Bart Ziino

Staff member

Bart Ziino is Senior Lecturer in History at Deakin University, where he commenced as an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellow in 2008, before taking on his current role in 2011.

Bart is a leading scholar of Australia and the First World War.  He has published widely on Australian experiences of 1914-18, including private sentiment surrounding the war, and various modes of remembrance and commemoration over the past century.

His doctoral thesis, the basis of his first book, A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the Great War (UWA Press, 2007), received the Australian Historical Association’s Serle Award for best thesis in Australian history.  He has since published the edited collections The Heritage of War (with Martin Gegner, 2011), Remembering the First World War (2015), and Museums, History and the Intimate Experience of the Great War (with Deborah Tout-Smith and Joy Damousi, 2021).

Bart has extensive experience teaching first-year world history at Deakin, as well as units on Australia and the two World Wars, historiography and honours-level research training.  He has supervised numerous Honours, Masters and Doctoral theses.

When not engaged in the above activities, Bart is in his natural environment scouring flea markets and op shops for the detritus of past lives.  For one of his more curious and intriguing finds, click here.

 

  • Research

    Bart’s research has long focussed on the manifold impacts of war on Australians and Australian society and culture.  His award-winning doctoral thesis (2003) investigated the ways in which bereaved Australians responded to the loss of loved ones at war, and the absence of bodies for burial at home.  His work has helped to illuminate the meanings of multiple and varied commemorative forms in Australia after the Great War, from private commemorations through to the symbolism of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

    Bart Ziino has attracted Australian Research Council funding for his ongoing study of private sentiment and feeling in Australia during the Great War, which has resulted in award-winning publications on children and war, as well as participation on the advisory board of Museums Victoria’s acclaimed First World War Exhibition Love and Sorrow.

    His collaborative work with Professors Joan Beaumont, William Logan and Andrea Witcomb on Australian extraterritorial sites of war heritage also received Australian Research Council funding.

    Bart has recently co-edited special issues of the journals History Australia, on Australia’s long exit from war after 1918 (with Romain Fathi), and Archives and Manuscripts on the theme of ‘Engaging with war records: archival histories and historical practice’ (with Anne-Marie Condé).

  • Publications

    Books

    Select journal articles and book chapters

    • With Anne-Marie Condé, ‘Engaging with war records: archival histories and historical practice’, Archives and Manuscripts 48:2 (2020): 97-108.
    • ‘Always thinking in the other part of the globe’: Australians and the meanings of wartime correspondence’, in Romain Fathi and Emily Robertson (eds), Proximity and distance: space, time and World War I (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2020), 149-164.
    • With Romain Fathi, ‘Coming home: Australians’ sorties de guerre after the First World War’, History Australia 16:1 (2019): 5-19.
    • ‘The 1918 armistice and the civilian experience of war’, in Carolyn Holbrook and Keir Reeves (eds), The Great War: Aftermath and commemoration (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2019), 32-44.
    • ‘“They seem to understand all about the War”: Australian children and the First World War’, Journal of the history of childhood and youth 11:2 (June 2018):227-247.
    • ‘Eligible men: men, families and masculine duty in Great War Australia’, History Australia 14:2 (2017): 202-217.
    • ‘The First World War in Australian History’, Australian Historical Studies 47:1 (2016), 118-34.
    • ‘“A Lasting Gift to His Descendants”: Family Memory and the Great War in Australia’, History & Memory, Vol. 22, No. 2, Oct 2010, 125–146.
  • Teaching

    Bart Ziino’s main teaching areas include the unit Australia and the Two World Wars, focussing on Australian experiences and the legacies of the two major conflicts of the twentieth century.  He also teaches History: Interpreting the Past, which takes students more deeply into changing ideas about and methods of studying the past.  He joins Associate-Professor Tony Joel in teaching ‘A History of Australian Football’ (go Tigers!).

    At honours level Bart has long been involved in teaching units on research training and historiography, while he previously spent a decade loving introducing students at first-year level to the shaping of the extraordinary twentieth century.

    Bart has also long been a supporter of the History Council of Victoria’s History Roadshow, aimed at Year 12 students completing VCE history, as well as presenting at the History Teachers’ Association of Victoria conference and professional development events.

  • Supervision

    Bart has supervised numerous honours, masters and doctoral theses in the fields of war and commemoration, military history, book history, family history, and more recently local history.

