The privatized nature of employment as a domestic servant is often inimical to collective action. Yet in the early 1960s there was significant trade union interest in the working conditions of female domestic servants in Singapore and Malaya. Studies of female domestic service in Malaya (later Malaysia) and Singapore are dominated by work focusing on Chinese-born servants before the Second World War, and migrant maids associated with economic transformation from the late 1970s. If scholarship on pre-war domestic servants leans toward an emphasis on agency, then studies of maids from the 1980s tend toward experiences of abjection. What of the intervening period, during the Cold War, when rapid decolonization introduced new factors into the demography, structure, and regulation of domestic service in Malaysia and Singapore? Did this provide opportunity for greater autonomy, mimic older colonial relationships, or herald new protections for domestic servants in the modern postcolonial state? The considerable historical literature devoted to the relationship between imperial power, colonialism, and domestic service rarely extends to the persistence and dynamics of domestic service in the era of decolonization between the 1950s and the 1970s, although it does explore the increasing feminization of the occupation. This article explores a confluence of factors—the politics of anticolonialism, economic dependence, and apprehension about the privacy of the home—that cohered in a controversy in the 1960s known as the “amah strike,” when female domestic servants in Singapore and Malaya threatened to walk off the job over a proposed change to their employment conditions.

"Protecting the Empire’s Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism 1830–1870." Australian Historical Studies, 54(1), pp. 171–172

"Ian Hoskins navigates the waters of a general history." History Australia, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

Why have Asian states – colonial and independent – imprisoned people on a massive scale in detention camps? How have detainees experienced the long months and years of captivity? And what does the creation of camps and the segregation of people in them mean for society as a whole? This ambitious book surveys the systems of detention camps set up in Asia from the beginning of the 20th century in The Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Malaya, Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Timor, Korea and China.

Is Trauma a transhistorical, transnational phenomenon? Gender and Trauma challenges the standard history that has led to our contemporary understanding of psychological trauma to answer this question, and to explore the impact of gender in the experience and understanding of emotional distress. Bringing together eleven case studies from all over the world, it draws on methods from history, gender and communication studies to consider how trauma has been understood over the 20th and 21st centuries.

Focused on Australia’s Royal Australian Air Force and Army garrison communities in Malaysia from the late 1950s, this article probes the creation and management of a complex power dynamic between the hosts in a postcolonial nation and an expatriate community modelled along colonial lines. These overseas military communities comprised Australian service personnel, their family members and schoolteachers. Thousands of locally employed civilians worked on Australian military bases, or for Australian families as amahs, cooks and gardeners, and Malaysian businesspeople capitalised on the Australian presence. The article tracks the political, social and cultural implications of the cross-cultural encounters enabled by Australia’s Asian garrisons, taking into account the perspective of both Australians and Malaysians, to argue that these communities had a marked impact on regional engagement. Negotiations of military, political, economic and personal power were constant and ongoing; Malaysian demands, far from being subordinated, were often both articulated and met.

This chapter explores how Australian war veterans promoted peace and reconciliation in the post-Second World War period. While it is essential to study opposition to war, efforts to uphold peace, initiatives to recognise the debts incurred during war and to bridge the gulf of understanding and sympathy that can exist between former enemies also forms part of the history of peace practice. Although the reason for the 'public mood' being against Japan in the late 1940s and 1950s is often construed as dependent on the experiences of prisoners of war (POWs) during the war, there has been very little research into the views of former prisoners themselves. Most of the mainstream press were in full support of Australia's participation in the war crimes process, and felt that the sentences handed down were some measure of justice for the many people who had suffered and died.

This article is the guest editors' introduction to a special volume of Pacific Historical Review entitled "Protection: Global Genealogies, Local Practices." Guest editors Christina Twomey and Katherine Ellinghaus argue that the global discourse of protection had a strong presence beyond British humanitarian circles and a longer chronological and larger geographical reach than historians have previously noted. Articles in the special volume include Christina Twomey's examination of protection as a concept with its origins in European, rather than British, colonialism, Trevor Burnard's study of the Protectors of slaves in Berbice in the early to mid-nineteenth century, Goolam Vahed's analysis of the Protectors appointed to lobby on behalf of immigrant Indian indentured labourers in late nineteenth century Natal, Rachel Standfield's investigation of the use of language in Protectorates in Australia and New Zealand in the 1840s, Amanda Nettelbeck's exploration of the concept of Aboriginal vagrancy in Australia in the 1840s, and Katherine Ellinghaus's comparison of the discourse of protection in policies of exemption and competency utlised in Oklahoma and New South Wales in the 1940s and 1950s.