Category: Department News and Events

50,000 years of Australian History: a plea for interdisciplinarity
Professor Lynette Russell, Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University
The 2nd Bicentennial Australian History Lecture, hosted by the Department of History, the University of Sydney

Joseph Lycett – Aborigines Resting by a Camp Fire near the Mouth of the Hunter River, Newcastle, NSW. (National Library of Australia)

How do we understand, imagine, visualise and create narratives for 50,000 years of Australian history?
As commonly presented, Australia’s past seems to consist of 230 years of European colonisation and over 50,000 years of Aboriginal culture, the former the purview of historians and the latter of archaeologists. Yet it presents striking opportunities for a truly integrated and seamless deep continental history, combining disciplines and methodologies.
Such a history would consider the full range of human experience from arrival, through changes in climate, technologies and belief systems to interactions with Maccassan, Portuguese, Dutch, French and finally the British. It would stretch across 2500 unbroken generations of people birthed, nurtured and sustained: people who modified landscapes, hunted, sang songs, practised religion and buried their dead.
This lecture argues for mixing epistemologies to create historical narratives of the deep past that may be taught in schools and universities, presented in museums and popular culture, and proudly shared by all Australians.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Professor Lynette Russell is Director of the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University, and Node Director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence in Australian Biodiverstiy and Heritage. She traces her Aboriginal ancestry via her grandmother from Western Victoria with connections into Tasmania and the Bass Strait islands; on the other side she is descended from transported convicts.
Lynette has a PhD in history from the University of Melbourne and has taught and researched in historical studies for over twenty years. In 2015 she was visiting fellow at All Souls College Oxford. Her monographs include: Hunt them, Hang Them: The Tasmanians in Port Phillip, 1841-1842 (2016); Roving Mariners: Aboriginal Whalers in the Southern Oceans 1790-1870 (2012); Appropriated Pasts: Archaeology and Indigenous People in Settler Colonies, coauthored with Ian McNiven (2005); A Little Bird Told Me (2002); and Savage Imaginings: Historical and Contemporary Representations of Australian Aboriginalities (2001). She is the current President of the Australian Historical Association.
The Bicentennial Australian History Lecture is a biennial public lecture hosted by the Department of History in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney. Distinguished historians offer engaged and critical perspectives on Australia’s past and the legacies of colonisation.
Date: Thursday 19 October, 2017
Time: 6 – 7.30pm
Please join us before the lecture for a reception in the Nicholson Museum at 5pm.
Venue: General Lecture Theatre, The Quadrangle, The University of Sydney. Venue location
Cost: Free and open to all with online registrations required
Register: here

Many congratulations to Mark McKenna for winning the Australian History Prize for his book From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories
And to Peter Hobbins for winning with NSW Community and Regional History Prize with Annie Clark and Ursula Frederick for Stories from the Sandstone, the book that grew out of the Quarantine Station project.
The Department also congratulates Miranda Johnson, whose The Land Is Our History was one of the three finalists for the extremely competitive General History Prize.
It’s an honour for the Department to have been so well represented in the Premier’s Awards this year.
Chris Hilliard
Chair, Department of History

In The Land Is Our History, Miranda Johnson shows how the forces of globalisation – much maligned in the current political climate – allowed previously marginalised indigenous peoples to form transnational networks of solidarity with which they asserted strong claims against national governments. This was the beginning of a powerful new ‘politics from below’. For the first time, minority indigenous groups in Australia, Canada and New Zealand successfully engaged with the legal systems of these states to insist on their distinct identities and, importantly, land rights. Rejecting policies of assimilation, indigenous activists radically challenged assumptions that the nation-state was one single and unified entity. Beginning in the 1960s, indigenous peoples established a ‘fragile truce’ with settler-states that would last for the next three decades.  Crucially, their claims carried extra weight as these nations attempted to cut ties with their British pasts, redraw their foreign policies in light of decolonisation and forge new cosmopolitan national identities.

