Stephen Garton

The convict origins debate: Historians and the problem of the ‘Criminal Class’

The character of the convicts transported to Australia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries has been a source of considerable debate amongst historians. Were the convicts victims of a harsh social system, victims of poverty, professional criminals or workers driven by want to steal? There have been significant changes in historical perceptions of the convicts and this paper investigates the reasons for these shifts and the assumptions about the causes of criminality that have informed this debate.

Workers' Welfare: Labour and the Welfare State in 20th-century Australia and Canada

This article investigates the historical dimensions of the labour movements relationship to the welfare state in Australia and Canada during the 20th century. It assesses existing class and party politics theories of this relationship and by proposing particular historical accounts of the welfare state in a comparative context, it seeks to move beyond the limitations of these theories. The article argues that such approaches focus too narrowly on social security and wage regulation as the key parameters of the welfare state, ignoring major fields of welfare intervention for women, indigenous peoples and war service. In attempting to provide a more comprehensive narrative of the welfare state in a comparative context the article seeks to provide a clearer conception of the distinctive features of settler society welfare states. And by placing the role of the labour movement in this broader history it critically assesses the successes and limitations of the labour movements engagement with the welfare state.

Disorderly Houses: Residences, Privacy, and the Surveillance of Sexuality in 1920s Harlem

“W h i t e o n l o o k e r s . . . m u s t b e made to remember that Harlem is not merely exotic, it is human,” W. e. B. Du Bois wrote in the National Association for Coloured People’s magazine the Crisis in 1927. “It is not a spectacle and an entertainment, it is life; it is not chiefly cabarets, it is chiefly home.” In admonishing whites, Du Bois was assuming that homes presented a picture of black Americans different from that of public performances and that the residents of Harlem, New York City’s foremost African American neighborhood, had adopted the bourgeois domestic ideals promoted by the black middle class as a means of advancing the race toward equality. On other occasions, however, he was less certain of the propriety and order of black home life. Du Bois shared with reformers of both races a concern that many residences in growing urban neighborhoods were so overcrowded that their occupants lacked privacy, causing them to be corrupted by lodgers or pushed out into commercialized public spaces where men and women freely mixed. Such anxieties were rarely supported by evidence of what actually happened in homes. Instead, reformers followed

Demobilization and Empire: Empire Nationalism and Soldier Citizenship in Australia After the First World War – in Dominion Context

This article analyses the demobilization of Australian veterans after the First World War, placing this process in the broader transnational context of Britain’s settler society dominions more generally. It explores the public challenges posed by demobilization in Australia, and by way of comparison, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, and how each of these dominions negotiated reintegration of veterans through the deployment of cultural and political strategies grounded in emergent nationalist discourses. Nationalism became a means of both acknowledging the contribution of veterans in making the nation and tying veterans back into the civil society. While nationalism was the ideological glue that held settler societies together in the immediate postwar years, preventing social and political disintegration, in Australia these nationalist discourses took on a peculiar character, at once proclaiming the virtues of veterans as founders of the nation while adopting a heightened sense of the importance of ties to the Empire. What emerged was a hybrid discourse that interwove nationalism and Empire loyalism, conceptualized here as Empire nationalism. This unusual Australian political discourse was forged by the experience of the Great War and demobilization, grounded in an effort to make soldier citizenship the core foundation for a new nationalism. In Australia Empire nationalism became a framework that both sanctioned particular forms of veteran violence and accommodated that violence into an affirmation of nationalist values, placing the Anzac legend at the centre of the national ethos, one that looked both inward to Australia and backward to Britain.

Harlem in Black and White: Mapping Race and Place in the 1920s

In the 1920s, as Harlem emerged as the largest black city in the world, a significant white presence remained in the neighborhood. Whites not only frequented nightlife, they owned and operated the vast majority of Harlem’s businesses, policed its streets, staffed its schools and hospital, drove its public transport and most of the vehicles traveling its streets, delivered goods, collected rent and insurance payments, and patronized sporting events. Scholars have made only brief mention of this presence and its impact on everyday life, portraying race relations as harmonious and inconsequential in a neighborhood represented as a segregated refuge from whites. Drawing on black newspapers and legal records, and using the Digital Harlem website to map and visualize that evidence of the white presence, reveals a very different picture, of interracial encounters that often led to conflict, and of Harlem as a place of contestation, negotiation, resistance, and accommodation.

‘Liberty of the Nation’: Eugenics in Australia and New Zealand and the Limits of Illiberalism

Desmond King has argued that eugenics was a prime vehicle for the advance of ‘illiberalism’ in America and Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, characterized by increasing constraints on individual rights and liberties in the name of science, race and nation. Many nations and states around the world enacted sterilization legislation to control the ‘menace of mentally deficiency’. Britain and her dominions were notable exceptions—eugenics was popular but sterilization legislation (with the exception of two Canadian provinces) never succeeded despite its many adherents. In this chapter, Stephen Garton explores this failure, concentrating on Australia and New Zealand as case studies in the resilience of liberal institutions when they were under considerable internal challenge.

