This article is a transcript of the speech by Gary Foley describing how, as a young man, he moved from northern New South Wales to Redfern, Sydney, where he became involved in the creation of the first Aboriginal Legal Service in Australia. He and other activists were inspired by the Black Panthers Party in the USA, the Black Power movement, and local Indigenous activists. Attracted by the work of Bruce McGuinness, Foley moved to Fitzroy, Melbourne, to participate in McGuinness's work in the Aboriginal Health Service, the education enterprise, Koori Kollij, and other activism. Thereafter, Gary Foley focused his work on Melbourne.
Australians are more likely to imagine that their nation was 'born' on a remote Turkish peninsula on 25 April 1915 than at Centennial Park in Sydney on 1 January 1901, when the Commonwealth of Australia was officially inaugurated. This article considers the reasons Federation failed to lodge in the Australian imagination as a moment of national birth and the consequences of that failure forAustralian democracy. It argues that people protect what they value and that a greater awareness among Australians of our democratic achievement might act as a safeguard in a period of global democratic decay.
The Indigenous sport of Australian (Rules) Football is widely regarded as the national game, at least in Melbourne and the state of Victoria. First codified in 1858 as the Melbourne Rules, today Australian Football, as it is officially known, is the most spectated sport nationally, and the controlling body of the sport, the Australian Football League (AFL), is one of the wealthiest and most influential Australian institutions. The history of Australian Football and its origins in gold-rush era Melbourne provides an ideal example of why the rules that govern the discipline of Australian history need to be broken. In referencing the orthodox methodological approaches and research practices in the writing of Australian Rules Football histories, this lecture shows how Indigenous peoples, knowledges, and cultural practices have been eliminated from accounts of the Australian past. In doing so, it also shows how productive settler-colonial relationships with Indigenous peoples can be rendered marginal and insignificant. Drawing on recent scholarly collaborations with historian Katherine (Kat) Ellinghaus, this lecture concludes by suggesting alternate approaches to the writing of Australian history that are inclusive of Indigenous Australian understanding of the past and therefore more conducive to reconstructing historical accounts that are both truthful and convincing. In doing so the lecture argues that we require new approaches to historical research, such as those encapsulated by the ARC and Cripps Foundation-funded project 'Ngura Ninti: An Indigenous History of Documents'.
In 1901Melbourne became the temporary capital of the new Commonwealth rather than Sydney where support for Federation was weak. This strengthened the federation in these crucial early years. Victorian politicians had the upper hand in the new parliament. Alfred Deakin dominated while his main rival George Reid was frequently absent in Sydney earning money at the bar. The social liberal and protectionist policies of the Victorian liberals became the foundational policies of the new nation, and, until John Howard became the leader of the Liberal Party, Melbourne was the power base of Australian Liberals.
The new Commonwealth of Australia, created in the first years of the 20t'' century, was the work of proud idealists, many of them Victorian reformers such as Charles Pearson, Alfred Deakin, H.B. Higgins, and suffragist Vida Goldstein, who proclaimed the values of equality, collective welfare, and social justice that they aimed to realise through key institutions such as the Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, a compulsory minimum wage defined as a living wage, old age and invalid pensions, the maternity allowance, and the White Australia policy. Espousing what US historian Mae Ngai has called 'the ideology of coolieism', these idealists saw Asian workers as inherently cheap labour, subject to degradation and exploitation by the bourgeois class. Deakin proposed equal pay for equal work. Social and economic equality were these founding fathers' and mothers' key values.
Taking the metaphor of waves helps position the 1970s women's protest movement in a history of feminist activism that extends back to the French Revolution. This article acknowledges the similarities and differences between the 19th and 20th century movements. It argues for a continuum, rather than a sharp break, and for locating the specificity of Australia's and Victorias' history in the context of a wider global movement. Ideas and strategies imported from overseas were applied to local grievances and created local solutions.
The early 1970s saw the emergence of what was then called the gay movement, which has been remarkably successful in changing social and legal attitudes to sexuality and gender. Although Sydney's Mardi Gras is the best-known expression of this new openness, Melbourne played a crucial role in the development of the movement.
In 1980 Professor John McCarty argued that the family farm was in the 19th century the basis of agricultural settlement of inland Australia-an area he labelled the Inland Corridor-and he called for historians to explore this form of farming. This article takes up McCarty's challenge and explores the importance of the family in settling the Northern Plains of Victoria. The article looks at the evolution of the family farm from 1870 to 1921 through the journal of one selector, James Harris James, and the experiences of his fellow settlers in the parish of Wanurp.
Although C.J. Dennis always maintained that the Sentimental Bloke was inspired by a real person, the origins of his enormously popular and influential urban successor to the heroic bushman have been underexamined. This article draws on extensive new research to add details to Dennis's account, to reveal the probable identity of the original Sentimental Bloke, and to trace his biography as much as is possible. In addition, it suggests that the bleak life and death of that figure exemplify some of the problems facing Australians during the Great War, problems for which the highly fictionalised and romanticised world of The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke provided comfort.
