Humanities and Social Sciences

History Program

Staff profiles

Teaching: Australian History 19th and 20th century; oral history and memory; gender history; history of sexuality.

Research interests: twentieth-century Australian history; rural labour, gender, identity and place; oral history; history of sexuality.

Projects in Progress: Women working on the land: gender, identity and rural labour in south-eastern Australia, 1901-1945; Gender and rural trade unions (women fruit-pickers and fruit-packers in the Rural Workers Union/AWU); Completing a monograph Secret Lives: Passionate friends and lesbian love in Australia 1920s-1950s, based on PhD thesis ‘Contested Desires: narratives of passionate friends, married masqueraders and lesbian love in Australia, 1918-1945'; Co-writing a book Sex in the City: a queer history of Melbourne (with Dr Graham Willet & Wayne Murdoch University of Melbourne & Dr Lucy Chesser).

Selected Publications:

Book Chapters:

‘'Sexuality and Madness: Regulating women's gender ‘deviance' through the Asylum', in Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, eds., Madness in Australia: History, Heritage and the Asylum, UQP/API, 2003, pp.109-120.
'Lesbians and loose women: female sexuality and the women's services during World War 2', in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake, eds., Gender and War, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.81-104.
'Lady friends and sexual deviationists: lesbians and the law in Australia , 1920s - 1950s' in Diane Kirkby, ed., Sex, Power and Justice: historical perspectives on the law in Australia, 1788-1990, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp.33-49.

Refereed Journal Articles:

'Prove first you're a male': A farmhand's claim for wages in 1929 Australia', Labour History, No 90, May 2006, pp. 1-21
‘ “They give up domestic help and go out harversting”; Women fruit-pickers and fruit-packers in 1912 Australia ', History Australia, vol.2, no.2, 2004, pp.07.1-07.12.
‘“The man-woman murderer”: sex fraud, sexual inversion and the unmentionable article in 1920s Australia ', Gender and History, vol.12, no.1, April 2000, pp.158-196.
‘Speculating on scrapbooks, sex and desire: issues in lesbian history', Australian Historical Studies, vol. 27, no.106, April 1996, pp.11-26.

Other Journal Articles:

'They "were wed, and merrily rang the bells": Gender-crossing and same-sex marriage in Australia, 1900-1940' in Graham Willet and David Phillips, eds., Australian Gay and Lesbian Perspectives 5, Australian Centre for Lesbian and Gay Research, 2000, pp.41-66.
‘Disciplined, punished and resisting bodies: lesbian women and the Australian armed services, 1950s-60s', Lilith: a Feminist History Journal, no. 9, Autumn, 1996, pp.53-77.
with Lyned Isaac, 'Forbidden Love - Bold Passion: An exhibition of lesbian stories 1900s -1990s', Museum National, vol.7, no.3, February 1999.
with Lyned Isaac, ‘Why an exhibition is not a book?: Forbidden Love, Bold Passion: an exhibition of lesbian stories 1900-1990s', Australian Women's Book Review, vol 9.1, Autumn 1997, pp.24-6.

Other Publications:

'Monte Punshon', in Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon (eds), Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian Culture, Routledge, London, 2000, pp.340-1.
'Eugenia Falleni/Harry Crawford', in Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon (eds), Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian Culture, Routledge, London, 2000, pp.157-8.
'Evelyn Brown [Powell] and Mary Parkinson', in Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon (eds), Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian Culture, Routledge, London, 2000, pp.356-7.