Advocacy Archives

‘Habits of civilised life’: how one Australian State forced Indigenous people to meet onerous conditions to obtain citizenship

by History Guild | Apr 17, 2024 | Advocacy, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

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’.

The forgotten female soldiers who fought long ago – and why their stories matter today

by History Guild | Apr 3, 2024 | Advocacy, Military History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 13 minutes
Women have survived and even thrived as part of the machine of war – but are rarely part of military history. Why have their stories been forgotten?

Forget ‘Man the Hunter’ – physiological and archaeological evidence rewrites assumptions about a gendered division of labor in prehistoric times

by History Guild | Mar 27, 2024 | Advocacy, History News | 0

Reading time: 8 minutes
Prehistoric men hunted; prehistoric women gathered. At least this is the standard narrative written by and about men to the exclusion of women. The idea of “Man the Hunter” runs deep within anthropology, convincing people that hunting made us human, only men did the hunting, and therefore evolutionary forces must only have acted upon men. Such depictions are found not only in media, but in museums and introductory anthropology textbooks, too.

“Homosexuals Are Not Cowards”: The Legacy of Willem Arondeus

by History Guild | Feb 21, 2024 | Advocacy, Military History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Dutch artist and author Willem Arondeus’ life had always been fraught with insecurity. Despite the modest success of his artwork, he lived in poverty, and friend Frieda Belinfante remembered him first for his timidity. ‘He was very shy,’ she said, ‘and kind of an inferiority complex. He didn’t think he was good enough for this or that.’

The Mabo decision and native title

by History Guild | Jan 23, 2024 | Advocacy, Political and Economic History | 0

Reading time: 4 minutes
On June 3 1992, the High Court of Australia handed down its decision in the long-running case of Eddie Koiki Mabo and his compatriots from the Torres Strait island of Mer. Together they challenged the authority of the Queensland government to claim not just sovereignty but also ownership of the land comprising their ancestral home.

How unearthing Queensland’s ‘native police’ camps gives us a window onto colonial violence

by History Guild | Dec 4, 2023 | Advocacy, Historical Sites, Social and Cultural History | 0

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.

Black GIs arrive in Britain

by History Guild | Nov 29, 2023 | Advocacy, Military History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 13 minutes
In this blog post I’m going to draw on the Cabinet Papers to explore the British Government’s response to the arrival of Black GIs in Britain during the Second World War. I refer to government records and other primary sources of the time which use terminology which we now consider offensive, for example, ‘coloured troops’ and ‘negroes’.

Several years ago I recall hearing a story about villagers in the West Country during the Second World War refusing to go along with a local US Army segregation order that Black GIs were excluded from the local pub and that only white American troops could use it – the villagers protested and effectively overturned this order. I’m pretty certain that it was the singer-songwriter and activist Billy Bragg that related this story to me, when I had the pleasure to meet him some years back. The story made a big impression on me and I thought, one day, I must follow this thread up. Now I have, and here are the fruits of my research so far.

Women, Parliament and Political Space

by History Guild | Nov 20, 2023 | Advocacy, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 10 minutes
This blog post marks the anniversary of the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act, which passed on 21 November 1918, and enabled women over the age 21 to stand for Parliament. While an often overlooked act, this change in the law represents an important milestone for women’s rights. For the first time in history, women were able to directly influence Parliamentary debates and the passing of laws.

Shapurji Saklatvala – British MP and agitator for change

by History Guild | Oct 30, 2023 | Advocacy, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 4 minutes
Shapurji Saklatvala was born in India in 1874, the son of a merchant. His maternal uncle founded what is today the Tata group – a multinational conglomerate. Saklatvala worked for the company for part of his career, and first moved to England to run the Manchester office. After moving to England, he married Sarah Marsh, who came from a Derbyshire family, and they went on to have five children.

Black soldiers and the Red Ball Express during World War II

by History Guild | Oct 23, 2023 | Advocacy, Military History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had a problem. In June 1944, Allied forces had landed on Normandy Beach in France and were moving east toward Nazi Germany at a clip of sometimes 75 miles (121 kilometers) per day.
With most of the French rail system in ruins, the Allies had to find a way to transport supplies to the advancing soldiers. “Our spearheads … were moving swiftly,” Eisenhower later recalled. “The supply service had to catch these with loaded trucks. Every mile doubled the difficulty because the supply truck had always to make a two-way run to the beaches and back, in order to deliver another load to the marching troops.”

The solution to this logistics problem was the creation of the Red Ball Express, a massive fleet of nearly 6,000 2½-ton General Motors cargo trucks. The term Red Ball came from a railway tradition whereby railmen marked priority cars with a red dot.

A slave state – how blackbirding in colonial Australia created a legacy of racism

by History Guild | Sep 6, 2023 | Advocacy, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

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.

How the Coastwatchers Turned the Tide of the Pacific War

by History Guild | Aug 16, 2023 | Advocacy, Military History | 0

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.

Category: Advocacy