Recently, I attended an annual conference organised by research postgraduates at my university in Brisbane. The papers ranged across a range of disciplines in humanities research. The presenters were all local, with one exception. The keynote was delivered by an associate professor from another Australian university – less about the substantive content and impact of her own research than on the colonialist attributes of the humanities and social sciences.

A core message was the necessity of a revolution in research practice. Existing knowledge tainted by colonialism was to be overthrown by adopting the principle of ‘CITATIONAL JUSTICE’ (projected in capitals on a PowerPoint slide). The researchers in training would advance the cause of anti-colonial research by ensuring that the majority of the cited references in their future work was either of First Nations or ‘Majority World’ (presumably what used to be called the ‘Global South’ or, before that, the ‘developing world’).

The large assembly of postgraduate students and a sprinkling of others was invited to undertake an exercise in which they would advance Citational Justice by completing these unfinished affirmations – ‘I will be disobedient by … I will be disruptive by … I will be unfaithful by …’ It was unclear whether refusing to partake in this exercise in purification would be a signal of one’s insufficiently reflective status as an always-already colonised subject or simply disobedient. In any case, I declined to take up my pen.

As I suggested later in the day, I would have appreciated the opportunity to ask whether it might be a prerequisite for anyone’s intellectual as well as personal development to know what it was that one was to disobey, what kind of order one would disrupt, what beliefs or loyalties one would be unfaithful to, and what role was played in any of these personal quandaries by the training in scholarship to which these students had willingly subjected themselves?

No doubt it is reassuring to know that the humble and mostly ignored work of academic research is now of such significance, so central to the social order that its worthiness must be measured not in terms of its adherence to some norms of disciplinary and scholarly convention, but against the elevated norm of Justice.

Listening to this appeal I was struck by its uncanny link to issues that I had already offered for discussion later in the day. Quite simply, who gets the right to speak on matters of research within a tradition of empirical scholarship? A claim to advance Citational Justice through quantifying the individual identity of authors suggests one answer. By the time I came to address the issue in thoughts prepared for the day, I had already reframed my question less as one about the right to speak than one about the obligation to speak.

These are reflections then on the obligations and duties involved in being a researcher.

The universities-sponsored website The Conversation is a widely read international platform for translating research into publicly accessible stories. It is a popular source of content for mainstream new outlets. In November 2023, The Conversation published an article describing the results of a major archaeological project on the Queensland Native Police. The researchers claimed that their new data increased the number of total deaths of Aboriginal people at the hands of this colonial police force to ‘potentially over 60,000 people’. I disagreed with the claim and had good reasons for doing so. I contacted The Conversation to ask whether they were interested in a research-based comment that would discuss the issue.

Since 2014 similar, though lower, estimates had been in circulation in a historical paper initially published on a well-known research repository. By November 2023 I considered them implausible. Drawing on archival research conducted with a long-time collaborator and expert on Queensland Native Police and colonial history, I had reviewed this data and done new calculations. I presented our findings at an economic history conference in Sydney in February 2023. The calculations and argument were well received and subsequently peer-reviewed for publication to appear in early 2024.

Besides an uneasy sense of implausibility, there were other reasons for reviewing the estimates advanced by these historians and archaeologists. They went to the research methods informing these estimates, the samples drawn from fragmentary evidence, errors in numerical calculations, and a naïve use of linear extrapolations to infer possible occurrences from surviving documentary and material evidence. A particular concern was that such unreliable figures diminished the role of other well-recognised causes of Aboriginal depopulation, especially land dispossession and violence by settlers, and the ensuing disease and famine.

One would think that an offer to subject these new estimates to some appropriate research scrutiny might have been welcomed by a platform that has as its mission the translation of research into public discourse.

After a period of silence, eventually I got a call from someone at The Conversation who said they might be interested in a piece timed around the journal article’s publication. But there was a condition: would I be able to get an Indigenous co-author as it was The Conversation’s policy to publish on such a matter only with an Indigenous co-author?

I had no hesitation in saying no. I thought quite unwarranted, even unethical, such an invitation to endorse retrospectively a piece of research that had been authored by two non-Indigenous researchers, both with a long record of empirical research on the colonial history of Indigenous-settler relations.