Mental Health in Australia, 1788–2015: A History of Responses to Cultural and Social Challenges

The history of mental health in Australia may be usefully viewed as responses to a succession of cultural and social challenges. The earliest challenge involved development of a colonial psychiatry from the 1800s when psychiatry itself was just emerging in Europe as a branch of medicine. This was the era of public asylums that commenced with optimism but ended with pessimism as they became custodial rather than therapeutic. Basic reform in Australia was delayed until the 1950s when the challenge of developing an independent Australian psychiatry began to be answered. From the 1960s, new factors came into play including effective medications, recognition of patient rights and deinstitutionalisation. A new, cultural and social challenge presented with the massive, post-war inflow of non-British, European immigrants and, later, Asian immigrants. Cross-cultural competence was now essential. From the 1970s, refugees arrived in growing numbers, and from the 1990s, mental health professionals made public the adverse effects of their detention in isolated camps. Another challenge to present in this period was how best to remediate the mental disorders of Indigenous Australians; again cross-cultural competence was necessary. Recently, Indigenous researchers have been developing culture-specific, diagnostic and treatment approaches. The latest challenge is how might Australia best assist in reducing the burden of untreated mental disorders in low- and middle-income countries (LAMIC). This fundamentally cross-cultural enterprise of global dimensions has evoked a vigorous, international, epistemic and policy debate. While the debate has been located mainly in Europe and North America, some Australian psychiatrists have been very active participants.

The Last Battle: Soldier Settlement in Australia 1916–1939

with me throughout the book. I wonder if some of the other chapters perhaps tried too hard to recover every story rather than relying on rich vignettes to make the case, although to be fair this can be difficult in the face of thin evidence. Elsewhere, I was struck by the sustained attention to military detail. The balance between the particulars of war and its human dimensions shows with compelling power how these lives and loves unfolded. Beneath the logistics of war lie deeply personal accounts of belonging and absence, and of denial and acceptance, all recovered sensitively through rich oral histories on which this book is based, together with an array of archival sources. Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific is a unique and special account of relationships that have their origins in war. These affiliations involved power and possibility, encounter and exchange, as well as exploitation. Their legacy has persisted long after the soldiers departed. Bennett and Wanhalla’s collection shows just how strongly they continue to resonate generations later.

Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand 1873–1910 / Migration, Ethnicity, and Madness: New Zealand, 1860–1910

Hamilton (xi) who adored the spotlight; and on the process of discovery in archival repositories where she read her way through such documents as the incoming correspondence files that had been serialised ‘by diligent nineteenthcentury clerks’ (66). Reading these, rather than the bumps on Hamilton’s head, Roginski reveals a complex character in the ‘tufty’ figure he presents in the only photograph that survives (47). Hamilton was both progressive—in his philanthropic efforts and anti-capital punishment stance—and a ‘conscious redactor of past events’ (52) who had been a bigamist, a thief and a grave robber. After weighing up the cultural space Hamilton occupied in Australia, Roginski turns her attention to the posthumous life of Jim Crow’s skull. It first served as a prop for phrenological lectures, then as a gift when Hamilton’s widow Agnes donated fifty of her husband’s skulls to the Public Library, Museums and National Gallery of Victoria. There, the skull fell between the cracks of scientific and institutional concerns. As Roginski writes, ‘changing intellectual currents can wash over a deceased person in a museum collection’ (58). Initially Crow’s skull was neglected. Later, it resurfaced as an object of interest to men engaged in racial science. Early in the twentieth century at the University of Melbourne, Professor Richard Berry wrongly incorporated the skull as a specimen of a Victorian Aboriginal man, whom Berry and his co-author labelled ‘44’. As Roginski argues, this was a ‘reductive mathematics that, by comparison, makes Hamilton’s language of phrenology seem oddly humanising’ (72). At some stage while the skull resided in a medical faculty, students bored holes into it while learning to trepan. Late in the twentieth century Crow’s bones were again erroneously identified, this time as those of a woman rather than a man. The precise whereabouts of Jim Crow’s other bodily remains are unknown, and a crucial list of the donations Agnes Hamilton made, which might contain more detailed information about theman, is missing. ‘I like to think’, the author writes, ‘that one day a folder in the archives of Museum Victoria will drop to the floor, and that delicate pages filled with Agnes Hamilton’s confident handwriting will slip out of them’ (74). I hope so too, and that when that day arrives those pages will fall into Alexandra Roginski’s skilful hands.