RC: The book places indigenous legal claims in this period in a global perspective, and shows how closely their success or failure was tied to global politics and anti-colonial discourses.  In the increasingly interconnected world of the 20th and 21st centuries, is it possible to separate nations from global or transnational contexts? What implications does this have for writing indigenous histories of this period?

MJ: Nationally-defined fields are still the norm in history departments and that is still how we frame many of our undergraduate classes. Of course, in the last two decades or so, transnational and global approaches to historical inquiry have been in the ascendant, so that those who work exclusively within a national framework may feel like they need to defend why they do so, which is interesting. I think few historians would write now without a sense of how the global impacts the local. Even if you frame a project within the context of a single nation-state, most historians are alert to how globalization––variously defined––impacts their study.

Indigenous history as a field plays a very interesting role in all of this. The fields of Aboriginal history and Māori history, for instance, emerged in part as a critique of settler national history. So historians involved in the construction of these fields such as Henry Reynolds here in Australia framed their projects in terms of the nation, but as a critique of the costs borne by Indigenous peoples in the making of that nation. They were critical nationalists. The effectiveness of the field of Aboriginal history in leveling this critique can be seen for instance in the infamous History Wars of the late 1990s and then in the development of another approach, that of settler colonial studies.

In the last few years, a new kind of critique has emerged, influenced by the work of historians arguing for transnational, trans-imperial, trans-regional approaches, which is that the frameworks of the nation-state really delimits, even conceals, Indigenous peoples’ agency. In response, some scholars are arguing for a focus on the mobility of Indigenous peoples both within nation-states and across them. This critique arises from different political circumstances, as a response to the effects of the legal claiming that I talk about in my book. As we well know in Australia, “native title” which, it was hoped in the early 1990s, would revolutionize Aboriginal peoples’ place and status has in fact led to new forms of inequality and constraint. In representational terms, there’s a lot of concern that the process of claiming native title has actually further intensified the operation of an “oppressive authenticity,” as Jeff Sissons calls it, in which Indigenous peoples are fixed in time and space. So, the argument for tracing Indigenous peoples’ mobility is in part I think a response to this distinctive legal process and political moment in settler states such as Australia, as well as broader trends in the historical discipline. As you can see, I am interested in the transnational, the global and the national. I think all these frameworks are important in thinking about the twentieth-century histories of Indigenous peoples.

RC: Activists in these decades forced courts to accept indigenous testimony and to incorporate indigenous practices and oral traditions into western legal systems. Does indigenous engagement with the settler-state legitimise it? Is it possible to resist the state without engaging with it? 

Engagement with the state, or refusal of the state’s power, are two poles of Indigenous politics. These might be more significant than conventional distinctions between “Left” or “Right” politics that are used to define majoritarian politics in liberal settler democracies. Yes, to be a claimant in a settler court means that to some extent you are legitimizing state sovereignty, the state’s power to offer limited justice, to redistribute property, to mediate disputes. At the same time, I think for a lot of Indigenous claimants it’s certainly the case that while one might recognize the authority and the power of the state to make decisions about one’s future that this doesn’t mean you think that the state is morally legitimate. So a large part of what was at stake in the cases I talk about in my book was demonstrating this gap between law and justice, showing up the immorality of prior legal rulings and policy-making, to force a change. Of course, some Indigenous people would say that to engage at any level with state processes is to cede a degree of sovereignty and so they refuse to do so.

RC: At the end of the book you suggest that the ‘fragile truce’ struck between indigenous polities and settler states has come undone in the face of neoliberal reforms that limit the commitment of governments to equality and social justice. Is there an implicit narrative of progress in many activist histories? What are the implications of this?