The journal article was published in early February 2024. In a vain attempt to test the policy and its application in this instance, I wrote again to The Conversation advising of its publication and repeating my offer to write a short article about this research.

Again I got no response – before a standard reply declining my ‘pitch’ and advising that there were other pieces with ‘stronger content’.

This experience prompts a range of questions for a researcher whose work addresses material in the public domain that deserves appraisal and evaluation, maybe even critique. Is it unique or even unusual? The extent of the practice of this kind of gatekeeping is hard to say. What I have learned anecdotally is that the filtering of identity as an ingredient of decision-making in publishing is increasingly a reality of contemporary cultural life in Australia.

Others have encountered similar responses from The Conversation. These others include researchers who have led the country in advancing the understanding of Australian colonisation and its consequences.

One major university publishing house, which has in the past published path-breaking work that we rely on still as the major sources for understanding the history, policy, and impacts of colonisation on the First Peoples of this country, now tells authors that it no longer publishes that kind of work unless it is by an Indigenous author.

How widespread is this kind of gatekeeping in Australian publishing and related cultural production? How much valuable research in Australian history is not seeing the light of day as a result of these new (and increasingly rigid) publication expectations? Who knows, who would ask, and what kind of explanation would they get?

The work of a research historian is empirical. It demands training in archival discovery, learning in methods of contextual interpretation, practice in the art of writing and learning the requirements of citation, a tiresome and tiring but vital tool of validation – a measure of the integrity of the research and the researcher.

Such work is neither neutral with respect to its methods, which are subject to change, nor wholly subjective, in which case it would be tied only to the identity of the historian.

It is instead contested. Discovery can be supplemented by subsequent discovery. Contextual interpretations change; histories based on archival research are always, inevitably, of the present. But their elements are reworked from the historical products of the past, in ways that are continually contested, or should be.

Not all works named as histories are contested in this sense. There are authorised histories. Sometimes they are inherently valuable for the work they do in making accessible previously unknown restricted sources. But a shadow always hangs over them. If other researchers can’t have access to the same sources, what credibility attaches to the stories told in these histories?

In some autocratic societies only certain kinds of history may be published – those that tell a story that legitimises the existing state of things. The imprimatur of a church or a political party governs the public discourse.

When cultural gatekeepers and border enforcers decide that the identity of the historian determines who is published, they exercise a new imprimatur, whether the identity be that of gender, of race, of sexuality, of class (not an idle comment – read anything about the post-1949 anti-rightist campaigns of Maoist China, proscribing the writing of children of landlords, or professors). Can such histories be regarded as anything more than the speech of the author, however confirmatory of our existing assumptions the work may be, however appealing their proclamation to be on the right side of history? 

In this context, a norm of Citational Justice based on the identity of the authors of referenced works begs more questions than it answers. Suppose that such a norm is built into judgements on publishing merit or research grant award, what then? What criteria will decide which of the citations of First Nations or Majority World researchers are to be valued? What rules of method, or practices of observation and recording, will be invoked in such decisions on merit?

It was a relief on the day of the conference at which these reflections were offered to hear presentations of emerging research that did not need to justify their authority with reference to Citational Justice. When a postgraduate student, who happened to be from the Majority World, spoke to his topic of historical adaptation to climate challenges (flooding) in the material fabric of a historic Southeast Asian city, he invoked instead the trusted tools of the historical record (centuries-old flood records, including from colonial archives) and empirical observation (description of building materials and design). One felt confident listening to him that here was a learning based on research that did not need to resort to Citational Justice to justify its authority.

Contemporary universities are expected to conduct research according to accepted ethical regimes. These regimes emphasise the rights of human subjects whose participation may be necessary to the conduct of the research; these regimes attend to the aims of the research, which are to be beneficial not harmful to third parties.

The ethical questions involved in research practice of empirical historians are not limited to these matters. The chilling effect of the cultural politics I have described demands debate. We are entitled to ask historians engaged in a discipline whose methods and product are not meant to be authorised but rather contestable: what obligations arise in their practice when facts and interpretations are contestable? And what restraints should be exercised in meeting those obligations by the personal identity of the historian or writer?

The question asked of historians in this way is rightly asked of researchers more generally, at least of those engaged in empirical research, and of the gatekeepers, the ones who control what is published and thus, to a large extent, what gets read or heard. 

This is one of a series of ABR articles being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.