Michael McDonnell, Author at History Matters

New Appointment in History

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Dr Niro Kandasamy has accepted a continuing position in the Department of History from 1 January 2022.

Dr. Kandasamy is currently based at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. She completed her prize-winning PhD in 2019 at the University of Melbourne on ‘Child Refugees in Australia and Internationalism: 1920 to the Present’. She teaches in the areas of human rights, global studies, memory, peace, and war. Her areas of research include government and the politics of Asia, migration history, disability, welfare service delivery, memory studies, gender, and the history of emotions, with a geographical focus on the Global South.

With a career that spans both academia and the non-government sector, Dr Kandasamy brings a wealth of active outreach and community-engaged research experience to the Department, along with an impressive track record in scholarly publication. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching experience will make an outstanding contribution to our curriculum and research culture in both History and International and Global Studies.

We look forward to welcoming Niro to Sydney.

Many thanks

Kirsten

Professor Kirsten McKenzie FAHA FRHistS
Department of History| School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry

Chair of Department

‘How was it really?’ The Department of History on Soundcloud

Study History in Semester 2

Vale Neville Meaney

By Professor James Curran

It is with great sadness that I inform you that our former colleague and friend, Neville Meaney, passed away on Sunday. He was a scholar, historian and mentor to many, including myself. Neville was appointed to teach American history here in 1962 after doing his PhD at Duke: he retired in 2006. His contribution to the intellectual life of the university, to the department, to his field and indeed to the country is vast.

Neville’s scholarship on Australian foreign and defence policy in particular towers above the rest – his work on the period 1901-1923 is nothing short of magisterial and his account of Australia and the First World War, published in 2010, is the best treatment of the subject. It was in many ways his magnum opus. His documentary history of Australia and the World, his work on Australia-Japanese relations and his many articles and reviews on Australia and America’s relations with the world broke new ground. His article on ‘Britishness and Australian nationalism’ in Australian Historical Studies in April 2001 is still one of the most frequently downloaded pieces in that journal. And his courses on the American national myth, US foreign policy, Australian foreign policy and Australian political culture inspired several generations of students who went on to either academic careers or senior positions in the Australian public service, including in the Department of Foreign Affairs.

In our introduction to an edited collection of his most important articles, Stuart Ward (who also studied under Neville) and I wrote:

“We first encountered Neville in the 1990s—a decade where Australian political history was in abatement and a new cultural history was making rapid headway. Neville was untroubled by the demise of the old diplomatic history, recognising that international relations needed anchoring in the broader political culture of the nation, and required more than a faithful account of meetings, cables and policy briefs from the archival coal face. Its value and potential were diminished if treated as a limited sub-specialization. But he was sufficiently old-fashioned to believe that the past held out themes of defining significance; that not everything was ‘contested’ or ‘unstable’, and that the study of politics and ideas remained a valuable point of entry into the national psyche. More to the point, he saw politics and international relations, not as a cul-de-sac of elite mannerisms, but as an extension of wider social, intellectual and cultural trends, particularly in democratic societies where political leaders are obliged to seek a popular mandate”

Neville was also active across all areas of academic life – as but one example in 1976 he was president of the SAUT (Sydney Association of University Teachers) the quasi-union body that represented academics. A brilliant tennis player and accomplished pianist, he had also – while an undergraduate at Adelaide – represented Australian Universities in Hockey.

His devotion to his students was legendary: Neville hosted postgraduate seminars at his home once a month that were occasions of great conviviality and indeed great rigour. It was where arguments and hypotheses were advanced, tested and subjected to scrutiny – mostly after bowls of Irish stew (which he made) and incredibly good red wine from his well-stocked, and terrifically well-chosen, cellar.

He will be greatly missed.

Neville’s funeral will be held at Macquarie Park Cemetery in the Camellia chapel on Tuesday 8 June at 2pm. I will be delivering a eulogy on his academic career at the service, and my column in the Australian Financial Review on Monday 7 June will be dedicated to his profound influence on Australian intellectual and public life.

There will be a wake at Sydney University in the Holme building from 6pm that same day, 8 June.

James

James Curran

Professor of Modern History

University of Sydney

‘Not Your Average Survey: A Student-led COVID-19 Archive’

Recording Experiences of the Pandemic

Authors: Kristian Marijanovic and Bella Bauer

Earlier in December, we heard from Nyree Morrison, from the University of Sydney Archives, on the University at the time of the Spanish flu. Considering nearly 40 per cent of the city was infected at one point, it was surprising how little we know about the University’s experience. One omission that stood out was that society records mentioned next to nothing about this disease that was ravaging the population. We cannot fill this absence but we can at least compensate for it by recording our current pandemic.

