Swimming at the beach was largely banned in Australia until the early 19th century – but now, it’s intrinsic to our national identity.
- Professor in Public History, University of Technology Sydney
Last week in Sydney, we saw a melodrama acted out that could stand in for the state of Australian universities more generally.
John Hirst’s body of work is an implicit but powerful defence of evidence-based history at a time when the truth is under attack.
A barbecue, a protest … or a good book? We asked some of our leading historians to choose an illuminating Australia Day read.
Beach shacks have long been isolated and precarious. What we find charming today was once considered ‘fringe-dwelling’, separated from cities along racial and economic lines.
Plan your summer reading or catch up on what you missed with The Conversation’s selection of the best books of the year.
The heated debate around the Voice referendum demonstrated Australian history is still up for grabs. So Kate Fullagar’s new book, Bennelong and Phillip, is both critical and timely.
Across the continent, diverse, adaptable fishing practices, recipes and rituals were a cornerstone of Indigenous life at the time of first contact – and many remain so to this day.
A fascinating new collection of essays explores Indigenous deep histories and conceptions of time, showing pre-colonial Australia’s rich human past.
Can a poem tell us more about the past than a history book?
Education Minister Alan Tudge has rejected the draft history curriculum. He wants students to learn that ‘we live in the greatest country on Earth’. That’s not history. It’s jingoistic nationalism.
The beach is synonymous with the Australian summer. But it has a long - and varied - history in this country too.
It is 50 years since anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner gave the Boyer Lectures in which he coined the phrase ‘the great Australian silence’. How far have we come since?
The history of fisheries exploitation in Australia reveals a staggering natural bounty, which has been alarmingly fragile without proper management.
Australian history is already a hotly contested discipline but is it time to broaden our definitions of the canon? Might an indigenous rock painting or a novel or a poem constitute a work of history?
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