    Current supervision:

    Lisa Cooper, Australian war graves in the south-west Pacific area (Primary supervisor)

    Fiona Gatt, The historical experience of urbanisation in North Melbourne, 1852–1905 (Primary supervisor)

    Rachael Cottle, Women of the Victorian Railways (Associate supervisor)

    John Rose, Cartophily, Consumerism & Celebrity: An exploration of the nexus between trading and cigarette cards as a marketing strategy and the developing celebrity status of Australian Rules footballers (Associate Supervisor)

    Lee Sulkowska,  ‘Prevent this demoniacal horde’: Cemeteries, scandal and their influence on death attitudes in colonial Victoria (Associate supervisor)

    Previous supervision

    PhD

    Piper Rodd, Recalling Resistance: remembering the First World War in Canada and Australia (2015)

    Honours

    Stephanie Schwarz, A place for every woman and every woman in her place’: Women, War and Public Debate (2020)

    Aaron Taylor, Catalinas over New Britain: Flying Boat Operations against the Japanese at Rabaul (2019)

    Fiona Gatt, Family History and the Long View of People in the Great War (2018)

    Lucy Hughes, ‘Public Responses to POW Memoirs: Past and Present’ (2018)

    Barry Teal, Australian Sea Lift Capacity: Rise, Transition, Demise (2017)

    Lisa Cooper, Remembering Lark Force (2017)

    Alannah Croom, ‘They bustle along as if business were the joy of life, as well as its necessity’: The emergence and consolidation of the Business Girl in Melbourne’s commercial workforce, 1880-1930 (2016)

    Hannah Muirhead, The Shadow Battalion: The Red Cross on the Victorian Homefront 1939-1945 (2016)

    Rebecca Filling, Prisoners of the Japanese in Film: 1944 – 2015 (2015)

    Elizabeth Grayland, Vesta and the (Good) Middle Class Woman in the first World War (2014)

    Xavier Fowler, ‘Biting an Apple on a String’: A History of the Commemoration of the Australians of Bomber Command (2013).

    Jennifer Leon, Sad memories and glory: An exploration of the debate over Anzac Day 1916-1930 (2013)

    Jeremy Jabour, ‘Chapters inside my whole life’: Australia’s WWII Veteran Publishing Boom, 1980-2012 (2012)

    Eric Endacott, Inventing to Win the War: Amateur Inventors and the Australian Home Front, 1914-1918 (2012)

    Adam Platenkamp, Victorian Society and Gallipoli: From Landing to Anzac Day (2010)

    Kelly Jones, 1917 ‐ A Year Divided: Women’s moral debate and the First World War (2010)

    Leah Riches, Remembering Fromelles: A Century of Private Grief and Public Politics (2010)

  • Awards, Fellowships and Honours

    2019

    In 2019, Bart’s article “‘They Seem to Understand all about the War’: Australian children and the First World War,” was judged the best article appearing in the Journal of The History of Childhood and Youth during 2018.  See the judges’ comments at the following link:

    https://www.shcy.org/news-announcements/ziino-wins-best-article-award-for-jhcy-vol-11-2018/

    2008

    Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, School of History, Heritage and Society, Deakin University.  Project: The culture of war: private life and sentiment in Australia 1914-18.

    2005

    In 2005, Bart received the Australian Historical Association’s Serle Award, for the best postgraduate thesis in Australian history in the previous two years.  Judges commended his work as a ‘sensitive and lucid thesis [that] enriches our understanding of the ways in which Australians responded to one of the great national and personal traumas of the twentieth century.’

    https://www.theaha.org.au/awards-and-prizes/serle-award/serle-award-previous-winners/

    2001

    Bicentennial Scholarship for doctoral research in the UK from the Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, University of London.

     

  • Media and public events

    Bart regularly presents his research in public forums, including articles in The Conversation, and a number of public presentations at museums, libraries and commemorative events.  In 2014 he was invited to give the Royal Historical Society of Victoria’s Augustus Wolskel lecture, on the theme ‘At Home with the War: The Great War in Victorian Private Life’.  In 2019 he was a key historical contributor to the short filmThe Missing’. 

    A selection of recorded presentations are available below:

    Duty and service in the Great War’, ‘Big Ideas’, ABC Radio National, 11 November 2014.

    War and Peace on the Home Front’, National Museum of Australia Life on the Home Front Symposium, 7 August 2015.

    Armistice in Australia, 1918’, Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne, 8 December 2018.

    Remembering the Absent Dead’, State Library of Queensland Long Tail of War Symposium, 7 November 2018.

    Listen to Bart discuss the fate of the only horse to return to Australia after the First World War on ABC Victoria, 23 November 2020.

     

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