Ann Curthoys

Freedom Ride, A Freedom Rider Remembers

This is the story of Australias historic Freedom Ride, the 1965 bus journey into the heart of the country to fight racism, from one who was there.;

Does Australian history have a future

This article first considers the problems of isolation that can beset national histories like Australian history, and then discusses the moves in recent years towards more transnational forms of history. In particular, developments in comparative histories, transnational histories, diasporic histories, and world histories raise questions about the contribution of Australian historians to future historical scholarship.

Feminism, Citizenship and National Identity

More than 200 years ago, the British King claimed land rights to about two thirds of the countries of this continent, an area the size of Western Europe, by setting up camp on the eastern shore on January 26, 1788.... There is only one way Australians can belong here. This is not part of Asia, Race Discrimination Commissioner Irene Moss needs to understand this. Your continuing failure over the past 200 years to treat with us as equals will condemn you, all of you, as a community of thieves in the eyes of your childrens children7 and the rest of the world. We are your only true connection to this continent, to this entire region. We are the land7 and we are here forever. (Aboriginal community leader Shirley Smith (Mum Shirl)7 28 January 1992)1

Raphael Lemkins Tasmania: an introduction

Raphaël Lemkins book on the history of genocide was never completed. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he planned over forty chapters, each about a particular historical case of genocide, from ancient times to the present, and researched and wrote many of them. Here we publish, for the first time, one chapter of that book from the original typescript in the New York Public Library. Chapter 38, ‘Tasmania’, discusses the virtual disappearance of the Aboriginal Tasmanians after several decades of British colonization and settlement in 1803. Despite its limitations as a work still in progress, the chapter demonstrates the subtlety of Lemkins understanding of genocide. His historical method was to rely largely on secondary sources but also to use primary sources whenever possible; for this chapter his main source was James Bonwicks The Last of the Tasmanians (1870). Lemkins ‘Tasmania’ considers the British authorities’ and settlers’ intentions and the experiences of Aboriginal people: loss of land and life, loss of children, the effects of liquor and disease, and the decline in their reproductive capacity. It concludes with a discussion of contemporary public opinion. Lemkins chapter has, of course, been superseded by extensive historical research published since the mid-1970s. Yet it remains a thoughtful and thought-provoking text.

Adventures of Feminism: Simone de Beauvoir's Autobiographies, Women's Liberation, and Self-Fashioning

While The Second Sex is usually taken as Simone de Beauvoirs major theoretical contribution to feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s it was very often through her autobiographies – especially Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, and Force of Circumstance, along with novels such as She Came to Stay and The Mandarins – that her feminist ideas were most thoroughly absorbed. The autobiographies became nothing less than a guide for the fashioning of a new kind of feminine self. Where The Second Sex had intimated that a significant aspect of human liberation lay in women not losing their identity or their sense of self in those of men, it was the autobiographies which suggested and demonstrated in great detail how this might be done. In them, the rejection of conventional marriage and children was no mere slogan, but the foundation of what seemed to young female readers to be a fascinating and challenging life. In this paper, I reflect on de Beauvoir and her historical and contemporary relevance: first through reminiscence and re-reading of the autobiographies themselves; then with an historical examination of how they were read, taking Sydney, Australia, as my example; and finally by offering some reflections on subsequent feminist critique.

Labour History and Cultural Studies

In the early 1960s a group of historians led by ANU academics Eric Fry and Bob Gollan formed the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. Its first Bulletin came out in April 1962, and was transformed into the journal Labour History in roughly its current format with the fourth issue in May 1963. Contributors to the Bulletin saw themselves as writing a new and contentious kind of history, especially with its subject matter. Those early issues of Labour History included articles academic, anecdotal, reminiscence on issues such as strikes and riots, unions, employer-union relations, labour and radical organisations, leading labour movement figures, and radical and labour politics, parties, and ideas. Labour history in Australia remains alive and well. The journal that carries that title is flourishing, receiving far more articles than it can print, and with a waiting list of up to two years before publication. Essays dealing with aspects of labour history appear regularly in other journals as well, such as Australian Historical Studies and the Australian Journal of Politics and History. As a review article in AHS by Rae Frances and Bruce Scates in 1993 indicated, publishers continue to produce in abundance books on various aspects of labour history.^he most recent Labour History conference, in June 1993, is testimony in itself, having attracted over 100 papers from historians and activists around the country. Labour historians are well represented in the academy: a large number of academic teachers of history, in Australian history probably the majority, have close associations with it. Labour history is also important for teaching and research in industrial relations and political science, and a significant number of labour historians work in those fields. Now, a third of a century later, where is the enterprise of labour history? How far have historians been able to achieve the aims of its founders, and have or should they have new aims?

