Humanities and Social Sciences

History Program

Staff Profiles

Teaching: Gender, Sexuality and Diversity Studies; Gender Relations in Australia and in Australia during war.

Research interests: Gardens, landscape, gender and identity; women’s autobiographical writings, especially women’s diary writing; gender and war; single women; women and ageing; feminist historiography.

Projects in Progress: ‘Growing Australian: domesticating native plants’. ARC Discovery grant exploring the uses and meanings of native gardening, and cultural resistance to it.
“‘A great and crying need”: A history of Kew Residential Service, 1887 – 2007’. ARC Linkage project, 2005 – 2008, $730,500. With Drs Richard Broome & Chris Bigby (CIs) & Dr Lee-Ann Monk (APDI).

Selected Publications:

with Susan Martin & Kylie Mirohamadi, Reading the Garden: the Settlement of Australia, MUP (forthcoming, February 2008).
with Susan Martin & Kylie Mirohamadi (eds) Green Pens: A Collection of Garden Writing, Melbourne, Meigunyah (MUP), 2004.
Spaces in Her Day: Australian women’s diaries of the 1920s & 1930s, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1995.
with Marilyn Lake (eds), Freedom Bound II: Documents on women in modern Australia, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1995.
with Patricia Grimshaw and Marilyn Lake (eds), Women’s Rights, Human Rights: international historical perspectives, New York, Palgrave, 2001.
‘”In spite of it all, the garden still stands”: gardens, landscape and cultural history’, in Hsu-Ming and Richard White (eds), Cultural History in Australia, University of NSW Press, 2003.
‘“I have built up a little garden”: the vernacular garden, national identity and a sense of place’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, vol 21, no. 2, April-June 2001, pp.115-121.
‘Gardens’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol 61, 1999, pp.152-162.
‘In Her Master’s House and Garden’, in Patrick Troy (ed.) A History of European Housing in Australia, Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
‘”Filling the Empty Cradles”: sexuality, maternity, and the effects of depression and war on gender relations in Australia’, in Peter Bastian and Roger Bell (eds), Through Depression and War: Australia and t20 June, 2008ldquo;Spinsters Indispensable”: Feminists, single women and the critique of marriage, 1890-1920’, Australian Historical Studies, April, 1998, pp.68–90.