Table of contents for Vol. 56 no. 3 2021 in Agora

Could Australia have been colonised by the French? Why are there more than four hundred locations with French names on the Australian coast?1 Why were the French so interested in exploring Australia? Did conquest, conversion or curiosity motivate the French government to fund expensive voyages of discovery to our Antipodean shores? Why were the English ultimately successful in colonisation? These questions are important but sparsely addressed in most narratives of Australia’s history. In summary, the French were keenly interested in Australia and actively involved in the European exploration of Australia. It was the emphasis on science, French political instability, the deaths of key French commanders and the effectiveness of British colonisation that prevented the French from acting on their territorial claims in New Holland—the name the Europeans had given to…

We men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them [the Martians] at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. […] And before we judge of them too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit? H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds1 When H. G. Wells wrote his commentary on British…

Victorian secondary school students studying ‘The Making of Empires 1400–1775’ or the histories of Asian societies from 1750 to 1918 are essentially taking their first look at one of the big questions that continues to cause arguments among historians: how did the English and Dutch East India companies transform from a series of coastal ‘factories’ in the seventeenth century to the vast, lucrative and prestigious Crown colonies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as British India and the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia)? We cannot answer that question without knowing how enclaves of company men––isolated in their walled citadels and garrisons, and cut off from local populations by language barriers and cultural differences––formed connections with local traders, rulers and militias, and acquired the power and status to expand and…

The history wars are flaring up again, with Alan Tudge, the federal Minister for Education and Youth, attacking the draft update of the Australian Curriculum for History for not presenting a sufficiently positive and optimistic view of Australia’s national story.1 Tudge’s intervention has received pushback from History teachers and educationalists, with Lucas Walsh writing in The Conversation that history ‘is often a messy contestation and confluence of violence and discovery’.2 The debates over the curriculum are a reminder that teaching controversial topics is an inherent part of the History teacher’s job. Colonial histories, with their impacts upon Indigenous peoples, presents the teacher with the problem of unpacking difficult histories in ways that are meaningful, sensitive to the contested nature of these histories and educationally rigorous. This article seeks to set…

‘Colonisation’ means ‘to plant or establish a colony’, but this does not convey the disruption that occurs when the places being settled are already the lands of others. In Australia’s case, colonisation ruptured and in thousands of instances ended the lives of First Nations peoples. The fallout from these changes is still being played out to this day. Colonisation also transformed the surface and ecologies of the Australian continent, although ecological disruption was not evenly paced—it was more accurately a series of disruptions across time and space, like the ripples from a rock thrown into a billabong. Unlike the billabong’s surface, which eventually returns to stasis, massive changes followed. Human agency did not act alone in such transformations. Environmental historian Alfred Crosby wrote: The demographic triumph of Europeans in the…

The process of colonisation of the Delta by settlers from the south was more complex than previously assumed.1 It may seem strange to talk about Egypt in terms of colonisation, but that is what basically happened in Egypt between 3300 BCE and 3000 BCE. In early Egyptian history, Upper Egypt (in the south) and Lower Egypt (in the north) were completely separate territories with different ways of life. Even after unification, ancient Egyptians continued to see them as the ‘Two Lands’, with Lower Egypt being the delta area and Upper Egypt the Nile Valley. Over 300 years, Upper Egypt gradually took over Lower Egypt partly through trade contacts, partly through migration, partly through working together in places like Memphis, and partly through the actions of southern kings who were determined…

Victorian History students at Levels 5–6 study the development of Australia as a nation. From the founding of British colonies in the 1800s to Federation in 1901, they explore significant historical events and the impact these had on the people and places involved. This contentious period of our history can be unpacked through the National Gallery of Victoria’s (NGV) rich collection of primary and secondary historical sources, which comprises art and artefacts from this time. If you’re not sure where to start, or haven’t taught elements of the Victorian History Curriculum through art before, NGV Learn provides a comprehensive range of resources and programs to help, including: • a learning resource with direct links to the History curriculum1 • an adapted resource for students learning English as an Additional Language…

