Table of contents for Vol. 58 no. 3 2023 in Agora

In the 1940s and 1950s, Holocaust memory was key to a popular Australian Jewish antifascist discourse that was left-wing, non-nationalist and universalistic. For these Jewish antifascists, memorialising the Holocaust meant fighting fascism and racism. These were identified as ongoing international threats that could only be defeated through solidarity with progressive forces and other oppressed people. The main organisation of the Jewish antifascist left in Australia was the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism. Formed in Melbourne in 1942, the Jewish Council represented ‘in institutional form the broad-based antifascist leftism enjoying considerable vogue both within the Jewish community and in society at large’.1 The Jewish Council monitored and responded to incidents of antisemitism, and actively linked the threats of antisemitism and fascism. Its strategy was to fight these threats by…

Often referred to as the ‘birthplace of Australian democracy’, the Eureka Rebellion remains a pivotal, and contested, event in history. Is it the moment people gathered under a new flag to demand a democratic ‘fair go’, or when greedy foreigners tried to avoid a tax, demanding the right to dig up gold without paying for it?1 Its significance was noted early on with Mark Twain remarking it as ‘the finest thing in Australian history’, ‘a revolution small in size but great politically’.2 It has also been played down by others, including Manning Clark, as more about aspiring capitalists than radicals or revolutionaries.3 For a country that has not had many moments of revolution, Eureka takes on a certain symbolism fuelled by the bloodshed of the stockade battle and the popular…

In the twenty-first century, abortion is a routine health care procedure in much of the Western world. In the United States and Australia, approximately one in four women will have an abortion over the course of their reproductive life.1 Many now think of abortion as a matter of individual choice or women’s rights. However, legal arguments for abortion have not always rested on these ideas. Rights discourses and their links to ideas of choice and freedom have evolved dramatically in the decades since abortion became lawful in both countries. Abortion in the United States In the last decades of the nineteenth century, American states passed laws banning abortion unless the procedure was performed to save the life of the mother (categorising it as a ‘therapeutic’ abortion). Simultaneously, states passed laws…

Levels 9–10 of the Victorian Curriculum—History asks teachers to help students explore ‘the reasons why Australians enlisted to go to war’.1 The lead-up to the centenary of World War I brought an abundance of resources on the minutiae of The Great War, including fascinating details about who was courted and who was rejected for service. In 2022, the History Teachers’ Association of Victoria (HTAV) received funding from the Saluting Their Service Commemorative Grants Program of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II. The grant would be used to develop an interactive educational resource for Levels 9–10 students that started at the beginning—with the enlistment process. After completing many World War I resources covering similar areas of research, the HTAV team…

The unessay has grown in popularity as an assessment tool in the secondary and tertiary History classroom, particularly in North America. An unessay is where students choose a format they will employ to produce a research-informed creative engagement with the past. Short stories, board games, video games and children’s books are all common unessay format choices. Other possibilities include cooking blog posts, sewing projects, comedy skits and ‘radio play’ podcasts. The freedom to choose a genre gives students the chance to draw on skills and passions that would not typically make their way into the History classroom. This article reports on the use of the unessay in an advanced undergraduate History classroom. It involved collaborative autoethnography to inform analysis of the unessay as an assessment tool.1 This approach allows for…

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Australia’s urban craftsmen led a campaign for the ‘eight-hour day’ that has long been celebrated by trade unionists. They marched through the city on the first anniversary of their victory in Melbourne in 1857, and this procession became an annual event and eventually a public holiday. They raised a monument to their collective success in 1903. W. E. Murphy, a leader of the campaign, even published a History of the Eight Hours Movement in two volumes, 1896 and 1900. But efforts to commemorate this past have gradually flagged. Today, few who enjoy their ‘Labour Day’ holiday recognise its origins in an industrial battle more than 150 years ago. The character of the campaign—an assertion of the rights of labour—is no longer widely understood.…