We are making a small but valuable archive of student and staff experiences of COVID-19, through an online survey and some interviews. Associate Professor Frances Clarke, who gave us the idea of the project, suggested its name, ‘Not Your Average Survey’, to which we added a subtitle, ‘A Student-led COVID-19 Archive’. It gets at the aim of the project, which is to record and preserve the experiences of a small but representative sample of people at the University during this time.

Beyond basic identifying details, such as gender and faculty, we wanted to know about people’s personal experience. We worked with Frances on setting out a series of questions, optional to answer and fairly open-ended, to get as many topics covered as we could; question 11 asks, ‘How would you describe the way this pandemic has reshaped your life?’ We wanted to know how people heard about COVID-19, what their initial response was, where they got their news about it from, and, of course, how they felt they were affected, whether it be socially, emotionally, education-wise, financially, or in any other way.

There were a few common themes in the survey responses. Some people enjoyed self-isolation; others didn’t. One staff member wrote, ‘Apart from missing physical contact with colleagues, the work experience has been exactly the same as it would be in person.’ But with mental health an oft-mentioned issue, it is clear it was a mixed experience. One staff member, who works in administration and was asked about how her thinking changed about the pandemic, wrote about ‘[m]ental health and feeling less trapped at home as time has passed’.

There were a range of attitudes to online learning but people generally felt the University responded as best as it could. One FASS student felt her ‘transition into online university was pretty good’, although she found it ‘interesting watching every authority figure refer to these as “unprecedented times”, whilst generally giving very few allowances for subpar work.’ A staff member, an Educational Designer, wrote, ‘We went into the proctored exams project knowing it would almost certainly disproportionately affect students who were of lower SES, in particular those in insecure housing or without financial resources’, and this could only be mitigated.

What of restrictions in general, beyond online learning and university? The new circumstances could be frustrating. One academic spoke about how her church adjusted to restrictions. She described what she did instead of singing, during in-person services; she clapped her hands and laughed loudly, saying, ‘I do percussion with my feet, with my hands, and I hum—and I feel frustrated!’ A FASS Honours student wrote that her ‘brother has bought 7+ Louis Vuittons [with stimulus money] … I frankly am frustrated constantly because my brother, the micro biologist, ignores COVID. He’s had 5+ people sleep over before, and he’s gone out clubbing.’ On a more serious note, one staff member wrote that ‘[f]amily relations became strained as we were confined to our home.’ These, more sensitive topics are something we wanted to record but it is difficult; this staff member provided little on the subject and, understandably, did not want to be interviewed.

We felt oral histories would complement the survey responses; interviews would give more depth, more vitality, to individual respondents. About 40 staff and students said they would be willing to be interviewed but many of these eventually ruled themselves out, as we started interviewing in late October, about two months since the last sizable amount of responses were submitted. Nonetheless, we conducted 10 interviews with 10 people, which ranged from half an hour to an hour in length. Five interviewees were professional staff, three were academic staff, and two were students. Associate Professor Julia Horne helped us plan the interviews, and we had two History Beyond the Classroom students, Claudia Rosenberg and Caitlin Williams, volunteering as interviewers.

Of course, there were issues with the survey and interviews. Diversity, for one. There were only three male interviewees and five of the interviewees were professional staff. It was a similar issue with the survey responses. As of 1 November, we recorded 139 responses. 74 per cent of respondents were female, 45 per cent were affiliated with FASS, and 91 per cent of students were domestic. Zoom interviews could be problematic. They were not recorded in an archivable file format, unlike the in-person interviews, and the interview sometimes might not ‘flow’ well; it is the same issue with a Zoom classroom. There were some other issues and oversights, such as neglecting to ask respondents for their age.

It is the end of this tumultuous year. The UK and the US have just approved vaccines. With the virus under control in Sydney, it seems like there will not be another opportunity to record how people experienced self-isolation and the other things that came with this pandemic. While we only began accepting responses from late June, which was after the State Government lifted some restrictions, this is still a valuable archive. It is a small but, we feel, representative sample of the University during this time.

Kristian Marijanovic and Bella Bauer

The Ends of Empire

Do Empires End? And what about the ‘leftover’ colonies?

