Welcome back!

We are delighted to start the new academic year as the Centre for Contemporary Histories. Over the next few months we will be reshaping some of the visual elements of the Centre, and some of the functions and activities of the Centre. We kick off the year with a small change to the newsletter – which will now be published fortnightly on Mondays. Please get your news, publications, celebrations, calls for papers, fellowships, grant opportunities and anything else you’d like to share with the CCH community to Anna.

Congratulations!

Congratulations to Dr Jacquelyn Baker who graduated earlier this year. Jacqui’s thesis is titled ‘Tracing the “Somewhere” of Women’s Liberation in Melbourne: An Oral History, 1960s-Present’.

Publications

Joan Beaumont was commissioned to mark the 40th anniversary of the War & Society journal. Joan had an article on POWs Rank and Privilege published in the very first issue of the journal in 1983. Her recent article is titled Australian military historiography, and is a survey of Australian military historiography across the past century.

PhD candidate Scott McCarthy had an article published in Historical Studies late last year – Popery, Politics, and Prejudice: Anti-Catholic Sentiment during Australia’s Great War Conscription Debates.

David Lowe and Kate Darian-Smith (UTas) have just published their new edited collection – The Australian Embassy in Tokyo and Australia–Japan Relations.

Jacqui Baker has a new post on the Vida blog for the Australian Women’s History Network, Self-Education and Intelligent Conversation: The Geelong Ladies Reading Circle, 1890-1929. Jacqui also filled in on Triple R’s The Grapevine last year. Jacqui interviewed Josh Black about his article that appeared in the Conversation’s end of year anthology (timestamp: 30min 30sec) as well as Lorinda Cramer about her Conversation article ‘Wool swimsuits used to be standard beachwear, is it time to bring them back?’ (timestamp: 2hour 11min).

Seminar Series

We kick off the 2023 Seminar Series this week with a seminar from Geoff Boucher – Becoming Unhinged: Political Anxiety and Racist Fantasy. All the venue and zoom details are here.

Next week Claire Lowrie will join us from UoW for her seminar – Moving Images: Analysing Photographs of Chinese Amahs. All the venue and zoom details are here.

Call for Papers

PHA Conference – Deakin Warrnambool – 31 Oct to 4 Nov 2023
Tracking the Kooyang: Truth Telling in the History of Oceania
For tens of thousands of years, First Nations peoples in southern Australia have harvested short finned eels – kooyang, in the language of the Gunditjmara people – with sophisticated systems of canals, dams, ponds and traps that enabled a sustainable yield, year after year, decade after decade, and century after century. Kooyang links the Gunditjmara to ceremonial and political networks that spread across the continent. Beginning their lives in the warm waters of the Coral Sea near New Caledonia, the eels are also embedded in the Pacific. Their migration from their birthplace to the rivers and lakes of southern Australia – and back again – is a staggering feat, an annual miracle that connects the First Nations peoples of Australia directly with the Pacific.
The migration provides a powerful metaphor of deep historical connection, of travel, of connection and of sharing of knowledge, that forms the foundation for the 25th biennial conference of the Pacific History Association that will take place on Gunditjmara country, at Deakin University’s Warrnambool campus from 31 October to 4 November 2023. PHA conferences are about place as well as past, and by holding the 2023 conference on the southern edge of the Australian continent we are reminded of the many ways that First Nations people in Australia and the Pacific are linked. We are inspired by the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, which calls for a process to be established for Telling the Truth about Australia’s History, about colonialism and the treatment of Indigenous peoples. Responding to the Uluru Statement, we invite contributions from researchers and practitioners of the History we share across the Pacific. The conference will bring together First Nations people, descendants of settler colonialism, and all members of our wide Pacific History community at Warrnambool, where we can join in speaking the truth about our histories.
Contributions can address the conference’s overall theme of Truth Telling and reaching across the Ocean, or make contributions that address specific aspects of the themes, including (but not confined to the following):
– Precolonial contacts and communication between First Nations peoples in Australia and the Pacific
– Memory and History
– Shared experiences of first colonial encounters
– Mission history
– Alternate ways of history making and telling
– Frontier Histories
– Wars – both within and external to our region
– Environment – adaptation and exploitation
– Decolonisation in all its forms
– Self-determination
– Art, Literature, Film, Photography, Music and Creativity.
We invite contributions in the form of panel proposals, individual paper abstracts, and brief
submissions on artistic or performance-based inputs. Panel proposals, abstracts, and other submissions
should be provided to the conference organisers by 31 March, 2023.

Cover Photo

Students in the Women’s Dorm, Howard University. Source – The U.S. National Archives