Melbourne Historical Journal

From the Editors

Simon Farley — 2023-01-25

Vale: Stuart Macintyre, 1947-2021

Joel Barnes — 2023-01-25

Review of the NGV’s She-Oak and Sunlight

Jack Norris — 2023-01-25

She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism was an exhibition held at the National Gallery of Victoria Australia (hereafter NGV), 2 April – 22 August 2021. The exhibition, guest curated by Dr Anne Gray AM and the NGV Australian Art Department, brought together over 250 artworks. While the exhibition highlights the work of Australia’s most eminent Impressionists, it provides a critical lens to the centring of this work in national mythology, highlighting the work of previously underrepresented painters, including female and First Nations artists.

A Networked Community: Jewish Melbourne in the Nineteenth Century by Sue Silberberg

Simon Farley — 2023-01-25

Some years ago, I paid a visit to the Jewish Museum of Australia, where I was struck by a ‘folk saying’ emblazoned on a wall: ‘Jews are just like everyone else – only more so.’ This is perhaps the defining sentiment of Sue Silberberg’s A Networked Community, a history of Melbourne’s Jewish community in the nineteenth century. Over and again, Silberberg emphasises how Melbourne’s Jews were deeply and seamlessly integrated into the broader settler community; her account suggests that antisemitism was virtually absent from Melbourne before the twentieth century. Yet she also makes it clear that this community took pains to ensure the maintenance of their culture and religion, particularly through strict enforcement of endogamy.

On the Side of History: Stuart Macintyre’s The Party: The Communist Party of Australia from Heyday to Reckoning

James Hogg — 2023-01-25

Stuart Macintyre’s long-awaited The Party is a masterwork of Australian history that traces the Communist Party of Australia’s meteoric rise during the Second World War and its post-war decline. The work is guided by several key questions including: How deep was the Australian Party’s support for the Soviet Union? How did members navigate the disjuncture between Soviet Policy and local realities?

Review of Vandemonians: The Repressed History of Colonial Victoria by Janet McCalman

Catherine Gay — 2023-01-25

In Vandemonians (2021), Janet McCalman brings together the shocking and the quotidian to explore the lives of ex- Van Diemen’s Land convicts who lived in nineteenth-century Victoria. The renowned social historian, best known for Struggletown (1984), shows that Victoria, presumably free of the ‘convict stain’ which haunted other colonies, was actually home to thousands of former Tasmanian prisoners who led rich and varied lives that were often marred by violence and poverty.

Encounters, Agency, and Race in Oceania

Bronwen Douglas — 2023-01-25

Re-reading Greg Dening’s writings provides a sharp reminder of the global significance of Pacific history in the second half of the twentieth century and his centrality in it. In this talk, I discuss three episodes of encounter between European voyagers and Indigenous Oceanians which show the enduring significance to my historical practice of what Greg called ethnohistory or ethnographic history. An ethnohistorical method illuminates the co-formulation of ‘anthropological’ knowledge in the fertile tension between European discourses on human difference or race, travellers’ experience in Oceania, and local agency

Set in Stone?

Catherine Fist — 2023-01-25

The Changing Commemorative Landscape during the Australian Interwar Period

Thea Gardiner — 2023-01-25

In the aftermath of the First World War, the Australian commemorative landscape was dominated by remembrance of the sacrifices made predominantly by men during wartime, celebrating a constructed national identity based on ‘egalitarian’ masculinity through the figure of the ‘citizen soldier’. By the end of the succeeding two decades, during which the terms of Australian nationhood underwent significant changes, the citizen soldier’s domination of Australia’s commemorative culture was challenged by a new historical and cultural subject of memorialisation: the ‘pioneer woman citizen’. Embedded in the language asserting the pioneer woman citizen into the public commemorative landscape was the exclusion of Aboriginal women, who were located outside of the boundaries of citizenship.

Green Bans Forever

James Hogg — 2023-01-25

The green ban movement of 1971-75 prevented an estimated $3 billion worth of development on over forty Sydney building projects. The New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation (BLF) fought alongside local communities to preserve Sydney’s historic buildings, bush and parkland, and the rapidly disappearing working-class housing in inner-Sydney. Although dubbed heroes in retrospect, Jack Mundey (BLF secretary), Bob Pringle (president), and Joe Owens (treasurer) faced consistent and powerful opposition to green bans from the press. Whereas other historians have afforded the press a positive or ambivalent role in the success of green bans, this paper challenges prior historiography with press and archival material that demonstrates the opposition green bans faced in the media. It can be surmised that because the extension of union power into political and social issues was typically conflated with a growth or abuse of that power, politically-conscious bans – whether black, green, or red – were met with mistrust and apprehension.