Sarah Pinto

Emotional histories and historical emotions: Looking at the past in historical novels

For anyone interested in the past and its representation, historical novels are difficult to ignore. Unlike a multitude of other alternative representations of the past that have been brought into historical view, however, historical novels have been largely excluded from scholarly historical analysis. Although historians might find historical novels fascinating, might read them voraciously, might teach courses on or around them, and might even write them while on sabbaticals, this engagement is not reflected in the pages of their work. Taking Kate Grenvilles controversial Australian novel The secret river (2005) as a case study, this article considers the emotional ways in which historical novels make sense of their pasts, offering a methodological way forward in the historical analysis of the genre.

'These Infants are Future Australians': Making the Nation Through Intercountry Adoption

Abstract The formal practice of intercountry adoption has its origins in the immediate postwar years but has increased in scale over the past two decades. Although rates of intercountry adoption remain low in Australia, in recent years proponents have called for the transnational adoption of children to be made more readily accessible by Australian couples. As researchers working on the history of adoption in Australia, we are interested in the ways in which intercountry adoption is conceptualised in current discourse. This article examines the manner in which submissions to a 2005 government inquiry into intercountry adoption in Australia mobilised the idea of the ‘interests of the nation’ in their arguments for intercountry adoption, a deployment which – on the surface – seems to represent a break with the nation-building rhetoric associated with ‘White Australia’, a policy which dominated attitudes to immigration and population growth for much of the twentieth century, and one which continues to have a strong resonance. However, we would like to suggest that this strategic deployment of the national interest by proponents of intercountry adoption in fact perpetuates many of the discourses and outcomes associated with earlier population and nation-building policies in Australian history.

Gender and sexuality

The population of colonial Australia was always marked by a significant imbalance in the ratio of European men and women, which closed only at the beginning of the twentieth century. Its legacy was a highly masculinist culture, where violence against women, especially Indigenous women, was common and women were treated as bedmates, child bearers and domestic workers. Feminists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries campaigned vociferously for women’s bodily autonomy, recognition of their importance as mothers, and the right to vote and participate in government. The suffrage campaigns were rewarded by the relatively early extension of the franchise at State levels between 1894 (South Australia) and 1909 (Victoria). The right to vote for and stand for election in the Commonwealth parliament was granted to white women who were British subjects in 1902. Feminists argued for the women’s vote on the grounds of equality with men, but also because of the maternal values women would bring to public life. It was an argument that spoke directly to the racialised concerns of a new nation in need of white mothers to populate its vast expanses. This anxiety about population, its growth and colour, would continue to shape attitudes towards gender and sexuality across the century and beyond. Citizen-workers and citizen-mothers. Marriage and family was the expected life course for both men and women. Heterosexuality was normalised and sexual self-control was the ideal for all, though in practice women were held to this more tightly than men. While sex was often understood as an essential or inevitable part of men’s lives, the strong emphasis on motherhood and racial fitness left little room for non-procreative notions of female sexuality. In the period after Federation there was an emphasis on sexual and social purity that belied a deep interest in, and discussion of, sex. There were significant public conversations about the age of consent, prostitution, rape and masturbation. As one commentator remarked in 1917: ‘you can’t move without Sex being flung in your face’.

“I Ain't Queer”: Love, Masculinity and History in Brokeback Mountain

Ang Lees big gay tragic historical love story, Brokeback Mountain, was released internationally in late 2005 and early 2006. Lees film told the story of two cowboys who fell in love while shepherding on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming in 1963. Although the film narrated a demonstrably American story, appeals to a socio-historical connection were widespread in Australia. Indeed, Brokeback Mountains cinematic release in this country coincided with “Australia Day,” a national day of celebration in which beginnings, nationhood, and “settlement” are reaffirmed. In this article, we track the explosion of publicly-audible conversations that took place in Brokeback Mountains wake in Australia in 2006. On the one hand, we seek to historicize this film; on the other, we also consider the political ways in which it historicized. As the “noise” about Brokeback Mountain became almost impossible to ignore in Australia, we noticed the film tended to be viewed as a cause for celebration. Through an analysis of the politics of historical stories and the gendered politics of emotion, we seek to complicate the notion that this film signified a radical departure from homophobic cinematic and cultural traditions.

Researching romantic love

Abstract How might we usefully conceptualize romantic love in historical work? Historians of the emotions typically move across and between disciplines in the humanities along with the social, behavioral and cognitive sciences in an effort to define and explain the emotions. Using romantic love as a case study, this article tests the effects of this interdisciplinary movement. It undertakes an experiment in interdisciplinary reading by closely examining key moments of definition and conceptualization of romantic love by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, literary scholars, and historians in the last two decades. This interdisciplinary reading experiment demonstrates that, taken together, the scholarships of romantic love offer an uncertain and incoherent picture of the emotion’s characteristics and behaviors. This uncertainty poses some problems for the romantic love historian, frustrating attempts to firmly establish the ground from which to investigate the emotion. This article argues, however, that this uncertainty might also provide an opportunity, directing the romantic love historian towards the emotion’s one (remaining) essential component: the romantic couple.