The governor-general is today considered a mostly ceremonial and constitutional figure representing the absent monarch as Australia’s head of state. The office is expected to be impartial to parliamentary politics, yet has the right ‘to be consulted, to encourage and to warn’ the government of the day, and possesses emergency ‘reserve powers’.1 Unlike today, the early governors-general had an active political role in Australian federal politics as the monarch’s viceroy and as Britain’s overseer of Imperial interests in Australia. The history of the Australian governor-generalship is the history of ‘sure and steady erosion’ of the office’s rights and freedoms to influence and engage in Australian politics.2 This history of erosion runs parallel with Australia’s slow disentanglement from the British Empire and its changing relationship with Britain over the twentieth century.…

Students this year are fortunate to be studying History when the referendum on a Voice to parliament for Indigenous Australians is being held. Seeing this as an opportunity to connect the curriculum with real world politics, I decided to teach the 1967 referendum and then hold class referendums with my two Year 7 classes. The learning intention was for students to study the significance of the 1967 referendum, to understand how and why referendums are run, and then experience a referendum by posing this year’s referendum question on the Voice. With regards to the Victorian Curriculum: History, Foundation–10, students at Levels 7 and 8 should be developing their understanding of historical significance by evaluating a ‘cultural achievement that led to progress’.1 The curriculum at Levels 9 and 10 encourages students…

Imagine a History lesson in which students are learning about the important waterways of ancient China. The teacher presents the information in an engaging way with pictures of the Yangtze and the Huang He. They are located on a map along with the Grand Canal. The teacher explains key terms such as ‘silt’ and ‘trade’, and pauses along the way to check that the students are understanding the content. Then, after presenting the content, the teacher engages the students in activities designed to retrieve and apply the knowledge they have learned, such as a class discussion or a writing task. Some students might demonstrate a solid understanding of the material and even make some astute, creative observations. Other students, however, flounder. Why does this occur? For some students the problem…

Ever since the emergence of state-like entities in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, we have evidence of organised political contestation. Protest, protest movements and what academics call ‘social movements’ are often interchangeably used terms. The origin of the word ‘protest’ in the late medieval period—from the Latin words pro (publicly) and testari (assert)—seems to capture its modern meaning well: large groups of people, waving banners or placards, making public claims for changes in politics, society or culture.1 There is, however, as much change as there is continuity in the history of protest. This article will place protest into four key ‘eras’, each of which is associated with particular protest forms and practices: • early protest• the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution• social rights and anti-colonialism• Vietnam and beyond. These divisions…

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1998 waterfront dispute, a landmark moment in Australia’s political and industrial history. On 7 April 1998, security guards entered Patrick stevedoring shipping terminals across the country and escorted the unionised workforce out of the gates. With the backing of the Coalition government, Chris Corrigan, the managing director of the Patrick Corporation, sacked and locked out 1400 waterside workers—all of them members of the militant Maritime Union of Australia (MUA). In response to the lockout, the MUA and the broader trade union movement organised a mass industrial, political and legal campaign. Ports across the nation played host to scenes of mass public participation in picket lines, demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience. The dispute transfixed the nation and transformed the lives of maritime…

My people can teach the world to love.1 These are the heartfelt words of esteemed writer, advocate and now former Q&A host Stan Grant in his farewell address to viewers. Grant’s exit from this television program serves as a poignant reminder that the struggle for rights and freedoms cannot be reduced to a six-week unit of learning or a chapter in a textbook. It is an ongoing battle in our society that affects the lives of too many. It is against this backdrop that our students can embark on a journey to understand the historical context and significance of the civil rights movement. By immersing students in a series of interactive learning experiences centred around the Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) case, they are empowered to become active participants…

‘There’s nothing, I mean absolutely nothing written,’ warned my Head of Humanities as we discussed if I would teach our new Unit 1/2 History offering, Global Empires, in 2022. ‘Sure,’ I said breezily. ‘How hard can it be?’ Writing a course from scratch was a challenge I had not yet tackled, let alone dreamed I would. I was like one of the explorers during the Age of Discovery—blissfully ignorant of a new continent just beyond my field of vision. Over the 2021–2022 summer holidays I sat down to write the course, and then put theory to practice in the classroom in 2022. Now that the unit has been developed and taught, here are some of my reflections on writing a new subject. The Importance of the Empire of Teachers With…