After nearly two centuries of European occupation, Melbourne’s Yarra River is a highly colonised river. Even its name ranks among the many facets of European colonisation of the river. Although ‘Yarra’ has its origins in the languages of Melbourne’s First Nations peoples, it is not the actual name of the river. The river’s actual name, in the local Kulin languages, is Birrarung. Throughout this article I will use both ‘Yarra’ and ‘Birrarung’ interchangeably when referring to the river. This article will discuss the history of the Yarra River’s naming, and will explore the First Nations’ histories of the river. It will also examine how European naming in the Australian context is an act of colonialism. September 1835 In September 1835, John Helder Wedge, the surveyor for the Port Phillip Association…

On May 23, 1701, Captain William Kidd lay gasping in the mud underneath the gallows at Execution Dock in London. Pirates were hung using shortened ropes to make their passing as difficult as possible, but Kidd’s rope had snapped. The assembled crowd, sensing that God was making his own judgement, called for clemency—reprieves had been granted for less in the past. The executioner prepared a new rope and Kidd was one again led up the gallows stair. This time the rope held, and as Kidd's life was choked from him, several English peers breathed more easily in the knowledge that their own contribution to his misadventure would remain obscure. The case of Captain Kidd reveals the thin boundary between privateering and piracy, and marks a sea-change in the governance of…

A reorientation of the British Empire took place in the revolutionary and war-torn decades between the 1780s and the 1830s. For more than two hundred years, Britain had profited from plantations in its Caribbean and North American colonies and from the trade in enslaved Africans that kept those plantations supplied with labour. However, in the nineteenth century, Britain turned from the troubled slave economies of the Atlantic world to focus more on the riches of India, the nascent settler colonial societies of Australasia, and expansion through Africa. Long-standing debates continue about what this ‘swing to the east’ entailed, both for Britain and its empire.1 Despite their concern with this period of transition in Britain’s imperial history, historians have nevertheless treated the Atlantic world, India and Britain’s colonies of settlement as…

Understanding the concept of ‘health care’ in the colonial period can be a fraught exercise because what we know as health care in the twenty-first century bears little resemblance to what was available in the colonial period. In nineteenth century Victoria, health services were developed haphazardly. Most hospitals were charitable institutions founded by philanthropists to assist the destitute only, and were bolstered by government-provided financial grants.1 Melbourne’s first maternity institution, for example, was established in 1856 as the Melbourne Lying-in Hospital and Infirmary for Diseases Peculiar to Women and Children. It had seventeen beds. Later called The Women’s Hospital, by the 1890s the institution still had limited services, catering for just 1.5 per cent of all the births registered in Victoria.2 The rest of the childbearing population had their babies…

Melbourne is famous for its Hoddle Grid (Fig. 1). This orthogonal network of streets demarcates the Central Business District and directs the flow of traffic in orderly lines. Laid out in 1837, this system is often celebrated as the most logical method of designing a town. But this is only part of the story. Hoddle’s urban layout is eminently practical if you find a Cartesian grid both desirable and convenient. However, this triumph of post-Enlightenment rationality is only logical if you belong to a knowledge culture that responds positively to right angles and regularity. This is not true of every culture globally, let alone in Melbourne. From a colonial perspective, Hoddle’s grid claims superiority over the people of the Kulin Nations and the natural landscape it denies. The ancient world…

I am so grateful to teach a Year 9 elective entitled ‘Yankees, Indians and Rebels’ that covers early colonial history in the United States through to the American Revolution. The course looks at the movement of people and the spread of ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which works well with both the Australian and Victorian curricula. Why Thanksgiving? Thanksgiving stirs up all kinds of memories. Growing up in Massachusetts, Thanksgiving was the holiday I loved most. I called it ‘Christmas without the presents but also without the stress’. We made the pilgrimage across the state to my grandparents’ house, which was nestled next to Lexington and Concord—well-known to all who study or teach the American Revolution. This love for the holiday only grew with my passion for History…