Self-care for academics: a poetic invitation to reflect and resist

Abstract In newspapers and blogs, on Twitter, and in academic papers, stories of struggling academics abound. Substance abuse, depression, failed relationships, and chronic illness are the casualties of a neoliberal university sector that values quantity over quality and demands ever more for ever less. Within the academic literature a growing counter-movement has called for resistance, collective action, and slow scholarship. Much of this work, however, has focused on strategies that can be applied within academia. Little has been written about the activities that academics do outside the university; activities that have no purpose other than enjoyment, rest, and renewal; activities that represent the valuing of the self as a human being, rather than a means of production; activities that could best be defined as self-care. Using reflective practice to construct a poem comprising three voices, this paper explores those activities. This poetic representation is an effort to create time and space for the authors, and a manifesto to encourage other academics to demand and protect the time, space, and reflective practice that are essential to both personal wellbeing and quality research and education.

Forever in our hearts: the births, deaths and marriages column in the Sydney Morning Herald, 1831-1860

This article charts the emergence of the births, deaths and marriages column in the colonial Australian press. Using Australia’s oldest continuing newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald as a case study, this article examines the evolution of the notices over a 25-year period from the newspaper’s first publication (as the Sydney Herald) in 1831. We argue that the births, deaths and marriages notices in the Herald were part of early attempts by colonists to reinforce their respectability before becoming a practice with widespread appeal that both announced key life events and marked people’s connection to place. Drawing on the scholarship of Pierre Bourdieu, our analysis pinpoints the moment these notices were ‘legitimised’ by the journalistic field and marked the birth of a media ritual in colonial Australian society. We provide historical insight into the ways in which the news media establish legitimacy in the social spaces they serve.

Memory, Place and Aboriginal-Settler History: Understanding Australians’ Consciousness of the Colonial Past

South Australian colonialism, is covered in three chapters. Christine Lockwood writes well of early colonial encounters around Adelaide, the dispossession and then the civilising mission. Tom Gara clearly outlines the ongoing Aboriginal presence in post-frontier Adelaide, as the Aboriginal remnant returned for traditional and economic reasons. Rani Kerin writes an excellent chapter on activist groups around the 1950s, led at first by the Duguids, but giving way harmoniously to Aboriginal leadership. These historical insights are given vitality by the five vivid life stories interwoven with them, four written by the chapter authors and a moving one by Jennifer Caruso about her own life. Four chapters cover the southern region. Diane Bell skilfully explores three encounters; first contacts; the Point McLeay mission and the Ngarrindjeri cultural revival during battles over the Hindmarsh Island Bridge and subsequent reconciling initiatives. Skye Krichauff writes well of the nineteenth-century encounters on the Yorke Peninsula, which were so closely shaped by the Mallee scrub that enabled significant post-frontier cultural retention by creating Aboriginal domains untouched by pastoralists. Robert Foster examines the cultural ideas of the Bunganditj people of the southeast and their encounters with pastoralism: the violence and early work relations, and the rationing era that followed. Pushed close to extinction, the Bunganditj survived and now are developing language and cultural revival programs. The editors Tom Gara and Peggy Brock explore the Eyre Peninsula and west coast, the most violent region due to remoteness. They track the missions including Poonindie and Koonibba, and the survival strategies of people through pastoral work and by moving east across the Peninsula, taking their newfound football skills with them. Six life stories illustrate these southern themes. Six chapters are devoted to the Outback. Peggy Brock covers the northern Flinders Ranges where the Adnyamathanha fiercely resisted pastoralists, retreating to inaccessible rocky back country. Labour needs and ration stations finally brought the people into the European orbit, as did the United Aborigines’ Mission (UAM) at Nepabunna, which became ‘home’ for many people. Chris Nobbs examines early contact in the northeast region between Aboriginal people and European explorers and missionaries, which generated much ethnographic material. Rod Lucas and Deane Fergie explore how varying infrastructures shaped relations in the northeast, including: the act of mapping and surveying; the imposition of state control through rations; the impact of missionaries; and the presence of work camps on pastoral stations. The latter formed an autonomous Aboriginal domain. Ingereth Macfarlane examines the intrusions of colonial actors into the western edge of the Simpson Desert. She does excellent close work reconstructing Aboriginal reactions to explorers, telegraph navvies and those who used or serviced ‘the line’ track. Carol Pybus examines how the An̲angu interacted with Ernabella missionaries whose benign policy enabled the An̲angu to make Ernabella a place to manage the balance between Christianity and An̲angu law. Finally, Tom Gara tells the story of Ooldea where the people interacted with railway navvies, Daisy Bates and the UAM mission, before being forcefully removed to Yalata and elsewhere. Gara reveals how some of them inadvertently moved across the Maralinga Prohibited Area, due to the poor management of Commonwealth authorities. Five life stories interweave this section. This book is scattered with seventy images and maps, some of the latter of variable readability. But overall, Wakefield Press does a pleasing job of book production. It will come to rest on many bookshelves. As an experiment try reading the life stories first!

The history of emotions in Australia

In the last two decades, emotions have increasingly featured in Australian historical scholarship. This article reviews the history of emotions in Australia by examining the various ways in which historians have engaged with and mobilised the emotions in their research. It argues that, for most Australian historians, the emotions are a tool of investigation in projects with historical interests that are largely directed elsewhere. Historical scholarship in Australia suggests, then, that the emotions are most useful as a category of analysis in the service of a range of other historical agendas.