Achievements.
Associate Professor Tiffany Shellam has won the Margaret Medcalf award for her article: ‘The collective Nyungar heritage of an orphan letter’, published in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, (2019, vol.20). This award recognizes ‘excellence in referencing and research in the use of State Archives held by the State Records Office of Western Australia.
Dr. Filip Slaveski, with colleagues from Deakin University, Indiana University, and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, has been awarded $245,532 for their ARC project, ‘The Last Soviet Famine, 1946/47: Drought and food crises in war’s aftermath.’ This project aims to increase our understanding of the relationship between drought and famine by analysing the most recent, though least understood famine in Soviet and Modern European History.
Publications.
Professor David Lowe’s article, ‘New Zealand and the Colombo Plan in the long 1950s’ has been published in History Australia. You can read it in full here.
Dr. Carolyn Holbrook‘s article, ‘Screening Anzac: Anzac-themed Television in Australia and New Zealand during the First World War Centenary’, has been published in Journal of Australian Studies. You can read it in full here.
Book Reviews.
Emeritus Professor Peter Edwards’ book, Law, politics and intelligence: a life of Robert Hope, has been reviewed by John Blaxland for Intelligence and National Security and by Mark Thomas for The Canberra Times.
Interview.
Professor Matthew Ricketson has interviewed Lesley Blume, author of Fallout: The Hiroshima cover-up and the reporter who revealed it to the world. Blume’s book not only reveals much normally hidden from view about the making of journalism but tells us a lot about the extent to which the United States government and General Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project’s head, manipulated the press, and sought to control what people learnt about the bomb’s effects.
Australian Policy and History.
Conference.
On 25 November, the Australian Policy History Network and National Security College, ANU co-hosted a one-day conference on ‘Concepts of National Security: Australian and international perspectives’. The program was shaped largely by David Lowe and Carolyn Holbrook, and featured papers from Eckart Conze (Phillips Marburg, Germany), Sylvester Johnson (Virginia Tech, US), David Ekbladh (Tufts, US), and Peter Edwards, Ian Kemish , Carolyn Holbrook, all CHRG members, and Deakin colleagues, Ian Warren and Peter Ferguson. Sue Thompson and Rory Medcalf from the National Security College were also speakers, and long-standing supporters of the Australian Policy and History network, Nicholas Brown and Frank Bongiorno (both ANU) were panellists, along with David Lowe, Joan Beaumont, Matthew Ricketson and Mia Martin Hobbs, from CHRG.
The conference provided a strong launch pad for the new research project ‘A conceptual history of Australian national security’ led by David Lowe and Carolyn Holbrook, with Eckart Conze. This has just been awarded $233,300 for 2021-23 as an ARC Discovery Project.
Publications.
Academics have been busy in the last few years calling out ham-fisted analogies between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler, and the contemporary United States and 1930s Germany. It’s easy to laugh at clumsy historical references, but harder to make informed judgements about the validity or otherwise of these references. In APH’s latest article, Dr Mathew Turner applies his expert knowledge of Weimar Germany to assess how viable these comparisons are.
Kama Maclean’s new book, British India: White Australia, examines the history of the relationship between the two nations. In this interview with Dr Joanna Cruickshank, Kama explains how the treatment of Indian students in Australia during the COVID pandemic bears some resemblance to the difficult experiences of earlier generations of Indians living in Australia under the White Australia Policy.
Australians’ involvement in overseas conflicts has been in the news again recently, with the release of the Brereton report into alleged soldier atrocities in Afghanistan. Dr Effie Karageorgos reviews Peter Yule’s new book about the effect of war service on Vietnam veterans and their families. Yule shows how issues such as Agent Orange and PTSD have echoed through lives and generations. And in a conclusion that reverberates today, Yule writes: ‘‘if we cannot afford to be generous to servicemen and women who returned damaged by war, then it is utterly wrong to send then to fight in civil wars in distant lands when there is no direct threat to Australia’.