A Fremantle monument to three white explorers was revised in 1994 to acknowledge the violence committed against Indigenous owners. As Australia struggles to reconcile its racist past, perhaps this monument shows a way forward.
Australia’s first memorial to Indigenous service people.
Freya Higgins-Desbiolles
Many of our public commemorations honour people and incidents that brought great harm to others. We need to look at what that says about us, and how we build more inclusive public memorials.
Judge May Lahey (left) with actor Jean Harlow in 1932.
The Cornell Daily Sun (digitally coloured image)
Dame Roma Mitchell is remembered as Australia’s first female judge. But Queenslander May Lahey beat her to the punch when she became a judge in Los Angeles in 1928. Her lack of recognition is symptomatic of how Australia remembers expats, particularly women.
Anthropologist Percy Leason thought he was painting the extinction of Victoria’s Indigenous people in the 1930s. He was wrong, but his portraits, part of a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, are surprisingly sympathetic.
Delegates to the Australasian Federation Conference, Melbourne, 1890, where being white, male and bearded was standard form.
National Library of Australia
This year is the 120th anniversary of the Australasian Federal Convention through which, with rancour, prejudices and vested interests, the Australian nation was eventually born.
Ben Hall and Tim Draxl in Only Heaven Knows
Robert Catto
Queer life thrived in 1940s Sydney despite policing and prohibition, as a new production of the musical Only Heaven Knows demonstrates. But it was not to last.
A treaty would be an agreement that is rather like that of host and guest, with rights and responsibilities for each party.
AAP/Joel Carrett
The result of the 1967 referendum may well have made Australia appear less racist, but it did not address the inherently racist nature of the Constitution.
People look out over an ornamental lake from behind a wrought iron fence at the Carlton Gardens.
State Library of Victoria
Melbourne is a product of British colonial planning policies to control public access and movement in Australian cities. This legacy still influences the use of public spaces today.
Australians are deeply attached to the cluster of beliefs and traditions we call the ‘Anzac legend’.
Shutterstock
In 1960, historian Ken Inglis wondered if Anzac functioned as a secular religion in Australian society. In 2017, we can confidently answer: yes, it does.
Gone are the days when we were told to suck out a snake’s venom. So what’s the current treatment and how have treatments changed over time?
State Library of NSW/Hood
Snake bite treatments have changed remarkably over the past 200 years. But most, if not all, made sense in their historical context.
Was World Vision Australia chief advocate Tim Costello right to say that Australia’s foreign aid spending was at its highest under Menzies, at 0.5% of gross national income?
AAP Image/Royal Australian Air Force, CPL Jessica de Rouw
The book Red Professor: the Cold War Life of Fred Rose tells of a progressive anthropologist who was stymied by non-Indigenous people in powerful positions. Sadly, it’s a narrative that still resonates today.
Clare Wright: one of many women historians carving a role as a public intellectual.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP
Compared to the male-dominated STEM disciplines and social sciences like philosophy and political science, Australian history has been remarkably feminised. Indeed there may be more women historians here than in the UK or US.
Does this rock painting, featuring a long, white gun, depict first contact? Is it a work of history?
Author provided
Australian history is already a hotly contested discipline but is it time to broaden our definitions of the canon? Might an indigenous rock painting or a novel or a poem constitute a work of history?
Vincent Lingiari looks on as Prime Minister Gough Whitlam swigs champagne after the symbolic handback of the Gurindji people’s land.
Rob Wesley-Smith
A new book reveals the drama and comedy of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s famous “hand back” of Gurindji land in 1975, following the Wave Hill Walk-Off 50 years ago – and the bittersweet aftermath.