History Program
Research
| Selected Current Research Projects |
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Eureka's Women: An Intimate History of Sex, Class and Culture on the Victorian Goldfields
This ARC-funded postdoctoral research project will be the first systematic study of the role of women in one of the most iconic event in Australian history, the Eureka Stockade. The research will challenge the prevailing representation of Eureka as a hyper-masculine episode - male passions inflamed, male blood shed, manhood suffrage won - by providing a unique gender perspective to a familiar narrative. The hypothesis of chief investigator Dr Clare Wright, is that women were intimately and inextricably involved in the events at Eureka, as they were more generally in the political and cultural life of the Victorian goldfields. The research findings will contribute to ongoing debates about the meaning of the Eureka story for Australian identity, citizenship and democracy.
History of Mexico, 1940-2006
Dr Barry Carr is undertaking an ARC-funded project to write a synoptic history of Mexico with a focus upon Mexico’s changing relationship with the international political and economic system. International, national and local analysis is being complemented by a series of regional or local ‘windows’, chosen because of the relevance of particular episodes, themes or regions to the larger issues that are examined in the forthcoming book. The book employs the frameworks and insights of social, cultural, political and economic history. The aim of the project is also to produce a graphically attractive text with spaces allocated for hidden, marginalized and subaltern voices, photos and cartoons. The book will be linked to the construction of a website on contemporary Mexico and the production of a DVD which will contain documents and images.
History of the Seamen's Union of Australia
Professor Diane Erica Kirkby is engaged in writing a history of the Seamen's Union of Australia with a particular focus on the decades immeditely prior to the SUA's affiliation with the Waterside Workers Federation to form the Maritime Union of Australia (1993). The SUA was a major organisation of workers in a vital industry in Australia's history as a martime nation. It was not only a major player in the labour movement but was one of those unions in the forefront of social and political activism on key issues, most notably the opposition to the Vietnam War, and support for Austalian athletes during the 1980 Olympics boycott.. This is a history of political activity, industrial struggle and social and economic significance. It draws heavily on the oral history of past members and officials.
Index to the Argus Newspaper
Dr John Hirst is currently engaged with a major on-going project to create an index to the Argus for the years 1860-1909 to fill the gap between existing indexes. Indexes for the 1860s and 1870s are complete; the index for the 1880s is being finalised. The ARC, which has supported the project from the beginning, is now being asked to fund the indexing of the 1890s. The aim of the project is to provide the whole index as an online resource. The index for the 1870s is currently online and can be accessed through the website of the National Library of Australia: www.nla.gov.au/argus.
Still Fighting For Our Rights: The Ongoing Struggle for Civil Rights in the USA, 1965-80
In recent years many historians have argued that the black struggle for civil rights in the United States cannot be confined within a narrative that privileges the events of 1955-65. The ARC-funded project of Dr Timothy Minchin and Professor John Salmond builds on these notions of a “long civil rights movement.” Dr Minchin's main focus is on exploring how African-Americans after 1965 continued to fight for equality in three central areas – education, employment, and voting. While the body of the book focuses on the 1965-80 period, co-investigator Professor John Salmond is writing both a detailed epilogue that continues the story past 1980 and an introduction that summarizes key developments prior to 1955.
Victorian Aborigines Advancement League
This project is being undertaken by Dr Richard Broome with the full cooperation of the Aborigines Advancement League, the oldest Aboriginal organisation still extant in Australia. It will produce the first detailed history of the Victorian Advancement League, adding to the League’s short history Victims or Victors? (1985). The Advancement League was formed in 1957 as a multiracial body to seek justice for Aboriginal people across Australia and provide welfare services for those in Victoria. A coup in 1969 formed the League into an all-Aboriginal body, which remains today. Its history, written from diverse archives and oral history, will be shaped into a monograph and academic articles, with the cooperation of the League. These writings will further our understandings of the growth of an Aboriginal leadership and Aboriginal organisations, white activism for Aboriginal rights, and the benefits and problems of indigenous and non-indigenous partnerships, which are vital questions from governments today.
White men's countries
Professor Marilyn Lake holds an ARC-funded Australian Professorial Research Fellowship to investigate the transnational emergence of self-styled white men’s countries around the world – in North America, South Africa and Australasia - from the late nineteenth century into the middle years of the twentieth century. It is a study of the rise of white masculine democracies in the context of the great migrations – Chinese, Indian, Japanese and European – of the long nineteenth century, a study that connects the formation of gendered, racialised, subjectivities with global political transformations. It investigates the changing meanings of sovereignty and self-government in the context of the circulation of historical knowledge, political ideas and new technologies of racial exclusion.
Professor Lake is exploring these ideas in three planned books: Drawing the Global Color Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality; Special Friends: Fraternal Yearning Across the Pacific; and a biographical study, Mr Deakin’s Tragedy.
Botany Bay Project - Professor Alan Frost
Until I began my research into the reasons for Britain’s decision to colonize New South Wales and the mounting of the First Fleet, almost all that had been written about these topics in the twentieth century had been based on the 100-or-so documents which had been published in Historical Records of New South Wales in 1892. Essentially what I have been doing is to reconstitute original files, so as to obtain much more extensive sequences of correspondence. I now have more than 1,000 documents, and no doubt there are more to be found. It goes without saying that analysis based on a hugely-expanded documentary base will differ significantly from that based on a fragmentary one. For example, it was once claimed: ‘Surely if the First Fleet were well-equipped, potato seed would have been sent?” I can now show that 10 bushels of potato seed were send (along with 26 bushels of long orange carrot, 26 of early York Cabbage, 6 of parsnip, 2 of asparagus . . . ). When completed, this project will stand as an enduring record for the nation.
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