This work is a counterpoint to Margaret Kiddle's Men of Yesterday,1which documented the lives of Western District pastoralists during the 19th century. The research investigates workers such as housemaids, shepherds, boundary riders, shearers, and contractors, who created the economic prosperity and lifestyle the pastoralists enjoyed. These workers were part of a selfcontained paternalistic world in which the authority of the pastoralist was universally acknowledged. While workers sought to rise in this world, their opportunities for social mobility were limited. Despite the attempts of state governments to break up the large estates, this paternalistic world remained intact well beyond this period.
This note provides background to a letter from Charles Wilson, who was unusual amongst early white settlers in Port Phillip in taking an interest in Indigenous culture. It supplements material provided in my earlier article on the Wilson family, 'The Importance of Gender and Social Networks in Return Migration Decisions: A Case Study from Colonial Victoria', published in this journal in December 2020. More specifically, it serves to introduce two documents reproduced here without change. The main document is Wilson's letter to his sister Anna concerning Aboriginal views of the world as he recorded them in the Wimmera (specifically referring to the Wotjobaluk around Horsham) in 1846. It follows this introductory note. The second document, incorporated into this note, cites Wilson's report on Indigenous people in the locality published in the Sixth Report of the Central Board Appointed to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria, 1869, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, No. 47, p. 6.
The Anzac Stick is the totem of Australia's oldest walking club, Melbournes' Wallaby Club. In May 1915, a member of the club, Lieutenant General J.G. Legge, plucked a tangle of buckthorn from the dugout of his predecessor, the first commander of the AIF, General William Bridges, on the Gallipoli Peninsula. This unpromising material was later fashioned into the handsome walking stick that outgoing presidents of the Wallaby Club have passed to their successors since 1916. Several Wallabies, including General John Monash, played significant parts in the Gallipoli Campaign, and the Anzac Stick was a product of fraternal relationships within a small circle of Wallabies, all senior officers, serving on the battlefield or behind the lines. Exactly who conceived it, and what each contributed to its creation, remains obscure; this note probes that still unsolved mystery.
Museums in the 1970s were largely masculine preserves, staffed almost exclusively by men in white coats. Women were thin on the ground. Their stories were equally rare. Those few women who did appear in museum exhibitions were mostly royal women or, in the Australian context, governors' wives. But as feminist historians recast the discipline, museums followed in their wake. From feminists to felons, matriarchs to monsters, womens' stories began to be presented in exhibitions. This article explores some of the challenges encountered in exhibiting women's history, especially where the stories themselves might be described as 'difficult history'. Are there 'no-go' areas in history exhibitions, and what happens if we challenge them?
The inaugural Gwenda D.M. Jones Memorial Lecture was delivered in Melbourne for the Royal Historical Society of Victoria on 19 November 2024. This memorial lecture series honours long-time member and generous supporter of the RHSV, Gwen Jones (1923-2021), who assiduously assembled, safeguarded, and then ensured preservation of The Jones Collection. The lecture introduces the richness and significance of the collection by using Gwen's 1953-54 study tour to the United Kingdom and Europe as its general focus, and especially her experiences sailing from Melbourne on the Orient Line steamship Orontes (Figure 1).
The tiny village of Sherbrooke in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne was thrown open to agricultural selection in 1893. Its transition within a few years into a tourist playground and a retreat for some of Melbournes' wealthiest families was marked by a degree of social upheaval best captured in a contemporary work of fiction. The Creeping City, by social realist writer John Morrison, acknowledged in passing by some local historians, remains an important account of the communitys' transformation. It begs the question of whether, in the absence of other substantive material, fiction can be regarded as a source of historical truth when writing local history.
The Victorian response to the discovery of gold in the 1850s included concerns about the way the gold rush promised or threatened to redistribute wealth randomly, alongside more optimistic responses. The article describes the democratic reforms that resulted from political activism by the gold immigrants. Finally, it characterises the gold eras' complex settlement of the tension between individual wealth seeking and public good-while gold-seeker political activists sought to equate private wealth seeking with the public interest, there was also importantly a flurry of settler institution and public sphere building.
Settlers viewed the colonisation of Victoria as a glorious march to progress, first by the occupation of verdant sheep pastures, then by the glorious discovery of gold. But there is another side to colonisation and the gold rushes-the devastation of the world of the traditional owners. Colonisation caused massive loss of life through violence and disease, and great trauma due to loss of land and culture. Yet we should not ascribe a simple victimhood to the survivors but instead see them as complex humans who found ways to exert power and transform themselves so they might endure and eventually thrive.
Napier Waller (1893-1972) was a nationally renowned Melbourne-based artist best known for his stained glass windows and wall mosaic in the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. This article offers a broad overview of Wallers' life and art with the aim of providing fresh insights into his motivation and the wellsprings of his artistic inspiration.
Since early last century women have been at the forefront of humanitarian aid and humanitarian work during wars and other forms of violent conflict within and between nations. They joined international aid organisations like Save the Children (formed 1919), Plan International (formed 1937), and International Social Service (formed 1924). These organisations remain active today and have demonstrated remarkable resilience across the twentieth and 21st centuries, assisting children through various means. Through a biographical lens, we can capture the activism of some relatively unknown Australian women who traversed the national and international arena and examine changes in their approaches to humanitarian work. Most of the women discussed here feature only within specialist fields where they might appear fleetingly, or within narratives where they are not the main focus of study.