What do Christmas Island, Gibraltar and Greenland have in common? Those places, like American Samoa, the British Virgin Islands and French Polynesia, are all overseas territories of larger continental states, often far removed from the ‘mainland’ of which they are a part. They are the remains of older colonial empires that never gained independence. About fifty such territories spread around the world continue to be administered by Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Most are small island countries in the Atlantic, Caribbean, Indian Ocean and Pacific, though they also include large countries such as Denmark’s Greenland in the North Atlantic and French Guiana in South America. A few are famous – St Helena, a British territory, was Napoleon’s home in exile. Others have been the source of disputes, from an independence movement in French New Caledonia to conflict between Britain and Argentina about sovereignty over the Falkland Islands and by Britain and Spain over ‘possession’ of Gibraltar. Yet other territories – the Cayman Islands, Ceuta and Melilla, Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon – are well known only to avid map-readers or travellers to exotic sites.

The Ends of Empire: The Last Colonies Revisited, by two University of Sydney academics, Robert Aldrich, Professor of European History, and John Connell, Professor of Geography, examines these fascinating spots around the globes, reflects on why decolonisation seemingly stopped before reaching these outposts, and what stakes they represent in the contemporary world. Their new 522-page book, published by Palgrave Macmillan in London, ‘revisits’ territories first explored in two co-authored volumes they published twenty years ago: France’s Overseas Frontier (1992) and The Last Colonies (1998). The Ends of Empire, however, is a completely new book, looking at what has changed and what has not changed in these places over the last decades and situating them in the context of the complex politics, cultural issues, economics and international relations in the twenty-first century.

The authors argue that, rather than being seen as failures of decolonisation, these overseas countries and territories represent a kind of negotiated ‘semi-sovereignty’ that, for most of their inhabitants, brings the sort of security and standard of living that would be endangered if they became independent. Their residents, for the most part, are fully-fledged citizens of the larger nation-states to which the territories belong, and they have rights of abode there. They are eligible for social welfare payments, they have access to better education and health care than is available to most of those who live in similar neighbouring countries, and they have increasingly gained recognition for local Indigenous and the Creole cultures. The internet age has plugged in many remote and isolated territories to the wider world, and easier travel has made it possible for larger numbers of people to move in and out of the territories. Because of all this, all referendums proposing independence for these territories in recent years have been defeated.

These territories are nevertheless faced with the problems of dependent economies, occasional social and ethnic discord, scandals caused by corruption and dodgy financial affairs, natural disasters and the threats of climate change, and issues surrounding irregular migrants and refugees. Their leaders bicker continuously with metropolitan authorities about the division of power between national and local authorities and the niceties of constitutional status. Some worry about the designs of outside powers and object to the militarisation of their territories. There is concern about who actually ‘belongs’ in these countries, some with Indigenous people such as Polynesians, Kanaks and Inuit, and all with cosmopolitan populations created through decades or sometimes centuries of colonialism and more recent movements of people.

Australia’s Christmas Island, the Cocos (Keeling Islands) and Norfolk Island are three of these overseas territories. Debates about the use of Christmas Island for detention camps for refugees and possible quarantine stations for those with coronavirus underline the fact that the Australian external territories, like those of other places, are not just international oddities with merely folkloric interest. Their variegated histories and cultures are typical of the mixing and mingling of peoples and cultures that characterise the diverse overseas territories, from the French island of Reunion – with over a million people descended from European settlers, African slaves and Indian indentured labourers – to Pitcairn Island – a British territory of only several dozen inhabitants who trace their ancestry to the survivors of the mutiny on the Bounty and the Polynesians who ended up on the islands with the mutineers.

This interdisciplinary study provides a new perspective on the history of decolonisation and a comprehensive analysis of a group of territories that have not become independent and whose residents, in the main, do not wish for them to do so. It examines the way cultures have blended, political authority has been negotiated, economic structures have evolved, and even small outposts have been drawn into the currents of the contemporary world order. It also considers other anomalies in among independent nation-states, from European micro-states that have survived for hundreds of years to countries of uncertain or unrecognised sovereignty, and from areas of new colonial expansion such as the South China Sea to places where there remain militant independence movements such as West Papua or demands by First Nations people for acknowledgement of their special position. It highlights the legacies left by colonialism even in small islands and enclaves sometimes forgotten by outsiders. The Ends of Empire suggests that imperial situations will probably never come to an end, but that the very existence of these semi-sovereign overseas territories mandates thinking anew about what decolonisation, nationalism and sovereignty mean in today’s world.

