Humanities and Social Sciences

History Program

Research Projects

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.

A study of the Fulbright Program in Australia 1949-2009
Professor Diane Erica Kirkby has recently begun this history of the Fulbright Program of educational exchange between Australia and the USA that will explore a significant and undervalued aspect of the post-war relationship between the two countries.  It will enhance our understanding of the sources of innovative ideas and their transfer, by investigating whether the 2600 Australian Fulbright scholars since 1949 were influential in re-orienting local research practice and public policy initiatives along US models.  It will broaden awareness of the Fulbright Program’s place in the Australian experience of globalisation, and continue to a critical understanding of cultural diplomacy as a key feature of foreign policy.

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.

Made in the USA?: The Decline of the American Manufacturing Economy, 1950-2008
In a global economy, the decline of manufacturing industries has not just occurred in the U.S. but has also affected other high-wage labor markets, including Australia. As well as throwing light on this process in Australia this ARC-funded project of Dr Timothy Minchin will show that deindustrialisation is a transnational process and that many multinational forms have declined simultaneously in both countries. In a world where factory closings make headlines, the project also has considerable contemporary relevance in both countries.

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.

Mapping Matrons: Women’s Cultural Patronage Networks in Seventeenth Century Northern Italy: from Maria Cristina of Savoy to Vittoria della Rovere

This ARC funded project undertaken by Dr Adelina Modesti will focus on a developing area of gender studies, matronage: the social agendas and politico-diplomatic motivations of élite women’s cultural patronage. Based on extensive archival research, this interdisciplinary contextual study will examine the commissioning and collecting practices of a group of dynastic women in early modern Italy, and chart the nature, scope and impact of their social networks, to determine the role and influence of gender on cultural production. Such studies of female influence and agency will shift traditional understandings of (élite male) power in European societies, adding an important historical dimension to contemporary debates concerning gender, social capital and female leadership. In particular it addresses women’s political influence and statecraft as expressed through their cultural activities and policies, retrieving women’s significant public engagement and community building in the realm of public taste. Historical precedents show how female networks and agency contribute to the community and public sector. This study will illuminate how our culture (and democracy) emerged in gendered networks of cultural exchange.