School of History

Professor Croft will draw on her engagement with archives and understanding of personal and family history in her story of the long journeys of ‘Handsome’ Joe Croft – the sobriquet shared by her grandfather and father. The place of archives held in the Noel Butlin Archives Centre at ANU from Victoria River Downs, one of Australia’s largest pastoral stations in the early 20th century plays a significant part in this ongoing story.

Professor Brenda L Croft, School of Art and Design, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU.

June 2025 will see the publication of Martin Thomas’s Clever Men: How worlds collided on the scientific expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948, a project catalysed by the exquisite sound recordings of Aboriginal music in the ABC archives. They are among the many cultural treasures accumulated by the largely forgotten exercise in research-cum-soft diplomacy called the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. 

What can the stories of South Asian ayahs – nursemaids and domestic servants – tell us about the significance of race and women’s domestic labour in Australia’s settler colonial history – and why do these stories remain so elusive? In this talk, Victoria Haskins reflects on the obscure lives of South Asian domestic workers who, traversing the transcolonial webs of empire, found themselves working in the Australian colonies.

Domestic violence was arguably at its most visible in colonial society by the end of the nineteenth century. As a result of developments in law and literature, as well as a growing consciousness amongst women about the unacceptability of their experiences, both colonial female writers and wives used print, press, and divorce petitions to place ‘wife-beating’ under the spotlight and challenge its stereotypical associations with working-class, urban, alcoholic men.

Next year marks the 125th anniversary of the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act and formal establishment of the ‘White Australia policy’. At least one major publication is being prepared to mark this anniversary and review diverse aspects of the stringent restrictions placed on the immigration of ‘coloured’ person to a now multicultural Australia.

In the early 1980s a new danger faced the Barmah-Millewa Forest, just upstream of Echuca on the border of Victoria and New South Wales. Bordering an 80-kilometre narrow stretch of the Murray River, this forest of river red gums and moira grass had endured decades of unseasonal water flows on account of demands downstream. 

Between 1960 and 1990, India developed the world’s second largest area of Eucalyptus cover. Today, however, multiple states have banned its planting and state forest departments even uproot mature trees from the roots and replant with native species.

Responding to the impulse to provide an account of the birth of what was (probably) Australia’s last new polity – the ACT Legislative Assembly – has presented multiple challenges. The period under review (1989-2001, the first four Legislative Assemblies) ends just 25 years ago, rendering historically valid assessments of the period tentative.

For the past two decades there have been various theses and antitheses regarding the idea that the disgust reaction evolved to support pathogen avoidance. Pathogen avoidance theory maintains that human self-preservation is dependent on avoiding, sublimating or destroying microbes. At first glance, disgust would appear to be a spontaneous and immediate reaction to a perceived threat. Yet it is also learned over time, and can even be unlearned, in that it is possible to challenge an understanding of what is disgusting.

This paper questions the established narrative concerning the introduction of inoculation to Georgian Britain. Its arrival is typically attributed to the account of Turkish practice by Emanuel Timoni, which first appeared in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions (June 1714), and the advocacy of Mary Wortley Montagu (particularly after her son underwent the operation at Pera in early 1718 and her daughter in London three years later).