In September 1993, the Australian media was abuzz over a Naval Board of Inquiry which investigated allegations of sexual abuse on the HMAS Swan. Following the Board of Inquiry and media coverage, the Minister for Defence Science and Personnel referred the matter to a new, broader Senate Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in the Australian Defence Force. This inquiry received 122 submissions and handed down its final report in August 1994. The HMAS Swan inquiries were neither the first nor the last major reports investigating abuse in the Australian armed forces. Indeed, media reports and new inquiries every few years suggest a cycle of serial epiphanies – to borrow a phrase from Aboriginal researcher Maggie Walter – about cultures of abuse within the ADF. Yet, what set the HMAS Swan scandal apart from earlier ones was: 1. The interest and interventions taken by the political class, and 2. That it centred on sexual abuse and the status of women in the Australian Defence Force (ADF). This article revisits the HMAS Swan inquiries thirty years later, exploring their findings, legacies and shortcomings. It explores why what could have been a turning point in the treatment of women in the ADF instead became just another inquiry.

Journal Article Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis Get access Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis. By David Hugill. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. xii, 212 pp. Cloth, $100.00. Paper, $25.00.) Noah Riseman Noah Riseman Australian Catholic University, Fitzroy, Australia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 110, Issue 3, December 2023, Pages 582–583, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaad330 Published: 01 December 2023

Australia in the 1990s witnessed the emergence of new transgender organisations that pushed for amendments to state and Commonwealth anti-discrimination laws. Like so many other social movements, they were subject to ideological and strategic divisions. Some transgender activists advocated for “passing” politics, while others adopted ideas about queer that celebrated difference and gender non-normativity. This article examines the politics around anti-discrimination reforms in Australia’s two most populous states: New South Wales and Victoria. New South Wales had a longer tradition of transgender activism and witnessed significant divisions across and within lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities. In Victoria, initial divisions led to the formation of separate organisations for LGB and transgender groups. Yet, this proved a boon in the long run because these groups worked together in solidarity. Both state campaigns proved successful at securing similar legislative reforms in 1996 (New South Wales) and 2000 (Victoria), but with different levels of public and political support. This article draws on a mix of oral history interviews, media reports, archival records, parliamentary debates, and documents shared from transgender activists’ personal archives. It analyses transgender activism and politics in 1990s Australia and how different approaches reflected wider divisions among transgender Australians over identity.

Until November 1992 the Australian military had longstanding rules against the presence of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) service members. The policies and practices for dealing with lgb people varied across time and services, but one commonality is that rarely did cases go to court martial and were generally dealt with through administrative and other disciplinary processes. Yet, the rare cases which did go to court martial leave a hitherto overlooked archival trail that provides insight into how the Australian armed forces conceptualised and policed homosexuality within its ranks. This article examines data from courts martial in the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), focusing especially on cases from the period after the Second World War. Exploring three case studies, it shows how courts martial were not so much about policing homosexuality, but rather prosecuting unsolicited advances and incidents which breached the unspoken bounds of discretion.

Although debates about transgender women in sport have been prominent in recent years, there is a much longer history of transgender participation in sport. This article uses oral history interviews and media to examine Australia's history of transgender women's participation in sport since the late 1970s. It explores the public debates around gender, sex, the body, and 'fair play discourse' as expressed around specific transgender athletes. It also examines the lived experience of those transgender sportswomen and analyses how they used gender presentation to affirm their femininity. Indeed, gender presentation and transgender (in)visibility heavily influenced whether teammates, opponents, sporting associations, and the media accepted transgender athletes in their affirmed gender. The presence of transgender women in sport consistently exposed anxieties around gender, sex, and the body because they exposed rigid understandings of gender binarism. Examining the long history of transgender women in Australian sport reveals how longstanding debates have played out in a variety of settings, with transgender athletes regularly searching for ways to affirm their gender and navigate sporting communities.

I was meant to spend the first half of 2020 on research study leave at the University of Cologne. My partner and I rushed back to Australia in mid-March, disrupting our plans and forcing me into a new working paradigm. Yet, the disruption wound up sending me into one of the most productive periods of my career. In this article, I reflect on how my privileges - both earned and unearned - have contributed to a boom in my academic work at the same time that it has wreaked havoc on the entire sector. I also reflect on how Covid-19 has not caused problems in higher education per se, but rather has exposed and exacerbated inequalities across the sector.

