Richard Broome

Not Strictly Business: Freaks and the Australian Showground World

Abstract Freak show performers are popularly portrayed as exploited individuals. This article examines the debate within the history of intellectual disability over freaks, and tests the contested positions against the evidence of freak shows in Australia, 1920 to 1950. It argues that these were not exploitative relations or simply business ones, but complex and nuanced two-way paternalistic relations. Freak performers experienced some power and a sense of belonging to the showground world. They consented or assented to their role in that world.

Windows on other worlds: The rise and fall of sideshow alley

This article explores the world of Sideshow Alley, which emerged from the ancient fair culture of Britain and took root in the agricultural show movement of Australia by the 1880s. There it flourished until the 1950s, when modernity and respectability caused its demise. The article also argues that Sideshow Alley was a place of power that helped to shape the identities of many Australians through the display of difference and that it also provided a site of agency for those displaying themselves.

Edward M. Curr and the Tide of History

Springs conference, but her conclusion that he ‘was undoubtedly a key player, both in bringing together like-minded people from the warring principalities of Washington ... and in providing telling arguments to support it’, is both judicious and reasonable (270). Ultimately, McDougall was rewarded with the post of counsellor (ranking second only to the Director-General) at the FAO, which he held until shortly before his death in 1958. In recent years, the multilateral economic agencies created in the wake of World War II have received welcome attention from international historians, includingAmy Staples’ The Birth of Development (2006) and Patricia Clavin’s Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946, also published last year. Wendy Way’s study is a valuable addition to this growing body of literature.

Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803

rage at the treatment of those she came to know drove her to act on their behalf until she was well into her nineties. Through the inclusion of such information, this book truly becomes a history for all Australians. The final chapter, also written by Langton, links the first warriors with contemporary warriors and leaders such as Eddie Koiki Mabo, and tells of the ongoing struggles for land rights and recognition of native title. This book provides documented evidence, perhaps for the first time, of the struggle between two cultures from the perspective of the original owners*the First Australians. It is an important addition to the vast collection of Australian history, not only for the fact that it is told from a different perspective, but because it is about time that Australia’s shared history was made available from this perspective.

Frontier History Revisited—Colonial Queensland and the ‘History War’

Aboriginal men from the colony of New South Wales (which also encompassed what are now the states of Queensland and Victoria) convicted mostly between the mid-1830s and mid-1860s, thirty-four Khoisan from the Cape Colony (now part of the Republic of South Africa), including the female murderer Mina Magerman, transported between the late 1820s and the early 1850s, and six Mâori men, five of whom were sent to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) in 1846, with the sixth, Te Ahuru, being briefly imprisoned in Hobart in 1851 after being sentenced to transportation for theft in the Wellington Supreme Court. Harman argues that British authorities sentenced indigenous peoples from these three colonies to transportation for similar reasons, but that Australian Aborigines, Khoisan and Mâori had very different convict experiences. Most indigenous men who became convicts had been fighting to defend their land against British invasion. Colonial authorities attempted to redefine their armed resistance as criminal activity by capturing them and trying them on charges such as murder or theft. These men were sentenced to terms of transportation because this meant they would be exiled from their ‘country’. Harman notes this exemplary punishment was often used in periods of conflict or tension on the colonial frontier*such as Cape Colony in 1834, the Hunter Valley and Liverpool Plains in New South Wales in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and the Hutt Valley in the south of New Zealand’s North Island in 1846*and had two aims. The first was to coerce the indigenous population to cease resistance; the second was to reassure the settlers that the colonial government was protecting them and their property and to dissuade them from taking the law into their own hands. Once they became convicts, however, the similarity in the experiences of indigenous convicts ended. Harman argues that the six Mâori convicts had the best treatment, though most did suffer severe illness in Van Diemen’s Land before they were returned to New Zealand. Hohepa Te Umuroa died and was buried on Maria Island; his remains were disinterred and repatriated in 1988. Most Khoisan convicts, including nine soldiers of the Cape Mounted Rifles transported for taking part in a mutiny in 1838, survived their term of imprisonment in Australia, though they were given no assistance to return to Africa. Australian Aboriginal convicts had the worst mortality rate of the three indigenous groups, often dying within a short period of being incarcerated. As Harman argues, this was partly due to Aboriginal cultural beliefs in which separation from one’s ‘country’ can lead to an illness ‘akin to clinical depression’ (111). Another contributing cause for this high death rate may have been the removal of these men from the frontier, where the settler population was sparse, to prisons, where they were placed in close contact with a large number of Europeans and were more likely to be exposed to illnesses and diseases to which they had no resistance. The author could consider consulting the literature on Aborigines and disease in the colonial period, such as N. G. Butlin, Our Original Aggression: Aboriginal Populations of Southeastern Australia 1788 1850 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983), and Judy Campbell, Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia, 178