RAHS Latest News
Dame Roma Mitchell (1913-2000)
Written by Elizabeth Heffernan, RAHS Volunteer To celebrate Women’s History Month in 2020, the Royal Australian Historical Society will continue our work from last year to highlight Australian women that have contributed to our history in various and meaningful ways. You can browse the women featured on our webpage, Women’s History Month. As the country’s first female Queen’s Counsel, Supreme Court judge, human rights commissioner, university chancellor and state governor, it is no wonder Dame...
Shirley Coleen Smith (1921-1998)
Written by Elizabeth Heffernan, RAHS Volunteer To celebrate Women’s History Month in 2020, the Royal Australian Historical Society will continue our work from last year to highlight Australian women that have contributed to our history in various and meaningful ways. You can browse the women featured on our webpage, Women’s History Month. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this webpage contains the images and names of people who have passed away. Known as Mum Shirl...
Daphne Mayo (1895-1982)
Written by Elizabeth Heffernan, RAHS Volunteer To celebrate Women’s History Month in 2020, the Royal Australian Historical Society will continue our work from last year to highlight Australian women that have contributed to our history in various and meaningful ways. You can browse the women featured on our webpage, Women’s History Month. In 1927, popular women’s magazine Woman’s World published a profile on an emerging young female sculptor. “She is such a little bit of a thing,” they...
Annie Lock (1876-1943)
Written by Dr Catherine Bishop, Macquarie University To celebrate Women’s History Month in 2020, the Royal Australian Historical Society will continue our work from last year to highlight Australian women that have contributed to our history in various and meaningful ways. You can browse the women featured on our webpage, Women’s History Month. ‘A crank’ and ‘a damn fool’ were two of the epithets applied to missionary Annie Lock in the late 1920s. ‘Missionary heroine’ and ‘Big Boss to the...
Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920-1993)
Written by Elizabeth Heffernan, RAHS Volunteer To celebrate Women’s History Month, the Royal Australian Historical Society will highlight Australian women that have contributed to our history in various and meaningful ways. You can browse the women featured on our new webpage, Women’s History Month. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this webpage contains the images and names of people who have passed away. Activist, educator, environmentalist, and the first...
Outside Off – Aboriginal Tour of England 1868
Written by RAHS Volunteer Maximilian Reid. This blog is part of a monthly series that will chart episodes of cricketing history to demonstrate how the arcs of societal change and cricket intersect. The creation of cricket, a sport for the landed English gentry, has been levelled and is now played and enjoyed by all. It was certainly not intended this way and the arcs by which societal change and cricket intersect is neither simple nor easy. Cricket, despite being traditionally a conservative...
Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park
By RAHS Volunteer Elizabeth Heffernan On 24 November 1934, sixteen years after the signing of the Armistice on 11 November 1918, the Anzac Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park first opened its doors. An estimated one-hundred-thousand spectators attended the ceremony. Eighty-five years later it remains an iconic national monument, commemorating the “ENDURANCE, COURAGE AND SACRIFICE” of Australia’s fallen soldiers in the First World War. [1] For all its timeless splendour, however, the road to the...
A Groundbreaking Bicentenary: St James’ Church, King Street
Written by RAHS Volunteer, Elizabeth Heffernan On the 7th of October 1819, builders under the guidance of convict architect Francis Greenway laid the foundation stone for what was intended to be Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s new courthouse on King Street. A far grander building was planned for George Street as Sydney’s new metropolitan cathedral – It was not to be. Sent all the way to Sydney from London, Commissioner John Bigge questioned the expense of Macquarie’s proposed cathedral, and...
Convict Flash Language
Written by RAHS Volunteer and Copywriter Christina King This blog post is part of a series entitled ‘The Convict Experience: Love, Life and Liberty Beyond the Chains’. Each month we will explore a different – and often rather unusual – type of primary evidence historians can use to hear convict voices telling their own stories. Previous editions on Convict Tattoos and Love Tokens are still available to read online. What was flash language and who used it? Originating in the criminal underworld...
Convict Love Tokens
Written by RAHS Volunteer and Copywriter, Christina King This blog post is part of a series entitled ‘The Convict Experience: Love, Life and Liberty Beyond the Chains’. Each month we will explore a different – and often rather unusual – type of primary evidence historians can use to hear convict voices telling their own stories. Movingly known as ‘leaden hearts’[1] and ‘likened to portable graffiti’[2], convict love tokens have been described as ‘a unique chance to see the convicts as they saw...
Convict Tattoos
Written by RAHS Volunteer and Copywriter, Christina King This blog post is part of a series entitled ‘The Convict Experience: Love, Life and Liberty Beyond the Chains’. Each month we will explore a different – and often rather unusual – type of primary evidence historians can use to hear convict voices telling their own stories. Revisionist history has done a significant job redefining convict history as more than simply an account of troublesome prisoners shipped to a foreign land. Primary...
Sasha Nekvapil (1919-2014)
Written by Elizabeth Heffernan, RAHS Volunteer To celebrate Women’s History Month, the Royal Australian Historical Society will highlight Australian women that have contributed to our history in various and meaningful ways. You can browse the women featured on our new webpage, Women’s History Month. For many Australians, skiing at Thredbo is a winter holiday pastime. What people may not realise is how much these iconic ski-fields owe to Czechoslovakian migrant Alexandra Nekvapilová, known...
RAHS Weekly News Round-Up