The Ends of Empire will be available in Australia in October 2020. For further information, see https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9789811559044

Semester Two 2020

Congratulations to Sophie Chao

A message from the Chair of the Department, Professor Mark McKenna

Our post-doctoral research associate, Sophie Chao, was recently awarded the John Legge prize for the best thesis in Asian Studies from the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA). Sophie’s thesis also received the 2019 PhD thesis award of the Australian Anthropological Society.

I’ve included the ASAA citation below. On behalf of the History Department, I’d like to offer Sophie our warm congratulations for such a wonderful achievement.

All best wishes, Mark

John Legge Prize for Best Thesis in Asian Studies (2019)

Winner: Sophie Chao, In the Shadow of the Palms: Plant-Human Relations Among the Marind-Anim, West Papua. (Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University).

In this remarkable thesis, Sophie Chao provides a ground-breaking exploration and analysis of dynamic plant-human-capital relationships in West Papua. The study centres on the devastation wrought by state-sponsored agro-industrial capitalism in the form of oil palm plantations, as experienced and perceived by the Marind-Anim people of Merauke District. Beautifully written, theoretically sophisticated, and deeply empathetic, the study shows how a lethal process of botanical colonization has disrupted existing multispecies networks and reconfigured people’s ways of being in the world. The effects on places, persons, time, and indeed dreams are persuasively explained as interlinked processes of deterritorialization and detemporalization. Rooted in cultural anthropological methods and informed by post-humanist theory, the analytical approach incorporates insights from environmental humanities, science and technology studies, plant science, ethnobotany, political economy and more. The thesis is extremely ambitious in its conceptual and theoretical aims, and required a high degree of political and ethical sensitivity in the associated fieldwork. It has emphatically delivered on all fronts. It seems destined to inform and provoke productive debate over sustainable environmental, economic and social systems, in Indonesia and elsewhere.

Farewell to Miranda Johnson

Dear Colleagues and friends of History,

Because we may not all get an opportunity to see Miranda before she formally takes up her new post at the University of Otago, I wanted to say a few words before she leaves. It goes without saying that her departure will be a huge loss to the Department, SOPHI and the University.

Miranda started with Warwick Anderson in REGS in August 2012 as one of the first PDRAs in the Laureate program. As Warwick often has said, she proved to be not only a wonderfully engaging and productive colleague and collaborator, she intellectually transformed the program, especially though her ideas about Indigenous racial modernities. It was during this period that she wrote The Land is Our History (2016) and organised a very successful international conference resulting in the co-edited collection Pacific Futures: Past and Present (2018). She worked hard to build programs in Pacific and Indigenous histories in the Department and across the University, a valiant effort she redoubled on taking up a teaching position in the Department in July 2015, where she immediately excelled.

In 2017, Miranda’s teaching was acknowledged with a FASS ‘Excellence in Teaching’ Award, particularly for her hands-on engagement with students and guests in her unit entitled The Pitcairn Project (where you can read about some of the students’ work).

In the same year, The Land is Our History, was shortlisted for the General History Prize in the NSW Premier’s History Awards. The judges described Miranda’s work in glowing terms:

‘The Land Is Our History’ is a superb example of the power of comparative, transnational historical research. It explores indigenous rights movements, from the late 1960s onwards, across three Commonwealth settler states — Canada, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Miranda Johnson draws on a rich array of source material, including legal cases, petitions, interviews and media reports, to create an engaging and path-breaking book.

In 2018, The Land is Our History was awarded the W.K. Hancock Prize of the Australian Historical Association, and it is worth quoting the citation in full:

Miranda Johnson has produced an ambitious, original and imaginative history exploring land, indigeneity, legal rights and activism across three settler-colonial nations. Thinking transnationally, Johnson explores legal and public discourses to draw together a raft of distinctive events and personalities into a vast and coherent canvas. She weaves nation-based histories of indigenous-settler conflict over land into wider networks and power structures, making sense of seemingly disparate developments in indigenous activism. Archival documents and oral accounts highlight the strength and moral authority of indigenous leaders who worked to gain acknowledgement of traditional ownership of land, and to interrupt and influence public debates around national identity. Johnson writes with precision, flow and economy. The work has a compelling argument, convincingly showing the complex and sophisticated ways indigenous activisms functioned to change settler attitudes towards land and indigenous belonging. An exemplary history, The Land Is Our History brings important new insights to a significant topic in both the past and the present.

Miranda talked about her work with student Ryan Cropp.

More recently, Miranda showcased some of her new work on legal history and Native identities in an essay in the internationally renowned journal, American Historical Review, entitled “The Case of the Million Dollar Duck: A Hunter, His Treaty, and the Bending of the Settler Contract.”

I’ll always remember co-teaching ‘Frontier Violence in Modern Memory’ with Miranda in 2017. There’s probably no better way to get to know your colleagues! Working closely with Miranda allowed me to see first-hand what a brilliant teacher and scholar she is. I heard nothing but praise and appreciation from students for her teaching and I picked up quite a few tips watching her lectures from the front row.

Miranda’s commitment to her students, the Department and the broader University community is on graphic display in her recent reflection on online teaching, published online in Meanjin.

It’s a plea for ‘the poetics of in-person classroom teaching, not as a value-added extra for an elite cohort, but as the essence of what we do’. It’s also a reminder of what her students and colleague will miss when she goes.

We need to establish respectful and generative classroom dynamics quickly with and among our students, many of whom do not know each other. These dynamics must be subtly but firmly maintained. How do you draw out the shy ones? Put them in small-groups, often awkward in many of the classrooms we are working in, but achievable if the chairs or tables can be moved around. How do you moderate the domineering over-talker in class? Sit beside them. Make eye contact with everyone during the session, although not too much. Help them be seen. Notice the one who pushes his chair back, angling his body back from the desk, his gaze directed anywhere but here. Bring him back. Watch for the over-anxious, fastidiously taking notes in order to avoid answering questions.

I’m sure that I speak for everyone when I wish Miranda and her family well for their future lives and careers in Aotearoa NZ.

All best wishes,

Mark McKenna, Chair, Department of History

History of University Life Seminar

Registration The Zoom webinar link will be sent as an email and calendar invite on the Monday prior to the event. If you registered for the entire series when you registered for the last seminar, you won’t need to register again. You will receive an invitation to this webinar automatically.

New registration? please click here to RSVP Missed the first seminar? If you missed the first seminar, or would like to watch it again, the webinar in this special series is now available online on the SOPHI talks site.

HUL on Social Media Please use the hashtag #UniKeeper for your social media posts. You can follow the History of University Life on Twitter @HULseminar.

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Image by Max Dupain reproduced courtesy of the University Art Collection, University of Sydney.

University Education is a Pathway to Employment

History of University Life II Sydney Research Seminar in Higher Education

You can now listen to and watch a recording of the full session above, here.

On Wednesday 24 June 2020, History of University Life* held its first live online seminar with an audience of 90 people. Professors Ariadne Vromen (ANU) and Susan Goodwin (University of Sydney) joined a panel with University Historian Julia Horne to discuss the importance of public investment in our public universities.

Just days before, the Commonwealth Minister of Education Dan Tehan announced far-reaching changes to HECS fees and university funding for teaching. The announcement prompted the panel to focus even more sharply on what exactly needs to be reformed and why.

Ariadne Vromen argued that we owe young people citizenship, employment and economic security. Ariadne explained that “the individual and social costs of young people’s exclusion from employment and education are profound and long-lasting”. We need as a nation, Ariadne said, to acknowledge that responsibility to create jobs lies with governments, industry and businesses. The government’s idea of “job ready” graduates subverts that greater responsibility.

Susan Goodwin unveiled UniKeeper, the social democratic plan to support public higher education. This plan has 3 planks: more affordable public higher education places; universal income support payments for higher education students and a proper plan to fund the public sector higher education teaching and research workforce.

Only 1 out of 3 university students receive any form of student income support and 82% of university students depend on paid employment to support them while they study.

This last figure is not surprising since Australia’s mass higher education is now one of the largest systems in the world (on the basis of population parity). Susan explained how “in Australia, young people’s citizenship is denied and eroded by enforced financial dependency on families.”

The questions flowed thick and fast. What do young people think? Should student income support be means-tested? How is higher education a public good? Who should lead the discussion on how to reshape higher education? Is ‘job ready’ a useful term in the discussion of higher education? These and more questions will be explored in the rest of this series. See SOPHI Events for further details.

* History of University Life II Sydney Research Seminar in Higher Education. History of University Life began in 2008 as a joint forum between the University of Sydney and St Paul’s college to discuss the history and role of universities in Australian life.

University Education as a Pathway to Employment was held as an online seminar on Wednesday 24 June 2020. Follow the link above for further details about this event including information on the panellists and to sign up for future webinars in this series.