Books in the Anthem Studies in Australian History series

The written histories, built memorials and spoken narratives of settler descendants often reveal an absence of Aboriginal people in Australian settlers' historical consciousness and a lack of empathy for those whose lands were taken over. This absence reflects an intellectual and emotional disconnect from Aboriginal people's experiences and from recent national debates about reconciling contested pasts. The aim of 'Memory, Place and SettlerΓÇÆAboriginal History' is to understand the evolution and endurance of this disconnect. Drawing on archival research, interviews and fieldwork, Skye Krichauff fuses the methodologies and theories of historical enquiry, anthropology and memory studies to investigate the multifaceted processes through which current generations of rural settler descendants come to know the colonial era. Primarily focussing on analysing and comparing the historical consciousness of a specific group of settler descendants - namely those who have grown up on land in the mid-north of South Australia that was occupied by their forebears in the nineteenth century - this book is additionally informed by interviews and fieldwork conducted with Aboriginal descendants. In addition, as a fifth-generation settler descendant herself, Krichauff utilises her insider status to provide personal insights and reflections with her analysis.Within spoken narratives and during site visits, settler descendants demonstrate that their consciousness of the colonial past has been formed by growing up in places surrounded by people and objects that provide continuous reminders and physical evidence of the lives of previous generations. This book argues that the primary and most powerful way through which this group knows the colonial past is through lived experience. A recognition that (and how) previous generations' experiences transfer through the generations is crucial to any investigation into the past known and understood through lived experience. As such, this monograph investigates and contextualises the timing, speed and intensity with which rural districts were occupied, Aboriginal people were dispossessed, and the extent and nature of previous generations' relations with Aboriginal people.Included in this monograph is an analysis of public histories (local written histories and plaques, monuments and information boards) which demonstrates a settler-colonial historical epistemology that frames the way mid-northern settler descendants make sense of the past. Memories of personal lived experiences are remembered, understood and articulated - are composed and constructed - using the public language and the meanings available in the wider culture in which individuals live. Krichauff provides concrete examples which demonstrate how, amongst many settler descendants, the memories, family stories and lived experiences of Aboriginal presence and positive settlerΓÇÆAboriginal interaction (stories which fall outside the dominant epistemology) are ignored or neglected. While knowledge about the past learned through external sources (books, films, documentaries) can, to varying degrees, shape and inform settler descendants' consiousness of the colonial era, Krichauff argues that it is the degree of connection with experience that is crucial to understanding the extent to which external knowledge is absorbed and remembered. By connecting Aboriginal people (past and present) with people and places known through everyday life, settler descendants are more likely to intellectually and emotionally connect their own histories with those of the victims of colonialism. This book concludes by demonstrating how it is possible to unsettle settler descendants' consciousness of the colonial past in ways that enable a tentative connection with Aboriginal people and their experiences.

'Travelling Home' provides a detailed analysis of the contribution that the mid twentieth-century 'Walkabout' magazine made to Australia's cultural history. Spanning five central decades of the twentieth century (1934-1974), 'Walkabout' was integral to Australia's sense of itself as a nation. By advocating travel-both vicarious and actual-'Walkabout' encouraged settler Australians to broaden their image of the nation and its place in the Pacific region. In this way, 'Walkabout' explicitly aimed to make its readers feel at home in their country, as well as including a diverse picture of Aboriginal and Pacific cultures. Like National Geographic in the United States, Walkabout presented a cornucopia of images and information that was accessible to a broad readership.Given its wide availability and distribution, together with its accessible and entertaining content, 'Walkabout' changed how Australia was perceived, and the magazine is recalled with nostalgic fondness by most if not all of its former readers. Many urban readers learnt about Indigenous peoples and cultures through the many articles on these topics, and although these representations now seem dated and at times discriminatory, they provide a lens through which to see how contemporary attitudes about race and difference were defined and negotiated.Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, 'Travelling Home' engages with key questions in literary, cultural, and Australian studies about national identity and modernity. The book's diverse topics demonstrate how 'Walkabout' canvassed subtle and shifting fields of representation. Grounded in the archival history of the magazine's production, the book addresses questions key to Australian cultural history. These include an investigation of middle-brow print culture and the writers who contributed to Walkabout, and the role of 'Walkabout' in presenting diverse and often conflicting information about Indigenous and other non-white cultures. Other chapters examine how popular natural history enabled scientists and readers alike to define an unique Australian landscape, and to debate how a modernising nation could preserve its bush while advocating industrial and agricultural development. While the nation is central to 'Walkabout' magazine's imagined world, Australia is always understood to be part of the Pacific region in complex ways that included neo-colonialism, and Pacific content was prominent in the magazine. Through complex and nuanced readings of Australian literary and cultural history, 'Travelling Home' reveals how vernacular understandings of key issues in Australia's cultural history were developed and debated in this accessible and entertaining magazine.