The Indigenous rights claims that I talk about in my book came to national attention in a period of heightened awareness of racial discrimination, of anti-colonialism, civil rights protests and so on. Aboriginal rights became a progressive cause in this context––the 1967 referendum was, for the majority of the population in Australia, an issue of equality and social justice. But Indigenous rights struggles were about more than equality; they were claims to the state for recognition of the distinct sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, often based in land rights. So they always troubled a progressive consciousness for it was never going to be enough to simply establish rights to equality; Indigenous peoples wanted something more than that. I think this claim is not very legible to settlers and yet at some level it registers and troubles them.

This trouble came more out into the open in the 1990s, post-Mabo, in Australia, and as claims to the Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand increased in number and extent in the same period. Many white settlers began to feel that their rights to land, and their sense of identity and belonging, was under threat. At the same time, the old social contract was being pulled apart, as you say, through radical neoliberal reforms. Suddenly, I think it seemed to a lot of white settlers that Indigenous peoples were getting things that were being taken away from them, whites. So this particular and complex set of changing political conditions were what I was trying to allude to in saying that the “fragile truce” was undone during the late 1990s/early 2000s. And I think this breakdown of the brief consensus around the importance of recognizing Indigenous rights was really disheartening for many Indigenous activists and leaders, even if they also expected it. In the sense that in order to fight for change, you need to believe that change is possible, then certainly activist consciousness is progressive (or even radical in some instances); but I think for many Indigenous activists there is a critical awareness of the specific constraints and limits of how far one can get in a settler majority democracy.

RC: Since the 1990s, the politics surrounding indigenous history in Australia have been intense and divisive. What are the challenges of writing indigenous histories in this climate? Does it affect the kinds of histories that are told? What attitudes do students bring to the study of indigenous history?

I see a lot of students come into my classroom who think that Indigenous issues are important but they don’t know why. As I’ve been briefly alluding to, the issues are incredibly complex and we don’t have a “go to” shared language for talking about these politics. So I feel like I need to teach a new language to the overwhelmingly non-Indigenous students I have, one that will take them beyond the guilt or shame or denial that still characterizes public debate about Indigenous issues in this country. This is one of the major challenges for writing or teaching Indigenous history here in Australia, establishing a useful, critical language for thinking and talking about the distinctiveness of Indigenous-settler state politics. Studying Indigenous history is hard, it is challenging intellectually, ethically, politically.

RC: The (at times) thorny question of agency is crucial to histories from below. You describe The Land is Our History as ‘a rare story about the disempowered changing the status quo’, yet you never diminish the ability of powerful state institutions to affect indigenous lives.  Can an overemphasis on agency run the risk of obscuring the determining role these powerful forces can play?

Great question! In fact, this is the question I was wrestling with in writing this book; how far can I take the story of agency? Is structural oppression of settler colonialism really the true story? As you point out, I try to have it both ways because this is the reality that I perceive and that I have drawn out of the archives I used for this project. The story of a struggle, which this book is, is necessarily a dialectical one.

RC: You argue in the book that for a variety of reasons – including shifting global political paradigms – there was a reversal of the ‘relations of power’ between indigenous peoples and settler-states in the 1960s and 70s.  As the modern neoliberal era is threatened by a new politics that promises a reclamation of national sovereignty, do you see opportunities for the creation of a new truce between indigenous peoples and states? What do relations of power between these two groups look like in 2017?

It really depends which Indigenous people you’re talking about and where. I think one of the things that is really different about 2017 from, say, 1967, is that there is now a recognition on the part of the state of a plurality of Indigenous representatives, political communities, voices (even if this is not necessarily well-represented in mainstream media). So there are multiple forms of relation, opportunities for compromise, negotiation etc. There is also a marked difference between and among Indigenous nations in terms of socio-economic wellbeing and so on. It’s hard to tell a single story about advantage or disadvantage because the reality is so complex. And yet, you have a fascinating and important story of unification in the making of the Uluru Statement recently. How that came about, and what it’s effects politically will be, is yet to be told.

RC: What do you know now that you wish you knew before you started working on the book?

 
That the hard part of bringing a major project to completion is the psychological game, the kind of faith that you have to maintain in order to get there but which, after many years, is often wavering because you think that what you’re saying is so obvious.

