Katie Holmes

‘Spinsters Indispensable’: Feminists, single women and the critique of marriage, 1890–1920∗

In considering a period of national anxiety about falling marriage rates and rising numbers of single women, this article looks at the ways different groups used the figure of the spinster to argue about the ways white women should live their lives. For some feminists, the spinster was an example of what life for a free, economically independent white woman could be. For masculinists, the single woman was a threatening figure, suggesting womens independence from men. These debates, however, also suggest broader anxieties about marriage and womens position within it.

Talking about Mental Illness: Life Histories and Mental Health in Modern Australia

Mental illness was an experience readily discussed by participants in the Australian Generations Oral History Project. The stories demonstrate the significant shift which has occurred within the community during the last three decades, around attitudes toward, and treatment of, mental illness. The pervasiveness of a therapeutic discourse through which to express understandings of self is also evident. This article examines the different ways in which participants understood their varying experiences of mental illness. It considers participants’ changing historical circumstances and argues that we can identify key structural patterns of inequality—poverty and gender—which shape the prevalence and experience of mental illness, and the interpretive frames which provide narratives through which to understand that experience, namely feminism and the therapeutic attention to suffering. The article also considers the significance of the life history interview in enabling participants to tell their stories of mental illness within a whole of life trajectory.

Howling Wilderness and Promised Land: Imagining the Victorian Mallee, 1840–1914

This article traces the changing understandings and representations of the Victorian Mallee region in the years 1840–1914. It tracks the multiple ways in which the region was imagined and discussed, paying close attention to how these imaginings were both shaped by and in turn themselves shaped the landscape. We argue that while the Mallee experience became emblematic of the broader Australian struggle with the land and thus the founding narrative of the pioneer legend, the Mallee as a distinct region retained local, specific meanings, including the idea of a preferred English settler. We identify the Federation Drought as a turning point in ecological, national and cultural understandings of the region.

Public history at its best

Katie Holmes reviews radio presentation Public Intimacies: Royal Commission on Human Relationships.

Reflections on the history of Australasian gardens and landscapes

Where appearances recede into the depths of space and time even as they come forward to stake their claim on the phenomenal realm, they make special demands on our powers of observation. 1 When Eur...

Introduction: Telling Environmental Histories

The introduction to this book considers what new insights can be gained by bringing together the approaches of oral and environmental history. Oral history brings attention to memory and the stories people tell about the environments they move into and across. The insights of environmental history challenge oral historians to think more critically about the ways an active more-than-human world shapes experiences and people. The integration of these approaches enables us to more fully and critically understand the ways cultural and individual memory and experience shape human interactions with the more-than-human world, just as it enables us to identify the ways human memory, identity and experience are moulded by the landscapes and environments in which people live and labour. The chapter includes a discussion of the historiography around oral and environmental history in India, Australia, the UK and North America.

“It’s the Devil You Know”: Environmental Stories from the Victorian Mallee

The Mallee region of south-eastern Australia is a semi-arid area with a distinct social and environmental history. Adapting to the demands of farming in this environment has required, so the narrative goes, highly responsive farmers who also possess great personal resilience. Their stories of adaptation and resilience, however, are striking for the conflicts they reveal about their attitudes to farming in the Mallee environment. This chapter uses life history interviews to explore different narratives about environmental change in the Mallee and considers the ways individual lives can disrupt and challenge the meta-narratives of colonial and national progress, of pioneering and the frontier, at the same time that those meta-narratives shape the ways in which individuals seek to frame their (gendered) life story and anticipate their future.

Oral History and Australian Generations

The articles in this theme issue of Australian Historical Studies use interviews from the Australian Generations Oral History Project to explore a range of issues in Australian social and cultural history and about the documentation, interpretation and use of oral history. Digital technologies are transforming access to and use of oral history. Digital indexing has made it easier for researchers to search for relevant material within interviews and across interview collections and, importantly, these technologies are enhancing access to the oral recording so that researchers are more likely to consider the layers of meaning embedded in voice and the ways in which people speak about their lives. Australian Generations is one of a number of large oral history projects, in Australia and abroad, that are pioneering digital technologies for oral history.