Trump Administration’s Attempts to Curtail Academic Freedom
History Guild supports the Australian Historical Association’s Statement in Response to the...
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Category: Advocacy
What is suffragette white? The colour has a 110-year history as a protest tool
Reading time: 7 minutes
“Suffragette white” is proving to be a popular fashion choice for women who want to make a statement. Most recently, former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate donned a white jacket in her appearance before a Senate inquiry into her controversial departure from the organisation.
Hidden in plain sight: Finding working-class women in The National Archives
Reading time: 10 minutes
This article will make use of a particularly interesting case study of pit brow women in Lancashire, to explore the complexities and opportunities associated with archival work. The women’s lives can be revealed through analysis of documents from sources in the Copyright Office, and the Ministry of Power collections. By identifying strengths and weaknesses of records, they can be analysed with greater depth and nuance, so that they are used most effectively during an exploration of the past.
Ukraine isn’t invited to its own peace talks. History is full of such examples – and the results are devastating
Reading time: 7 minutes
Ukraine has not been invited to a key meeting between American and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia this week to decide what peace in the country might look like.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine will “never accept” any decisions in talks without its participation to end Russia’s three-year war in the country.
A decision to negotiate the sovereignty of Ukrainians without them – as well as US President Donald Trump’s blatantly extortionate attempt to claim half of Ukraine’s rare mineral wealth as the price for ongoing US support – reveals a lot about how Trump sees Ukraine and Europe.
Of course Australia was invaded – massacres happened here less than 90 years ago
Reading time: 4 minutes Much has been made of the University of New South Wales’ “diversity...
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60 years old, the Yirrkala Bark Petitions are one of our founding documents – so why don’t we know more about them?
Reading time: 17 minutes
Each of these declamatory objects speaks back to power, a creative act of resistance to a perceived political injustice. Like the stories of the creation, presentation and reception of the Eureka Flag and the women’s suffrage petition, the story of the Bark Petitions takes us to a time when democratic inclusion, when basic entitlements of citizenship, could not be taken for granted by certain sections of the body politic.
Our mapping project shows how extensive frontier violence was in Queensland. This is why truth-telling matters
Reading time: 6 minutes The Native Mounted Police operated in Queensland for 80 years, starting in 1849. It consisted of small groups of between six and 15 Aboriginal troopers under the command of white officers. The troopers were typically recruited from areas far from where they were sent to serve. Detachments of troopers were regularly sent out on patrol, covering large areas along the frontier of the colony in pursuit of Indigenous people who were considered to be “problematic”. Their main job was to protect civilian settlers, the lands they had taken up, and their livelihoods – by whatever means necessary.
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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.
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 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.
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.
‘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’.
