Joy Damousi

History matters: The politics of grief and injury in Australian history

This article argues for the need to move beyond certain conventional narratives of Australian history. As a way of reconfiguring this narrative, it is suggested that historians need to give a fuller account of the place of grief, trauma and loss in Australian histories. This is important for two reasons. First, memories of these experiences are political and highlight the oppression by institutions and government of psychic life along the axes of class, gender, race and sexuality. Second, a public expression of trauma emphasises the politicisation of emotional life and points to the crucial role of the ‘personal’ in progressive politics.

Writing Gender into History and History in Gender: Creating A Nation and Australian Historiography

This paper reflects on the impact of gender in the writing of history by considering the reception of Creating A Nation, the first gendered history of Australia. It argues that while there has emerged an impressive volume of feminist history and with it has come an important acceptance of womens historical experience, the reception of ‘gender’ within the historical profession has paradoxically been ambivalent and ambiguous. This is the case because of an unease about feminist theory and its relevance to history. There also remains a prevailing belief that a gendered neutral historical place exists, to which historians can retreat.

Beyond the ‘origins debate’: Theorising sexuality and gender disorder in convict women's history∗

This paper aims to shift the debates on convict women from a discussion of their ‘origins’ and their morality to a focus on the construction of cultural meaning and the dynamics of relationships. Drawing on feminist and cultural theory, I argue that attention to a number of cultural signs can illuminate sexual difference and gender disorder.

Stepping out of history : documents of women at work in Australia

Introduction Convict wives 1787--1820 Immigrant brides 1820--1840 The search for independence 1840--1860 Women in a male world 1860--1880 The call to the factory 1880--1900 Womens mobilisation in peace and war 1900--1920 A womans work is never done 1920--1940 From the military to motherhood 1940--1960 Campaigns for rights and equality 1960--1980

The Greek Civil War and child migration to Australia: Aileen Fitzpatrick and the Australian Council of International Social Service

In July 1950, a newly arrived Greek immigrant to Australia, Spyros Kenos, wrote to the Australian Council of International Social Service (ACISS) pleading assistance to bring out his wife and children who currently resided, as he described it, ‘in the Iron Curtain countries’. The service, a branch of the International Migration Service, was formed in 1924 to assist immigrants whose predicament required action in more than one country. The circumstances of war had dramatically and painfully dispersed his family across three countries – Hungary, Romania and Australia. His family comprised his wife, Varavara, and his daughter Georgia (born in 1934), both residing in Hungary, and his two sons, Nicholas (born 1936) and Achilleas (born 1942), currently living in Romania. Kenos pleaded for diplomatic assistance from the Australian government authorities in his new-found home, but he was told that both Hungarian and Romanian governments had to be approached by Australian authorities separately if he was to be successfully reunited with his family. His frugal circumstances meant that he did not have the finances to cover the cost of bringing out his children; he could provide £100 towards the fares to bring out his family.

Does Feminist History have a future

Abstract Contemporary shifts in scholarship and institutional agendas, I argue, have created new sets of challenges for feminist history. While these do not undermine the paradigms of this scholarly endeavour, there has been an inevitable shift in how feminist history is now written, conceptualised and undertaken. A hallmark of dynamic and innovative scholarship is a capacity to evolve and respond to intellectual challenges and developments. There is much to be positive about in the future, as I believe feminist history at its best has not remained a passive or static body of knowledge, but continues to be reformulated and reconceptualised, but with this dynamism comes uncertainties which institutional change can bring. While I do not believe these are systemic enough to pose a challenge to the enterprise, I suggest they do create cause for wider discussion, especially about the place of the humanities more generally in the corporate university of the twenty-first century.

A cultural history of sound, memory, and the senses

The past 20 years have witnessed a turn towards the sensuous, particularly the aural, as a viable space for critical exploration in History and other Humanities disciplines. This has been informed by a heightened awareness of the role that the senses play in shaping modern identity and understanding of place; and increasingly, how the senses are central to the memory of past experiences and their representation. The result has been a broadening of our historical imagination, which has previously taken the visual for granted and ignored the other senses. Considering how crucial the auditory aspect of life has been, a shift from seeing to hearing past societies offers a further perspective for examining the complexity of historical events and experiences. Historians in many fields have begun to listen to the past, developing new arguments about the history and the memory of sensory experience. This volume builds on scholarship produced over the last twenty years and explores these dimensions by coupling the history of sound and the senses in distinctive ways: through a study of the sound of violence; the sound of voice mediated by technologies and the expression of memory through the senses. Though sound is the most developed field in the study of the sensorium, many argue that each of the senses should not be studied in isolation from each other, and for this reason, the final section incorporates material which emphasizes the sense as relational.

Remembering the 1951 Referendum on the Banning of the Communist Party

On 22 September 1951, a nation-wide referendum asked Australians to vote Yes or No to the following question: ‘Do you approve of the proposed law for the alteration of the Constitution entitled ‘‘Constitution Alteration (Powers to Deal with Communists and Communism) 1951’’?’ The law to which the referendum question referred would enable the Commonwealth government to ban the Communist Party of Australia. Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies had called the referendum in response to the High Court’s ruling that his government’s Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950, which had passed both houses of Parliament with Opposition support, was unconstitutional. Contrary to general expectation on all sides of politics, referendum voters narrowly rejected the government’s proposed change to the Constitution. The government made no further attempts to ban the Communist Party, and instead pursued other avenues in its fight against communism, most notably in using the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, created two years earlier by the Chifley Labor government, to monitor closely the party’s activities. The referendum has been of interest to historians mainly in the context of post-war Australian political and Cold War history. Historical analysis began, perhaps, with L. C. Webb’s Communism and Democracy in Australia (1954), a book considered in some detail by Murray Goot and Sean Scalmer in this present collection. Subsequent work has appeared in the context of studies of two of the principal players, Menzies and H. V. Evatt, and in a range of other Australian Cold War histories discussed in these essays. Anniversaries have tended to prompt further reflection: there was a conference to mark the fortieth anniversary in 1991, interestingly the year the Soviet Union and the Australian Communist Party both finally dissolved, while this present group of essays arises from a successful and enjoyable two-day symposium held in Melbourne on the occasion of the referendum’s sixtieth anniversary. In bringing these essays together in this issue of Australian Historical Studies, we aim to extend historical understanding of the nature and significance of the 1951 referendum in a number of directions. We seek to move discussion beyond a paradigm hitherto defined by the internal dynamics of Cold War politics to one informed by recent developments in cultural, social, legal and political history and also by the transnational turn, which has encouraged historians to connect their local and national histories with events and processes elsewhere.

‘Women—Keep Australia Free!’: Women Voters and Activists in the 1951 Referendum Campaign

Abstract This article considers three aspects of the womens vote and activism during the 1951 referendum campaign. First, it is argued that the appeal to women was conducted in terms of the democratic right to freedom of expression and protest especially as it connected to domestic issues. Second, womens engagement in this campaign has been overlooked, but was influential, diverse and prominent, as evidenced by the involvement of activists such as Millicent Preston Stanley and Margot Mahood. Finally, the campaign directed at the woman voter points to the increasing appeal by the major parties to women as independent voters.

‘The woman comrade’: equal or different?

Abstract This paper considers ideas about sexual difference in Communist discourse during the inter-war years. The Communist Party of Australia drew upon discourses of womens difference from men in order to appeal specifically to the ‘‘woman comrade’. At the same time it claimed an equality between working men and women which meant that the interests of both could best be defended by the Party. The competing discourses thus made available to working-class women opened up a limited space for a distinctively female activism, which disdained bourgeois and reformist feminism.