The bushranger legend is an important component of Australia's cultural history, with names like Ned Kelly and Ben Hall still provoking strong, if ambivalent, responses. Storytellers mobilize this legend in unique and exciting ways that reflect upon both the cultural and actual history of bushrangers, as well as speaking to contemporary concerns and driving debate on the national character. 'Outlaw Nation' is a multidisciplinary investigation into the history of cultural representations of the bushranger legend on the stage and screen, charting that history from its origins in colonial theatre works performed while bushrangers still roamed Australia's bush to contemporary Australian cinema. It considers the influences of industrial, political and social disruptions on these representations as well as their contributions to those disruptions.'Outlaw Nation' is a comprehensive cultural history of representations of bushrangers in cinema and colonial theatre. Beginning with the bushranger legend's establishment, it explores the formative years of the representational tradition, identifying the origins of characteristics and the social and industrial mechanisms through which they passed from history to popular theatre. Tracing the legend's development, the book interrogates the promotion of these characteristics from a contested popular history to an officially sanctioned national outlook in the cinema. Finally, it analyzes the contemporary fragmentation of the bushranger legend, attending to the dissatisfactions and challenges that arose in response to political and social debates galvanized by the 1988 bicentenary.The cultural history recounted in 'Outlaw Nation' provides not only an into the role of popular narrative representations of bushrangers in the development and reflection of Australian character, but also a detailed case study of the specific mechanisms at work in the symbiosis between a nation's values and its creative production. Bushrangers have had a heightened though unstable significance in Australia due to the nation's diverse population and historical insecurities and conflicts over colonial identity, land rights and settlement. Community often defined the bushrangers in their stage and screen appearances, and the challenges that these marginalized communities faced were absorbed into the political and social mainstream. 'Outlaw Nation' is an insight into the process through which the bushranger legend earned its cultural resonance in Australia.

The essays in 'Migrant Nation: Australian Culture, Society and Identity' work within the gap between Australian image and experience, focusing on particular historical blind spots by telling stories of individuals and groups that did not fit the favoured identity mould and can therefore offer fresh insights into the other side of identity construction. In this way this collection casts light onto the hidden face Australian identity and pays respect to the experiences of a wide variety of people who have generally been excluded, neglected or simply forgotten in the long-running quest to tell a unified story of Australian culture and identity, a story that is rapidly unravelling.Whether in terms of language, history, culture or personal circumstances, many of the subjects of these essays were foreign to the settler dream. The stories reveal their efforts to establish a sense of legitimacy and belonging outside of the dominant Australian story. Drawing upon memories, letters, interviews, documentary fragments and archives, the authors have in common a commitment to give life to neglected histories and thus to include, in an expanding and open-ended national narrative, people who were cast as strangers in the place that was their home.

In 1955 'Jedda' was released in Australian cinemas and the international film world, starring Indigenous actors Rosalie Kunoth and Robert Tudawali. That year Eric Bell watched the film in the Liberty Cinema in Yass. Twelve years later he was dismayed to read a newly erected plaque in the main street of the Yass Valley village of Bowning. It plainly stated that the Ngunnawal people, on whose country Bowning stood, had been wiped out by an epidemic of influenza. The local Shire Council was responsible for the plaque; they also employed Bell's father. The Bells were Ngunnawal people. The central paradox of 'Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)' is the enthusiasm of a pastoral community, made wealthy by the occupation of Ngunnawal land, for a film that addressed directly the continuing legacy of settler-colonialism, a legacy that was playing out in their own relationships with the local Ngunnawal people at the time of their investment in the film. While the local council and state government agencies collaborated to minimize the visibility of Indigenous peoples, and the memory of the colonial violence at the heart of European prosperity, a number of wealthy and high-profile members of this pastoral community actively sought involvement in a film that would bring into focus the aftermath of colonial violence, the visibility of its survivors and the tensions inherent in policies of assimilation and segregation that had characterized the treatment of Ngunnawal people in their lifetimes. Based on oral histories, documentary evidence, images and film, 'Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)' explores the themes of colonial nostalgia, national memory and family history. Charles Chauvel's 'Jedda' (1955), a shared artefact of mid-twentieth-century settler-colonialism, is its fulcrum. The book newly locates the story of the genesis of 'Jedda' and, in turn, 'Jedda' becomes a cultural context and point of reference for the history of race relations it tells.

Trailblazing women of Australian Public Broadcasting, 1945-1975 offers a compelling new perspective of Australian radio and television history. It chronicles how a group of female producers defied the odds and forged remarkable careers in the traditionally male domain of public-affairs production at the ABC in the post-war decades. Kay Kinane, Catherine King, Therese Denny and Joyce Belfrage were ambitious and resourceful producers, part of the vanguard of Australian broadcasters who used mass media as a vehicle for their social and political activism. Fiercely dedicated to their audiences, they wrote, directed and produced ground-breaking documentaries and current affairs programs that celebrated Australian life, while also challenging its cultural complacency, its racism and sexism. They immersed themselves in the ABC's many networks of collaboration and initiated a range of strategies to expand their agency and authority. This book investigates what motivated these women to become outspoken public broadcasters and how they manage to overcome the obstacles in their way. With vivid descriptions of life at the ABC, it traces their careers as they crossed borders and crossed mediums, following them as they worked on location shoots and in production offices, in television studios, control rooms and radio booths. In doing so it highlights the barriers, both official and unofficial, that confronted so many women working in broadcasting after World War II.