The Land Is Our History is published by Oxford University Press. Order it here

Established by the History Department, USYD First Gen aims to celebrate the skills and perspectives that first generation students bring to academia and beyond.
Our objectives include:
1. Providing support to students in the transition from high school to university through initiatives
such as sharing social and academic resources among members on campus and online;
2. Fostering a community amongst First Gen students who share common experiences; and
3. Providing the First Gen community at USYD an inclusive platform where they can express
themselves and embrace their identity as First Gen students
A First Generation student is a student who is the first in their family to attend university; whose parents or guardians who have not completed tertiary study, or an equivalent qualification abroad. We also acknowledge students whose older siblings have gone to university, as well as staff and graduates.
To find out more about us and receive updates, visit our Facebook page: USYD First Gen
Or, send us an email: usydfirstgen@outlook.com

Dr. Sophie Loy-Wilson’s new book, Australians in Shanghai recently featured in an ABC news story, and/or listen to the podcast on the Earshot program produced by Sophie and Tamson Pietsch.
Professor Mark McKenna’s book From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories has been reviewed in the SMH, ABR, Saturday Paper, Adelaide Advertiser, Telegraph, and the Monthly. Between October and December 2016, he did over 20 radio interviews (WA, SA, Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland, NSW, Northern Territory) about the book, and Radio National’s Earshot is broadcasting and podcasting a half hour documentary based on the book.
Professor Glenda Sluga’s co-edited volume has just been published entitled Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History which the Chronicle succinctly describes as a collection of essays on internationalism as an idea and institutional phenomenon espoused by groups across the political spectrum.
Dr Marco Duranti was recently interviewed by Phillip Adams on Late Night Live (Radio National) about his recently released book The Conservative Human Rights Revolution. Marco has also published a commentary in The Conversation UK on how The Conservative Human Rights Revolution informs the controversy in Britain surrounding Theresa May’s calls for the UK to exit the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The book was also reviewed in Lawfare, where legal scholar Ed Bates concluded, “Duranti’s book is highly recommended….it should influence debates on how the ECHR is seen today.” And, in an unexpected twist, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange provoked a robust discussion on the book’s argument when he tweeted about the book.
For some other reviews of new books by members of the department, see: http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/historymatters/2017/05/new_reviews_for_our_latest_pub.html

