Tag: Australian

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

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

by | Dec 4, 2023 | , , | 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.

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Auxiliary power: in wartime, Australian women fought germs, fired shells – and took on gender norms

Auxiliary power: in wartime, Australian women fought germs, fired shells – and took on gender norms

by | Nov 2, 2023 | , | 0

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.

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Are we learning the wrong lessons from history?

Are we learning the wrong lessons from history?

by | Oct 18, 2023 | , , | 0

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.

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Remember El Alamein

Remember El Alamein

by | Oct 16, 2023 | | 0

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.

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Are Aussie pubs really filled with tiles because it’s easier to wash off the pee? History has a slightly different story

Are Aussie pubs really filled with tiles because it’s easier to wash off the pee? History has a slightly different story

by | Oct 11, 2023 | | 0

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”.

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Linguistics locates the beginnings of the Austronesian expansion – with Indigenous seafaring people in eastern Taiwan

Linguistics locates the beginnings of the Austronesian expansion – with Indigenous seafaring people in eastern Taiwan

by | Oct 2, 2023 | , | 0

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.

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5,700 years of sea-level change in Micronesia hint at humans arriving much earlier than we thought

5,700 years of sea-level change in Micronesia hint at humans arriving much earlier than we thought

by | Sep 13, 2023 | , | 0

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.

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

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

by | Sep 6, 2023 | , , | 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.

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Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536, what historians and scientists believe was the ‘worst year to be alive’

Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536, what historians and scientists believe was the ‘worst year to be alive’

by | Aug 24, 2023 | , | 0

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.

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