Australian Historical Studies
Australian Historical Studies is a refereed journal dealing with Australian, New Zealand and Pacific regional issues. First published in 1940, it is now one of Australia's oldest and best known academic journals, receiving contributions from leading academics in the field.
The journal deals with all aspects of the Australian past in all its forms - heritage and conservation, archaeology, visual display in museums and galleries, oral history, family history and histories of place.
Australian Historical Studies is published biannually in April and October each year.
Volume 37, Number 127, April 2006
Work and Leisure
This issue opens with an application of aural history to the European encounter with the Australian soundscape. Diane Collins observes how a number of recent studies of inland exploration have concentrated on the explorer’s gaze, and argues that listening was another, indispensable aspect of the process of discovery.
Aboriginal music and song was one component of the Indigenous presence that many Victorians wished to incorporate into their centennial celebrations in 1934. Sianan Healy explores this popular interest within the frame of primitivism and the search for authenticity.
Felicity Collins and Therese Davis are also interested in performance and representation, this time through the medium of the historical film. Taking issue with both academic historians and populist commentators who question cinema’s capacity to ‘do history’ and critics who deny that history makes for quality film, they argue that the role of film in the reconciliation process has been misunderstood.
Two articles take up aspects of religion in New Zealand. Geoff Troughton relates the extraordinary interest in Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World when it was put on public display in 1906 as part of a travelling exhibition across the British Empire. Nicholas Reid is concerned with the minority of New Zealanders who belonged to the Catholic Church, and their competition in the middle decades of the twentieth century with the much smaller minority of communists for influence over the working class and labour movement.
Beris Penrose and Bradley Bowden provide a new perspective on the politics of industrial health and safety. And David Walker responds to a recent book by Keith Windschuttle, The White Australia Policy. More