Dr Miranda Johnson discusses indigeneity and the sacred and what it means when a river is legally declared a person on the Social Science Research Council blog called The Immanent Frame, which publishes short invited essays about secularism and politics. Her creative and innovative teaching around The Pitcairn Project was also recently featured in Sydney University news.
Dr Chin Jou contributed an essay on historical precedents for protesting Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’ for The Huffington Post, and also was a featured author in the Princeton Alumni Weekly
PhD candidate Marama Whyte recently published an article in History Today on women of the American press and their fight for equality in the 1960s and 1970s.
PhD candidate Sarah Bendall published a piece on using material culture to examine notions of gender in the early modern English world on the Journal for the History of Ideas blog.
PhD candidate Billy Griffiths recently contributed a piece to The Conversation on western Arnhem Land and the important work of Indigenous Rangers in caring for country and telling it’s stories to raise awareness of environmental threats to their land.
MA candidate Chris Maxworthy featured on ABC Radio Drive talking about the early Spanish explorer Luis Vaez de Torres, and how the strait that bears his name between Cape York and New Guinea was ‘plagiariased’ by James Cook in 1770.
Professor Dirk Moses was interviewed by the Turkish Platform for Independent Journalism, platform24.org on freedom of the press and genocide denial. He wrote about the Australian press and its treatment of European affairs for the ABC Religion and Ethicssite, and on the historical categorisation of Donald Trump in the Washington Post.
Associate Professor Michael A. McDonnell was interviewed about enlistments in the Revolutionary War for the US public radio program and podcast BackStory. He also recently featured in a podcast on “The History of History Writing” for the popular Ben Franklin’s World in the US, and served as an NEH Visiting Scholar at a Summer Institute at the Library of Congress on the topic of “On Native Grounds.”
Dr. Frances Clarke was interviewed by ABC’s Nightlife on April 9 2017 on the end of America’s Civil War, and recently wrote a blog post for the Australian Women’s History Network
Professor Glenda Sluga posted an article on the recent concern about the demise of the existing international order on E-International Relations, which was also published in German in the May edition of the German magazine Merkur, as part of her GeschichtesKolumn series. She also blogged on women in the long history of humanitarianism for the Australian Women’s History Network
Professor Mark McKenna took part in three events at the Sydney Writers Festival, appeared at the Writer’s Festival, South Coast, NSW in April, was interviewed by BBC and AAP Reuters regarding Uluru Statement on May 26, and contributed an article to the Conversation on ANZAC day and republicanism. He also published a major essay on Australian political biography in the Monthly in April, and was Interviewed on RN Late Night Live.
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The Department of History at the University of Sydney presents:
History on Monday
Seminar Series for Postgraduates and Faculty
Held at 12.10-1.30
in Woolley Common Room, Woolley Building A22
(Enter Woolley through the entrance on Science Road and climb the stairs in front of you. Turn left down the corridor, and the WCR is the door at the end of the hall)
Click here for map
2016 Coordinator:
Professor Dirk Moses
The semester at a glance:
Semester 2 2017
7 August
Ayhan Aktar (Bilgi University, Istanbul)
Remembering and Forgetting: Official Histories and Silenced Memories in Turkey
14 August
Leigh Ann Wheeler (SUNY Binghamton)
Sexual Civil Liberties and the Rise of Gay Rights: An Untold History of Stealth and Wealth
21 August
Phillippa Hetherington (School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London)
Imperial Governmentalities and the Campaign to End the Traffic in Women in the Russian Empire
28 August
Alison Bashford (University of Cambridge)
Gendering Modern World History
4 September
Anna Ross (University of Warwick)
Tetouan: Spanish Imperialism after the Americas, 1913-56
11 September
Frances Steel (University of Wollongong)
Anglo Worlds in Motion and Transpacific Encounters
18 September
Saliha Belmessous (UNSW)
Emancipation within Empire, Algeria, 1945-1962
25 AVCC Common Week
2 October
Labour Day
9 October
Katie McDonough (Western Sydney University)
Public Works Laboratory: Experiments in Provincial Governance in Eighteenth-Century France
16 October
Stephen Macekura (Indiana University Bloomington)
The Rhodesian Quandary: Accounting for International Development in the 1940s and 1950s
23 October
Andreas Stucki (University of Bern)
Engendering the Iberian Empires: Domesticity, Female Cooperation, Violence and Resistance, c. 1955-1975
30 October
Richard Steigmann-Gall (Kent State University)
Star-Spangled Fascism: American Interwar Political Extremism in Comparative Perspective

Dr Anne Rees (right, centre) talks of the impact that Australians in Shanghai should make
On 21 March, the Department of History celebrated a launch of three books by its lecturers before an audience of over 40 colleagues and friends.
* Chin Jou, Supersizing Urban America: How Inner Cities Got Fast Food with Government Help (University of Chicago Press, 2017):
Launcher: Warwick Anderson
* Sophie Loy-Wilson, Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China (Routledge, 2017):
Launcher: Ann Rees with introduction by Kirsten McKenzie.
* Marco Duranti, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention (Oxford University Press, 2017):
Launcher: Danielle Celermajer
The Department thanks the launchers and congratulates Chin, Sophie, and Marco on their tremendous achievement.
The Department also thanks Dirk Moses and Natasha Wheatley for generously offering to host the triple book launch.

Professor Warwick Anderson lauds Dr. Chin Jou’s provocative Supersizing Urban America, while Dr. Jou (middle, left) looks on.