Christina Twomey

Trauma and the reinvigoration of Anzac: An argument

This article argues that changing ideas about trauma and victimhood, which emerged from the 1980s, played an important and insufficiently recognised role in the reinvigoration of Anzac for contemporary times. The recasting of war as horror and trauma that became prominent internationally from the 1970s is shown to have generated new sympathy for war veterans. In Australia, these developments occurred in parallel with feminist protests about rape in war, which complicated the emerging narrative of soldier as victim. A key turning point in the renewal of Anzac emerged in the 1980s, contemporaneous with feminist protests, when male veterans reasserted their symbolic centrality in the Anzac march and claimed victim status for themselves. Ultimately the traumatising effects of war, and sympathy for its victims, have become a central trope in the post-1980s incarnation of Anzac. It is suggested that the empathy this inspires offers a superficial understanding of war’s cost. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Framing Atrocity: Photography and Humanitarianism

This article examines the evolution of atrocity photography and its links with humanitarian movements in the late nineteenth century. It argues that photographic images and the language of atrocity must be studied together in order to appreciate the relationship between them which was encapsulated in a genre depicting the ravaged or mutilated body. Three moments in the evolution of the relationship between humanitarianism, photography and atrocity are considered: the Bulgarian ‘atrocities’ of the late 1870s; the Indian Famine in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies of 1876–78; and the campaign to reform conditions in the Belgian Congo between 1903 and 1913.

Australian Responses to the Indian Famine, 1876–78: Sympathy, Photography and the British Empire

Abstract This article analyses Australian efforts on behalf of victims of the 1876–8 Indian famine as complex articulations of colonial identity and loyalty in the British imperial world. Focused on the Victorian Famine Relief Fund, which made extensive use of vivid photographic images of sufferers, the article also examines the public campaigns on behalf of Indian famine victims in other colonial cities and towns. It suggests that the language of filial duty most commonly associated with later military commitments had a humanitarian pedigree, and that the settler colonial ability to express empathy for non-white British subjects was enhanced by the capacity to see photographic images of them. Despite their promise of drawing the viewer closer to witnessing suffering, photographs of famine victims served rather to emphasise the distance between the viewer and the viewed, in ways that were productive for the fund-raising effort.

Australian nurse pows: Gender, war and captivity

In World War II, thirty‐eight members of the Australian Army Nursing Service were taken prisoner by the Japanese Imperial Forces. This article focuses on nurse prisoners of war as women whose wartime experiences confounded symbolic understandings about appropriate gender roles in wartime. It also examines the nurses’ position as white women held captive by racial others outside the nations borders. These tensions over gender, race and nation in wartime captivity are explored in three main sites: print media representations of the nurses’ release, POW nurses’ subjectivity and commemorative activity. POW nurses’ own testimony and activism undermined media representations of feminine vulnerability, but paradoxically reified rather than challenged the centrality of Anzac mythology in narratives of Australians at war.

Courting men: mothers, magistrates and welfare in the Australian colonies.

Abstract Scholarship on women and philanthropy in nineteenth-century Australia has often focused on the relationship between poor women and private philanthropic associations. This article, however, explores the way poor white women in the colony of Victoria turned to the state for support in times of extreme poverty. Despite the colonial governments preference for private charity, ‘good’ mothers, in the 1850s and 1860s, could gain both the personal sympathy of the magistrate and financial assistance in a variety of forms. But poor white mothers found that the colonial magistrate had both the capacity to help and promote them in their struggle to raise their children or to place them under a very different regime of judgement, surveillance or interference in their tasks of motherhood and daily life. This article explores the ambiguous relationship between poor women and the state under such conditions.

Masculinity, emotion and subjectivity: Introduction

This introduction summarizes the key themes raised in a symposium on masculinity, emotion and subjectivity at Monash University in 2006. These include ways of writing about the lived experience of masculinity in the past as well as the present, especially in terms of how men understand and use the “scripts” that prescribe and describe manliness, and questions of sources and approaches for the study of masculinity as a performance.

‘Without natural protectors’: Responses to wife desertion in gold‐rush Victoria

This article uses the issue of wife desertion in gold‐rush Victoria to explore the ways in which womens welfare needs were often eclipsed by reform programmes centred on the male breadwinner. It argues that deserted wives were powerful cultural symbols of the dislocations of gold discovery, of urban poverty and of unprotected femininity, which reformers appropriated and used for their own ends. The article then charts how deserted wives, and the contradictions that they represented, emerged as legitimating figures in the rhetoric of the land reform movement. Viewed in this light, land reform appears to be a movement with a thoroughly gendered social vision, one that effaced the needs of impoverished women who lived apart from men.

POWs of the Japanese: Race and Trauma in Australia, 1970–2005

Abstract Australian prisoners of war (POWs) captured by the Japanese in the Second World War are central figures in Australian memory of that war. A resurgence of cultural interest in their experiences began in the 1970s. This occurred within the context of three developments: the ending of the White Australia Policy, defeat in Vietnam, and the creation of the psychiatric category of post-traumatic stress disorder. In the 1970s, POWs often became a metaphor for Australias relations with the Asian region, thereby underscoring the racial dimensions of their experience, whereas by the 1980s and into the 1990s they were prominent as the traumatized survivors of an earlier war. The article argues for the need to historicize the influence of trauma as a way of understanding the war experiences of POWs.

Is Australian History Over-determined by the Transnational Turn?

Twomey explores the intellectual, ideological and institutional reasons why Australian historians have embraced the transnational turn. She argues that transnational history employs a methodology that aligns with the practices of empire and has therefore been extremely influential in studies of imperialism and colonialism. This approach has held particular appeal for scholars of a settler society, keen to move beyond parochial frameworks and enter international scholarly debates. Twomey takes an example from her own work on protection, to demonstrate the analytic potential of the transnational model. She argues that protection, rather than being a nineteenth-century humanitarian intervention in empire, entered the language and practice of British imperialism through its absorption of the legal structures of Spanish and Dutch colonies. The influence of transnationalism, despite its historiographical and methodological promise, has also meant that academic research on other aspects of the Australian past have fallen from favour. In the rush to enter a global conversation, Australian historians have begun to overlook the local stories that also make up an essential element of Australia’s past.

Prisoners of war of the Japanese: War and memory in Australia

This article reflects on the place of prisoners of war of the Japanese in Australian memory of World War II. It examines the return to prominence of prisoners of war memory in the 1980s and places this phenomenon in the context of the memory boom and the attention accorded to difficult or traumatic memories. By exploring the relationship between Australian war memories and debates about Indigenous suffering, it suggests that cosmopolitan memory cultures form an important conceptual link between them. Recognising prisoners of war memory as an example of traumatic memory allows us to move beyond an analysis bounded by the nation state, and to argue that instead of seeing it as emerging in competition with other contemporary memories focused on the suffering of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, it shares some elements in common with them.