In 1970s Australia, magazines and newspapers regularly featured stories about transgender women. The articles were often exploitative and depicted transgender people as freaks, with headlines designed to shock and mock. Digging deeper, there is another side to transgender people in the Australian media. Notwithstanding the exploitative nature of the coverage, the media was still a site of transgender visibility in an era where there otherwise was none. Oral histories with transgender Australians often mention the importance of a particular television show, article or magazine because they saw others 'like them', and they realised that they were not alone. Some transgender people even kept those articles for years because of the connections they felt to an otherwise uncertain identity. There were also features in the press that were empathetic to transgender Australians, whether that be on the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), in magazines such as Cleo or in broadsheet newspapers. This article analyses the complex role that media played representing and relating to transgender Australians in the 1970s. Drawing on a mix of newspaper, magazine and television sources, as well as oral histories, the article opens new lines of inquiry about histories of transgender visibility, public discourse and understanding the self.

This article uses Australian newspapers from 1910 to 1939 to pose some preliminary ideas about imagining trans possibilities before the Second World War. Using trans-ing analysis and drawing on ideas of trans-historicity, the article focuses on the ways that the Australian press represented males caught dressing as women, and the ways that those individuals explained their gender performances. Although the accused usually argued that they were only joking, reading against the grain suggests that the frequency and nature of these gender transgressions represented challenges to the established gender binaries of the era. Historians need to read such examples of gender non-normativity as part of an Australian trans-historicity for which shifting psychological, medical and social discourses would only gradually provide a language to articulate more diverse gender identities.

This article examines how two works of fiction depict male same-sex desire in Australian military history. The protagonists in the novel Bodies of Men and the short story collection The Boys of Bullaroo do not identify as gay or bisexual, yet they develop intensely intimate friendships that become sexual. The texts come from different literary and popular genres, but they both represent what Elizabeth Woledge refers to as intimatopias: ‘a homosocial world in which the social closeness of the male characters engenders intimacy.’ Intimatopic fictions of war are queer texts that challenge binary and normative understandings of sexuality because the characters’ sexual identities are not defined by (homo)sexual acts. Bodies of Men and The Boys of Bullaroo are intentionally ambiguous about the protagonists’ sexualities, which are neither fixed nor fluid, but rather expressed as demisexual extensions of intimacy. The texts also challenge Australia’s digger and Anzac mythologies by presenting soldiers as sensitive, vulnerable and non-heterosexual. As such, intimatopic fictions of war reimagine Australian military history and offer new, queer conceptualizations of same-sex intimacy, mateship and desire.

In the past 50 years, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) activism in Australia has grown from small, localized organizations to national campaigns calling on all Australians to affirm LGBTI people’s equality. While the issues and activist strategies have evolved over the past 50 years, there have been two persistent patterns: most organizations and activism have been state based and have drawn on international influences, especially from the United Kingdom and United States. In the 1970s the organizations CAMP (Campaign Against Moral Persecution) and Gay Liberation presented competing visions of LGBTI equality, but both recognized the importance of visibility in order to change societal attitudes and influence law reform. Campaigns to decriminalize male homosexuality began in the 1970s and continued across the states through the 1980s and even into the 1990s in Tasmania. After law reform, activists shifted their advocacy to other areas including anti-discrimination laws, relationship recognition, and eventually marriage equality. HIV/AIDS was another important cause that generated grassroots activism within LGBTI communities. State AIDS councils worked in partnership with the federal government, and Australia had one of the world’s best public health responses to the epidemic. Pop culture, international media, and visibility at events such as the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras gradually shifted public opinions in favor of LGB equality by the 2000s. Transgender and intersex rights and acceptance were slower to enter the public agenda, but by the 2010s, those two groups had attained a level of visibility and were breaking down preconceived stereotypes and challenging prejudice. Indeed, politicians lagged behind public opinion on marriage equality, delaying and obfuscating the issue as the major political parties grappled with internal divisions. In 2017 the Commonwealth government held a postal survey asking Australian voters whether or not they supported same-sex marriage. This was an unprecedented exercise in Australian polity that was divisive, but LGBTI activists succeeded in their campaign and secured an overwhelming victory. The postal survey’s outcome also set the stage for new political fights around LGBTI people’s rights: so-called religious freedom, transgender birth certificates and support for LGBTI young people.

