Until recently, little was known of the history of the children convicts brought with them to Australia, or gave birth to while under sentence. Their stories are moving.
Portrait of De Lacy Evans and his wife (1870)
State Library Victoria
In the 19th century there was no formal or medical process for gender transition. When people crossed gender categories, they did so socially, sometimes for their entire lifetimes.
Privately commissioned histories are a strange literary beast. In MUP: A Centenary History, Stuart Kells does a fine job, but doesn’t quite resolve the matter of maintaining authorial independence.
Teenage chef Debbie commenced her decade-long tenure at the Australian Women’s Weekly in July 1954 – and her recipes could help with your ‘matrimony prospects’.
A new book illuminates the bold lives of Australian women journalists between 1860 and the end of Word War II – a time when female reporters were ‘almost unheard of’.
Across Australia, there are memorials to white people ‘killed by Natives’. But there is a silence about what led to these attacks, or the reprisal massacres that typically followed.
Camels on Nullabor (at bottom right) supplied by State Library of South Australia B-7953. Other images are family photographs, supplied by author.
Sabah Rind’s great-grandparents, a Baloch-Afghan cameleer and a Muslim Badimiya Yamitji woman, had to battle the White Australia policy and the Aborigines Act 1905 in the course of their daily lives.
The sad reality is that if the demands of these early activists had been met nearly a century ago, we would not be suffering the severe disadvantage that hovers over Aboriginal lives still today.
Bachelor of Science graduates at Adelaide University in 1890.
Courtesy of University of Adelaide Library, University Archives
A new book explores a paradox: women have been excluded from Australian science for many social and political reasons, but were also present and active in it from its earliest days.
In their 1881 petition, Aboriginal people from the Maloga mission who sought greater freedom from missionary control called for the government to grant them their own parcel of land.
As we look towards 2023, trend forecasters are figuring out how to boost work morale. In the second world war, Curtin turned to the media to spread his message.
Current discussions about ‘homelessness’ have echoes of the past treatment of vagrants. New historical research tells us more about the lives of people during periods of social and economic hardship.
Image credits: State Library of Western Australia.
Historically, women’s contributions to the agricultural sector often occurred outside of professional roles. ‘Lady’ Maud Williams, who discovered the Lady Williams apple, is one of those women.
Clockwise from left: Curramulka Community Club, St Francis House, book cover (ABC Books), Flinders University, State Library of New South Wales.
Vince Copley lived a long, impressive life, helping to make a better world for Aboriginal people. Born on a mission in 1936, he died aged 85, just after finishing his memoir, on 10 January 2022.
NAA: A14482, 020309DI-03 AUSPIC/Photographer Peter West
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne