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Revision is a cornerstone of historical scholarship, the welcome consequence of open discussion typically supported by rigorously tested new evidence. This case study examines one such instance concerning the Australian War Memorial’s Wirraway aircraft, which famously shot down a Japanese Zero fighter aircraft in late 1942, the only one ever to do so. It presents a detailed analysis of the evidence for both the revision and status quo cases, finding overwhelmingly in favour of the latter.
As Foreign Editor of Sydney’s Evening News from 1922 until 1931, Andrew Melville Pooley was instrumental in transforming the popular reporting of foreign news in Australia, while also lecturing to a wide variety of audiences, including the NSW chapter of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, of which he was a founding member. Drawing upon his extensive and continuing international travels, he continued to provide incisive contributions to debate on world affairs in publications and commentary in the 1930s. However, he first gained international notoriety as a correspondent in Japan, where his exposure of corrupt collusion between international arms manufacturers and the Navy led to the fall of the government in Tokyo.
Father Captain Thomas Joseph O’Donnell, an Irish Australian, led by Christian example. He was assertive, positive in his religion, pragmatic, and patriotic to the people of Australia. O’Donnell lectured to support the government’s call for enlistments and the conscription referendums. The newly appointed Archbishop of Melbourne, Dr Daniel Mannix, refused to grant him permission to join the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) as a chaplain until a frustrated O’Donnell defiantly joined up as a private soldier. Within the military, he preached and practised his faith with a dedication to humanity.
While visiting his relations and friends in Ireland post-war, his Irish accent and AIF uniform saw him arrested for using disloyal words about the Sovereign. It marked him as a person of interest to British military intelligence, who saw things in the context of suppressing the Irish Republican movement. A court-martial followed. The Irish Republican Army later murdered O’Donnell’s British accuser, Lieutenant Stewart Chambers. Australia was drawn into this sensational event at the highest level. There were tensions between the AIF and the War Office, the British and the Irish independence movement, and sectarianism. Captain O’Donnell’s voice and agency are captured in this paper.
In late 1981, in response to escalating Cold War tensions and the buildup of arms that accompanied it, Western Australian peace activists formed the People for Nuclear Disarmament (PND (WA)). PND (WA) was part of the broader Australian disarmament movement and brought together a wide range of disarmament groups while maintaining a commitment to grassroots organising. In 1984, WA disarmament activist and Nuclear Disarmament Party (NDP) senate candidate, Jo Vallentine, was elected. Shortly after its electoral victory, the NDP split, with Vallentine leaving the party to sit as an independent. In the aftermath of the NDP split, the WA disarmament movement rallied around Senator Vallentine, providing the groundwork for the emergence of the WA Greens.
We argue that a picture titled ‘Civilisation’ by Yakaduna, better known as Tommy McRae, is a key piece of visual evidence that helps viewers glimpse something of the challenges faced by First Nations people and by colonists in negotiating coexistence. We explore some of the interpretive possibilities of the picture, drawing on surveys of the artist’s life and times and giving attention to representations of the Lake Moodemere encampment/reserve where McRae lived. We summarise scholarly appraisals made of his work and trace newspaper reports of his achievements. We draw on recent work by scholars to suggest the importance of visual storytelling and of McRae’s work to Wiradjuri people and to residents in the border district region. We argue the picture points to stories of resilience, survival, cultural resistance and present-day cultural resurgence. It triggers investigations of the reasons for the Lake Moodemere encampment/reserve and what the place means for First Nations people.
Santilla Chingaipe, Black convicts: How slavery shaped Australia, Scribner, Sydney, NSW, 2024, xxiii + 308 pages; ISBN 9781761107238.
Kristen Alexander, Kriegies: The Australian airmen of Stalag Luft III, Ad Astra Press, Mawson, ACT, 2023, xvii + 220 pages; ISBN 9780645792515.
Peter Crowley, Townsend of the Ranges, National Library of Australia, Canberra, ACT, 2024, 352 pages; ISBN 9781922507693.
Peter Woodley, ‘We are a farming class’: Dubbo’s hinterland, 1870–1950, Australian National University Press, Canberra, ACT, 2025, xix + 346 pages; ISBN 9781760466756.
Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex, Outrageous Fortunes: The adventures of Mary Fortune, crime writer, and her criminal son, La Trobe University Press, Collingwood, Vic, 2025, 341 pages; ISBN 9781760645052.
Jacqueline Kent, Inconvenient Women: Australian radical writers 1900–1970, NewSouth Publishing, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, NSW, ix + 303 pages; ISBN 9781742237503.
Trish FitzSimons and Madelyn Shaw, Fleeced: Unraveling the history of wool and war, Rowman & Littlefield, New York, 2025, xiv + 246 pages; ISBN 9798881803803.
Stephen Gapps, Uprising: War in the colony of New South Wales, 1838–1844, NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, NSW, 2025, vi + 320 pages; ISBN 9781742238029.
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The spearing of Governor Phillip on a Sydney Harbour beach in 1790 is a significant incident in Australian history. Was it a spur-of-the-moment act, a premeditated ‘payback’, or is there another explanation? Though the incident is factually well known, why it happened has ample scope for further consideration. This paper questions the ritualistic explanations of Governor Phillip’s spearing characteristic of most historical interpretations of the incident since 2001. It concludes that Phillip’s assailant acted defensively of his own volition in the heat of the moment.
This article traces the life and career of an identity of early Wagga Wagga, John Clark (1824–76). Held in high esteem throughout the town and district, Clark was a publican, alderman and entrepreneur. Yet, unbeknownst to everyone, including his own family, he was also a fugitive from justice.
The Australian Government established the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS) in 1961 and made it permanent through an Act of Parliament in 1964. It was to record and collect the remaining cultural knowledge of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living a traditional lifestyle in all its aspects: ‘before it was too late’. AIAS had a veneer of academic independence, and so long as it dealt with bona fide researchers and their research projects, their political orientation was not considered. Nevertheless, when confronted with funding a research application by Frederick G. G. Rose, it was the applicant rather than the research project that was problematic. This paper examines Rose’s dealings with the AIAS, the difficulties it faced in supporting academic and political freedom, and pressure from government to deny Rose funding.
In 1788 the King of Spain, Carlos III, authorised an enlightenment voyage by two Captains of the Spanish Royal Navy, Alejandro Malaspina and José de Bustamante y Guerra. This political-scientific expedition took four years. This paper explores the Malaspina-Bustamante expedition, the first official foreign delegation to visit Port Jackson following the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788.
With anticipation of war against Britain, in mid-1796 Bustamante wrote a plan for the defence of Spanish America and Spain’s interests in the Pacific. One part of his plan was the destruction of the Sydney colony with gunboats from Peru, Chile and Montevideo. The inhabitants of Sydney and Norfolk Island would become prisoners of war and be transported to South America. It was hoped that some of these colonial prisoners might populate the Spanish Americas. Bustamante was tasked by senior Spanish ministers to develop his plan.
In parallel with Bustamante’s work was the rapidly expanding British southern whale fishery that had commenced its operations in the Pacific Ocean from 1789. While first a peaceful activity, once war between Britain and Spain commenced then these whalers were also privateers – operating against Spanish colonial ports and shipping.
For Spain the elimination of the colony at Sydney was important for the preservation of Spanish control in the Pacific and the suppression of whaling privateers. This essay describes the Bustamante plan and its aftermath as British interests in the Pacific Ocean transformed what had been a silent backwater before 1788. Additional information on Spanish language sources for a view of Australian history is also explored. This paper should add to the understanding of one European power’s strategic response to the new British colony in the southwest Pacific.
Lucy Frost, Convict orphans: The heartbreaking stories of the colony’s forgotten children, and those who succeeded against all odds, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, NSW, 2023, 296 pages; ISBN 9781761067686.
Lucas Jordan, The Chipilly Six: Unsung heroes of the Great War, NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, NSW, 2023, xi + 307 pages; ISBN 9781742238098.
Hannah Forsyth, Virtue Capitalists: The rise and fall of the professional class in the Anglophone world, 1870–2008, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2023, xii + 299 pages; ISBN 9781009206488.
David Dufty, Charles Todd’s Magnificent Obsession: The epic race to connect Australia to the world, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2024, vii + 354 pages; ISBN 9781761471353.
John Kennedy McLaughlin, The Immigration of Irish Lawyers to Australia in the Nineteenth Century: Causes and Consequences, Alexandria, NSW, The Federation Press, 2024, xxv + 292 pages; ISBN: 9781760024536.
Anne Coote, Knowledge for a Nation: Origins of The Royal Society of New South Wales, Royal Society of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, 2024, xiii + 304 pages; ISBN 9780645859409.
Robert Cox, Breakout! The Tasmanians who terrorised Victoria, Wakefield Press, Mile End, SA, 2024, xv + 278 pages; ISBN 9781923042728.
Bob Crawshaw, Battle of the Banks: How ad men, barristers and bankers ended Ben Chifley’s boldest plan, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, Vic, 2023, xi + 223 pages; ISBN 9781923267275.
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In March 1878, two riots occurred in Hyde Park in protest against the anti-Catholic preaching of Pastor Daniel Allen, a Baptist minister who on Sundays held open-air services in the park. In the wake of the riots, mounting public opinion led the government to ban public meetings there. As a result, soap-box orators and open-air preachers relocated to the Domain, where they have continued to operate ever since. This article examines the Hyde Park riots in the context of the need to balance the right of free speech and the right of people not to be subjected to ‘hate speech’.
In August 1914, Australia stood half a world away from the rumblings of war in Europe. In an era before the internet, satellites, television and where telephone and radio were short-range communication devices, how did Australians discover that their nation was at war? This article examines the role that the telegraph played in disseminating the news that the conflict in Europe had started. It will also study the limitations of telegraph technology and the difficulties, such as censorship, print deadlines, ministerial errors and British Foreign Office mistakes that contributed to the delay of the Australian public getting the full and correct story.
Australian military law was comparatively sophisticated but a complicated dictum boiler-plated during Federation from the British laws. It had evolved throughout the modern history of war with an emphasis on discipline to ensure adherence to orders necessary to accomplish the Army’s given task. The physical environment in World War I and the stresses of the work caused many soldiers to break the rules. It was essential to have a system of laws enabling the offenders to be punished and set an example to others that orders were to be obeyed.
Martial law was declared seven times in pre-Federation Australia, playing a part in some significant historical events. Yet very little has been written on the topic, and no comparative study has so far been made. This paper gathers, for the first time, brief accounts of all of the martial law events in the early colonies into one document and draws some initial comparisons. It will be seen that martial law was an adaptable doctrine. In the years between 1790 and 1853, it was used to fend off starvation, quash two rebellions, overthrow a government, and wage two wars against First Nations peoples.
This Interpreting an Image analyses the earliest image of the first Christ Church at Newcastle in 1817. I argue that the Governor, Commandant, Commissioner, Minister for the Colonies, surveyors and a convict forger colluded in circulating exaggerated images of Christ Church’s superstructure to attract investment and immigrants to the newly free settlement of Newcastle. The Macquarie and Dixson Collector’s Chests misrepresented the church’s grandeur. The tower, steeple and spire of the church were largely dismantled due to structural failures.
Anne Sarzin, The Angel of Kings Cross: The life and times of Dr Fanny Reading, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, Vic, 2023, viii + 357 pages; ISBN 9781922952509.
Hugh Tranter, Southern Signals: Stories of innovation, challenge and triumph in Australia’s communication history, National Library of Australia Publishing, Canberra, ACT, 2023, vii + 280 pages; ISBN 9781922507563.
Rose Ellis, Bee Miles, Australia’s famous bohemian rebel, and the untold story behind the legend, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 284 pages; ISBN 9781761069130.
John Cary, Frontier Magistrate: The enigmatic Foster Fyans, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, Vic, 2023, ix + 283 pages; ISBN 9781922952639.
Toby Raeburn, The Remarkable Mr and Mrs Johnson: Founders of modern Australia’s first church, schools and charity, and friends of Aboriginal people, 1788–1800, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, Vic, 2023, xv + 311 pages; ISBN 9781922952790.
Cassandra Pybus, A Very Secret Trade: The dark story of gentlemen collectors in Tasmania, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2024, xviii + 318 pages; ISBN 9781761066344.
Anna Johnston, The Antipodean Laboratory: Making colonial knowledge, 1770–1870, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2023, xii + 313 pages; ISBN 9781009186902.
Bronwyn Hughes, Lights Everlasting: Australia’s Commemorative Stained Glass from the Boer War to Vietnam, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2023, viii + 235 pages; 197 illustrations; ISBN 9781922669827.