Since 2014, I have been coordinating a team project documenting the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) military service in Australia. The project examines changing policies, practices, and most importantly, the lived experiences of LGBTI military service personnel from the end of the Second World War until the present. When we conceived this project, we expected that we would derive most policy information from records in the National Archives of Australia (NAA) and most information about lived experience from a mixture of media reports and oral history interviews. What has astounded us, though, has been the extent to which several service members kept their own personal archives of documents – most of which related to their personal service and some of which did not appear in the NAA catalogue. In other instances, interview participants’ testimonies or personal documents raised topics that sent us to uncover other uncatalogued archival records. In this article, I draw on examples from our research project where this interview- document nexus proved fruitful in uncovering hitherto hidden histories of LGBTI military service in Australia. Rather than thinking about oral and archival sources as needing to be reconciled, conceptualizing them as a nexus generates new methodological possibilities to uncover new sources that inform each other, enriching both microhistories and grand narratives of the past. RESUME Depuis 2014, je coordonne un projet d’equipe documentant l’histoire du service militaire lesbien, gai, bisexuel, transgenre et intersexue (LGBTI) en Australie. Le projet se penche sur les changements dans les politiques, les pratiques et, plus important encore, l’experience vecue par le personnel en service militaire LGBTI de la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale a aujourd’hui. Au moment de la conception du projet, nous nous attendions a obtenir la majorite des informations sur les politiques de la National Archives of Australia (NAA) et l’information sur le vecu d’une combinaison de rapports mediatiques et d’entrevues d’histoire orale. Nous avons toutefois etes stupefaits de voir dans quelle mesure plusieurs membres des services avaient conserve leurs propres archives, dont la plupart des documents se rapportaient a leur propre service et n’apparaissent pas dans le repertoire de la NAA. Dans d’autres cas, les temoignages des participants aux entrevues ou les documents personnels nous mettaient sur la piste d’autre materiel d’archive non repertorie. Dans cet article, je m’inspire d’exemples tires de notre projet de recherche ou ce lien entrevue-document s’est averee profitable en fait de decouvertes d’histoires de service militaire de LGBTI en Australie qui auraient autrement ete passees sous silence. Plutot que de voir les sources orales et archivistiques comme etant a reconcilier, les conceptualiser comme etant en relation fait emerger de nouvelles possibilites methodologiques afin de decouvrir de nouvelles sources qui se nourrissent l’une l’autre, enrichissant ainsi a la fois les micro-histoires et les grands recits du passe.

[Extract] I distinctly remember my first visit to the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (ALGA) in 2014. I had long been an ALGA follower on Facebook and knew members of its executive committee. Yet I was a little nervous that first visit because I was only beginning my foray into the field of LGBTI history. Like so many other academics starting new projects, I felt almost like a phony, moving into well-established turf occupied by other historians – professional, academic and those independent scholars who research out of sheer passion.

In 2013, one of the final acts of the Gillard government was to amend Australia's Sex Discrimination Act to add sexuality, gender identity and intersex variations as protected categories. This was not the first time the Commonwealth had considered anti‐discrimination legislation protecting LGBTI people. The most prominent example was the Democrats‐sponsored Sexuality Discrimination Bill, introduced to Parliament in November 1995, which included provisions to protect transgender people as well as gays, lesbians and bisexuals. The Senate referred the bill to an inquiry by the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee, which received 436 submissions. Approximately 100 of these submissions specifically addressed transgender discrimination, some advocating for the rights of transgender Australians, and others focusing their attacks against the bill based on the transgender provisions. This article draws on the concept of transgender citizenship to examine the transgender‐related aspects of the inquiry and the debates in parliament, to understand the ways that the public and politicians framed transgender rights in the mid‐1990s. These debates are telling in how transgender issues and anxieties over gender fluidity have consistently become an easy target in wider debates about equality for sexual and gender minorities.

[Extract] Whenever I talk to European or American audiences about Australia’s or New Zealand's involvement in the First World War, they always seem surprised. Most do not realize that two nations so far away in the Antipodes were involved in the conflict. They are also surprised to hear how strongly the war features in the nations’ histories and national identities. Even less known, including in Australia and New Zealand, is the First World War history of the Pacific island of Niue. Despite its remoteness and tiny population, 160 Niuean men enlisted in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. They were all volunteers, all men, and represented a cross-section of Niuean society. Yet, their war had tragic outcomes, and not for the same reasons as for the majority of men and women who served from other parts of the world. It is this history that Margaret Pointer reconstructs effectively in Niue and the Great War, chronicling the movements, ailments, culture shocks, deaths, returns and memorializations of the First World War for Niue.

Historians generally accept that Australia’s Vietnam War has been clouded in myth, whether those myths be about the actions of the anti-war movement, the nature of Australian combat, or the reasons why Australia got involved in the conflict. What has received less attention is myths surrounding national service and the idea of volunteerism. Whereas in popular memory national service is intricately linked to compulsory service in Vietnam, among veterans there is a potent contrasting myth: that all servicemen in Vietnam, including national servicemen, volunteered to deploy there. This article examines the myth of the volunteer national serviceman, focusing in particular on legislation relating to national service, government statements, military records and the memories of Vietnam veterans. A close reading of both the historiography and the primary source documents definitively debunks the myth of the volunteer national serviceman in Vietnam, suggesting that veterans cling to this myth to align their Vietnam War experiences with(in) Australia’s Anzac mythology.