Gender in the Social Sciences

Abstract This paper considers the three main ways in which social scientists are concerned with gender—as a field of study, as an analytical tool and as a social phenomenon structuring the social sciences themselves. It begins with a reconsideration of a report I wrote for the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 1998 on gender in the social sciences, and moves on to consider what has changed since then, emphasising the substantial internationalisation of Australian scholarship in thinking, method, focus, collaboration and communication. With the growing alliance of gender studies with cultural studies and the transformation of the latter from an interdisciplinary project into a new discipline, I suggest, feminist scholarship has become much more disciplinary in focus. For this reason, it has become important to understand why it is that women have found it much harder to achieve parity with men in some disciplines than others, and why it is that within disciplines, there remain strong gender differences. It concludes by observing that the vitality of gender scholarship depends significantly on its continuing engagement with public concerns and issues.

Visions, nightmares, dreams: Women's history, 1975

This paper examines four key texts in Australian womens history—Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia 1788 to 1975, Penguin, 1976; Anne Summers, Damned Whores and Gods Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia, Penguin, 1975; Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon, Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work, 1788–1974, Nelson, 1975; and Beverley Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter, and Poor Mary Ann, Nelson, 1975. The paper discusses the context within which these texts were produced and then examines them as works of history, noting especially the continuities and discontinuities between these texts and current work in Australian womens history.

How different was Victoria? Aboriginal ‘protection’ in a comparative context

Scholars of settler colonial governance in Victoria have tended to characterise the colony as distinctive. It was, most agree, shaped by unusually intensive efforts to govern, survey, ‘civilise’ and control Aboriginal people, rather than to destroy or simply neglect them, although the latter certainly occurred too.1 Here, we wish to scrutinise the idea of Victorian exceptionalism, focusing on the late 1850s and early 1860s, the years shortly after the achievement of responsible government in 1856. With responsible government, Britain lost control over Aboriginal policy, and, just as importantly, British humanitarian societies lost their lines of direct influence on policy. In this period, then, we can trace the beginnings of Aboriginal policy as colonial politicians devised it under the new system of responsible government.

The advent of self-government, 1840s–90

Prior to British colonisation, Australia was populated by self-governing Aboriginal societies. Linked through kinship and trade, these societies, though sometimes hostile to one another, neither seized each others land nor sought to exploit the labour of other groups. Their system of government was through transmission of ancestral law, kinship networks and power differences based largely on age and gender, and ceremonies and ritual. If Aboriginal people were self-governing, the British who encountered them thought they lacked government altogether, an idea that was foundational to Britains proclamation of their lands as settled colonies. Whereas British colonisers in other parts of the world usually had to recognise and negotiate with indigenous systems of government, in the Australian colonies they rarely did so. This chapter examines the granting of a different system of self-government to most of the Australian colonies in the 1850s and to Western Australia in 1890. It is also concerned with its shadow-side: Aboriginal dispossession, loss of self-government and enforced dependence on colonial charity. Self-government was a complex matter for colonies such as New South Wales and Van Diemens Land, given their origins as convict settlements. Over time, as the free proportion of the population increased and under pressure from the colonies, Britain had granted elements of what was known as ‘representative government’: a local parliament, called a legislative council, whose task was to represent ‘the people’ and make laws on a specified range of matters. While the early legislative councils were nominated and advisory, they grew in size, authority and representativeness as the proportion of elected members increased. Representation by itself, however, was not enough; what mattered was whether the governor (representing the crown) or parliament (representing the people) had control. In the mid-nineteenth century, imperial and settler interests combined to produce a particular system known as ‘responsible government’.