throughout Australia and the world today.
The Siege of Malta through Australian eyes
Reading time: 11 minutes
The Siege of Malta in the Second World War, which lasted from June 1940 until November 1942, was a linchpin of the war. Had Malta fallen to the Axis, the war may have concluded very differently. Australian soldiers, sailors, and airmen played a crucial part in defending the island, in this article we explore how they experienced it.
Why the Anthropocene began with European colonisation, mass slavery and the ‘great dying’ of the 16th century
Reading time: 5 minutes
We’ve made enough concrete to cover the entire surface of the Earth in a layer two millimetres thick. Enough plastic has been manufactured to clingfilm it as well. We annually produce 4.8 billion tonnes of our top five crops and 4.8 billion livestock animals. There are 1.4 billion motor vehicles, 2 billion personal computers, and more mobile phones than the 7.8 billion people on Earth.
Life and death in Hong Kong during the Second World War
Reading time: 9 minutes
On 8 December 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces launched an all-out assault on Hong Kong, then a British colony. Following 18 days of brutal fighting, the defending troops surrendered and Hong Kong fell. The Japanese military occupation began.
Revealed: how women cricketers mended Australia’s relationship with Britain after Bodyline
Reading time: 7 minutes
Some of the earliest records of women playing cricket date back to 1745 in England and 1855 in Australia. Emily Whatman was part of a strong cohort of enthusiastic players from the 1890s. The snowballing interest in playing cricket had led women to form their own national cricket associations in England by 1926 and in Australia by 1931.
Australia refused to endorse China’s claim to Taiwan in 1972 because it foresaw a time like this
Reading time: 8 minutes
Journalists and policy analysts should spend more time reading history. If they did, they would be better placed to challenge the diplomats and politicians who casually requisition the past in order to lay claim to the present. We might also find our way towards policy prescriptions with real meat, as opposed to the all-too-common superficialities that substitute true engagement with historical context for little more than a doff and a wink at times gone by. Wisdom is in the files.
1915 in Australia: the reality of total war sinks in
Reading time: 5 minutes
1915 was a critical year for Australians, and not just because of the pride and myth-making associated with Gallipoli. Today we struggle to capture a sense of the profound shock and anxiety the landing at Anzac Cove brought to Australia. But it was this, together with a wider understanding that the war was not going well, that defined 1915 and drew Australians ever deeper into the vortex of total war.
How the world failed West Papua in its campaign for independence
Reading time: 6 minutes
At the UN, West Papuan activists sought the support of African delegates who they believed were likely allies. They argued West Papua and Africa shared a history of racial oppression and a desire to see the end of colonialism in all its forms.
The East River Column: the rebels who helped Second World War prisoners of war
Reading time: 13 minutes
The underground resistance group the East River Column played a vital role opposing Japanese forces around Hong Kong during the Second World War. Their activities provided a lifeline for Allied prisoners of war, who they aided with support, shelter, and a means of escape.
From micro to macro, Andrew Leigh’s accessible history covers the economic essentials
Reading time: 6 minutes
Andrew Leigh’s The Shortest History of Economics is the latest in a series of such histories, mostly focused on particular countries.
It begins with a striking mini-history of household lighting, focusing on the amount of labour required to produce the light now given off by a standard lightbulb: 58 hours for a wood fire, five hours for a candle based on animal fat, a few minutes for an early electric lightbulb, and less than one second for a modern light-emitting diode.
We have revealed a unique time capsule of Australia’s first coastal people from 50,000 years ago
Reading time: 5 minutes
Barrow Island, located 60 kilometres off the Pilbara in Western Australia, was once a hill overlooking an expansive coast. This was the northwestern shelf of the Australian continent, now permanently submerged by the ocean.
Our new research, published in Quaternary Science Reviews, shows that Aboriginal people repeatedly lived on portions of this coastal plateau. We have worked closely with coastal Thalanyji Traditional Owners on this island work and also on their sites from the mainland.
The Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS)
Reading time: 5 minutes
The first Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea was prompted by the sinking of RMS Titanic. An attempt to establish basic rules became the most important international treaty about the safety of merchant ships and sea travel.
‘It bucked our lads up wonderfully’: the lightning-quick battle that marked the birth of the US-Australia military alliance
Reading time: 6 minutes
While the AUKUS alliance is new, the Australian-American partnership is not. As Australians reflect on the sacrifices of their soldiers on ANZAC Day, it’s worth remembering the first time Australian and American troops joined forces in battle – in northern France, in the final year of the first world war.
What Australia’s convict past reveals about women, men, marriage and work
Reading time: 5 minutes
It is not the presence of convicts that matters, but the drastic distortion in the ratio of men to women that came with it. Convict men outnumbered convict women by roughly six to one. These numbers were even more skewed at the start of settlement. Convicts were joined by free migrants, especially in the second half of the 19th century, whose numbers also skewed heavily male. The ratio of men to women was consistently skewed in favour of males in Australia until the start of the first world war.
BIG ISLAND, LITTLE ISLAND: AUSTRALIA-MALTA RELATIONS IN THE 20TH CENTURY
Reading time: 9 minutes
From humble beginnings and over centuries, Britain built an empire by conquest, diplomacy, and economic muscle whose deep marks on the world and its history have been, and will be, felt for many years to come. One of the most fascinating ways this maritime nation changed the world was by forging ties between disparate nations and nationalities, like Malta and Australia, which endure to this day.
In their own words: letters from ANZACs during the Gallipoli evacuation
Just five days before Christmas, in the early hours of Monday December 20, 1915, the last Anzac troops left Gallipoli in what Australian historian Joan Beaumont called an “elaborate game of deception”. Self-firing guns were rigged to take pot-shots and camp fires lit to give the impression of there being more soldiers than there were. The Australians […]
Who were we fighting at Gallipoli?
In the annual discussion of the Gallipoli campaign Australians are subjected to a variety of hyperbole and parable as commentators and reporters offer up the same old chestnuts for want of something else to say. That at Anzac Cove ‘our nation was born’, that it ‘came of age’ or that Australian forces at Gallipoli were […]
Southern Cross Over Malta: Australian Fighter Pilots in the Battle for the Mediterranean
Reading time: 10 minutes
For three long years, as Britain and her allies first clung to survival and then clawed victory out of the face of overwhelming odds, a single island held out hope in the Mediterranean. Malta, just 17 miles long and 9 miles wide, with its neighboring island of Gozo had long stood as a fortress in the sea for whoever could hold it. Over the centuries, Malta had withstood Moorish, Turkish, and French sieges and fallen under a variety of civilisations dating back thousands of years.
‘Habits of civilised life’: how one Australian State forced Indigenous people to meet onerous conditions to obtain citizenship
Reading time: 7 minutes
In the breakthrough High Court case Love and Thoms vs Commonwealth in 2020, the court ruled that First Nations people could not be considered aliens in Australia. As Justice James Edelman noted in the decision, whatever the other manners in which they were treated […] Aboriginal people were not ‘considered as foreigners in a kingdom which is their own’.