The screening of the documentary series Persons of Interest on SBS, in which former targets of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) surveillance examine their files, has prompted some…
Something hidden in manuscript – what could it be?
Les Enluminures
The discovery of a Portuguese manuscript purporting to include an illustration of a kangaroo has been used to question which European power was first to “discover” Australia. The drawing is included in…
This picture, from a trove of historic Sydney Harbour photos, shows the ferry South Steyne rounding Bennelong Point.
Graeme Andrews 'Working Harbour' Collection, City of Sydney Archives
Never mind the bush and the outback – Sydneysiders were a maritime people from the start. For proof, browse through the Working Harbour collection, 10,000 images of Sydney’s maritime history recently donated…
History in schools is not engaging our students.
History class image from www.shutterstock.com
In 2008, historian Dr. Anna Clark conducted a survey of the state of history education in Australian classrooms. The book that resulted from this study — History’s Children — presented a bleak image of…
Beautiful one day … a quarry the next?
Underwater Earth / Catlin Seaview Survey - www.catlinseaviewsurvey.com
Few of us remember that the declaration of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and its subsequent World Heritage status was born out a 12-year popular struggle to prevent the most wondrous coral reef in…
Gravestones at Rookwood range from the majestic to the tacky.
Crouchy69
Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery, the largest necropolis in the southern hemisphere, has had its share of troubles lately. A recent ABC investigation reported on a suite of alleged governance problems, including…
Men, women and children were among the gold diggers who rebelled on this day in 1854.
S. T. Gill, 1954
When I was at primary school in the late 1970s, engaging kids in history lessons meant a good dose of role-play. Each year, on today’s date, it was time to re-enact the Eureka Stockade. It was on this…
Unrealistic expectations raised early explorers’ hopes beyond all possibility.
Larry W. Lo
How did Australia, the mysterious southern continent that had captured European imaginations since ancient times, slip from the grasp of the Dutch? Four hundred years ago, the Dutch East India Company…
Former prime minister Paul Keating delivers a Remembrance Day address in Canberra.
AAP Image/Alan Porritt
Delivering the Remembrance Day address at the Australian War Memorial, Paul Keating has highlighted the protection that unifying Europe gave from the sort of dangers that led to “Armageddon” last century…
Joan Beaumont’s new book Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War provides a strong insight into both Australia’s role in World War One and life on the home front.
Australian War Memorial
Over the next four years, the centenary of World War One will prompt the publication of a vast number of war-related books. In Australia, it will be hard to keep count of the new books on Gallipoli, with…
Opposition leader Tony Abbott has signalled he’d like to see the history curriculum change. But is it a good idea for government to intervene?
AAP Image/AFP Pool, Saeed Khan
In the last week of the campaign, some naggingly familiar comments came out from the Coalition. Then opposition leader Tony Abbott said he wanted to see the national curriculum in history changed because…
Victoria was a world leader in leisure … and that’s how we founded footy.
Australian Football Yarra Park – State Library of Victoria
Finally, the AFL home and away season is beginning. Once again our footy teams will make history. But let us not forget that history made footy. Australia, notes Geoffrey Blainey in his Shorter History…
Prime Minister Julia Gillard answered questions about the AWU affair at a press conference yesterday.
AAP/Alan Porrit
The recent drama about Julia Gillard’s activities on behalf of one faction of the Australian Workers’ Union back in the early 1990s is another chapter in the long story of money in Australian unions. Parliament…
NSW premier Barry O'Farrell needs to reform the law to give Sydney University more responsibility for its colleges.
AAP Image/Alan Porritt
Why is the University of Sydney powerless to stop bullying behaviour in what the public sees as “its colleges”? This has been a constant refrain in recent weeks as the controversy surrounding the behaviour…
Australia is not fulfilling its obligations to its veterans.
Flickr/Another Seb
Ten years ago this month, John Howard’s Minister for Veteran Affairs, Danna Vale, launched a searchable internet database known as the World War 2 Nominal Roll. It was intended to be a virtual war memorial…
Survivors of Namibia’s Herero tribe surrendering after a battle with German forces.
Ullstein Bilderdienst Berlin/Supplied
More than a century ago, on 26 September 1905, in a remote and isolated part of German Southwest Africa (present day Namibia) a young Australian lay dying amid the sand dunes and salt pans. Lured across…
Australian humanities subjects need to get on board with MOOCs and develop Australian voices in online learning.
World image from www.shutterstock.com
FUTURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION: We continue our series on the rise of online and blended learning and how free online courses are set to transform the higher education sector. Today Ruth Morgan looks at the…
A United States Air Force RF-101 Voodoo aircraft pilot photographs a Russian ship loaded with missiles while the aircraft itself casts a shadow in Port Casilda, Cuba, Nov. 6, 1962.
EPA/Defense Imagery
Fifty years ago, the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba. Since then, the Cuban Missile Crisis has been recognised as one of the most definitive…
Former Prime Minister John Howard is misinformed about the Australian history curriculum.
AAP Image/Julian Smith
There is a great deal of derogatory, evidence-free and ill-informed opinion about how history is taught in Australian schools. But these tired arguments are so often repeated that we can actually put them…
The families of the interned men of the Caminiti clan in Queensland, circa 1940.
Supplied
When Fascist Italy declared war on Britain in mid-1940, almost 5,000 Italians living in Australia were imprisoned in internment camps. Few Italian families escaped the human cost of detention as “enemy…