History

All nations are sustained by myth-making, but some myths are more problematic than others. Australia has long taken heart from the myth of Anzac, the story that in their ‘baptism of fire’ at Gallipoli, in 1915, Australian men gave birth to the nation. Notably militarist in orientation, extolling the feats of men at war, extensive government investment has helped render our national creation myth sacrosanct. Thus, when Alan Tudge, a former Coalition minister for Education and Youth, contemplated suggested changes in the national history curriculum in 2021, he declared that the school curriculum must never present Anzac as a ‘contested idea’. Anzac Day was ‘the most sacred day in the Australian calendar’.

Professor Joy Damousi was the ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow at the University of Melbourne between 2014 and 2019. The ARC Fellowship made possible the scale of the now published book, enabling research not only in Australia but also the United States, Britain, and Europe. The book evidences the potential of richly funded historical research.

Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII (1876–1958), bears the dubious distinction of being the twentieth century’s most discredited Catholic – and also the millennium’s most controversial pontiff. The case against Pius, prosecuted most famously by John Cornwell (‘Hitler’s Pope’), is that he aided and abetted, or at least did nothing to prevent, the Nazi regime’s unprecedented crimes against European Jews. A stiff, diffident Roman patrician, he was simply too steeped in cultural anti-Semitism to see the importance of speaking out against Nazi racial ideology or the genocide it encouraged.

Uwe Radok was born in 1916 in East Prussia to a family of Christian converts who identified as German Protestant. Nevertheless, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, the Radoks were classified as Jews – their five children Mischlinge, of mixed ancestry. In 1938, the family applied to emigrate to Australia. When their visas finally arrived in August 1939, it was too late.

Writing in the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the life of a king was made up of two objects: to extend his rule beyond the frontiers; and to make it more absolute within them. Reading those lines, I couldn’t help but think of Vladimir Putin, whose primary political goals seem to mirror those of absolutist monarchs. Rousseau was implying that war was an instrument wielded by capricious princes to serve their own interests. Not long after Rousseau, Antoine-Henri Jomini was the first military strategist to unpack the idea that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Many politicians and military strategists throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century agreed, whether democrats, fascists, or communists. General Ludendorff, Marshal Shaposhnikov, and Mao Zedong all came to the same conclusion: war and politics – one and the same thing.

In Unmaking Angas Downs, researcher and writer Shannyn Palmer seeks to understand why a derelict pastoral station in Central Australia, once a hub for First Nations people and a popular tourist destination en route to Watarrka Kings Canyon, was abandoned. Established by white pastoralist Bill Liddle in the late 1920s, Angas Downs is 300 kilometres south-west of Mparntwe Alice Springs at a place known as Walara to Anangu. Curious about the shifting fortunes of Angas Downs, Palmer travels to Walara to uncover the ‘histories that are obscured by the single, fixed idea of the pastoral station’.

At the conclusion of the third women’s cricket test against England in 1935, Victorian all-rounder Nance Clements souvenired her name plate from the Melbourne Cricket Ground scoreboard. What she discovered on the reverse side of the plate, as Marion Stell recounts in The Bodyline Fix: How women saved cricket, was the name Larwood.

The Silk Road is not one place, nor is it a particular route for travel, trade, and cross-cultural exchange. It is an idea, and a powerful one at that, as Tim Winter’s Silk Road: Connecting histories and futures shows. The concept of the Seidenstraße was popularised by Ferdinand von Richthofen in the 1870s to define the trade routes westwards from Han China in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Since then scholars have argued for many Silk Roads over land and sea between Africa, Eurasia, and the islands around those landmasses through which goods and ideas have been exchanged for at least two millennia. 

As the war in Syria enters its second decade, the human scale of the catastrophe is difficult to comprehend. Shocked by the security service’s torture of children who had graffitied the words ‘Down with the regime’ on a wall in the city of Daraa in 2011, nationwide demonstrations rose up against Bashar al-Assad’s tyrannical government. When I ask my now-exiled Syrian colleagues what life was like under the Assad family, they struggle for historical parallels before agreeing that, for them, it resembled Stalin’s Soviet Union and North Korea (a regime the current president’s father, Hafez Al-Assad, looked to for inspiration).

'Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven.’ William Wordsworth was writing about the French Revolution, but the sentiment could have applied to the three McDonagh sisters in 1920s Sydney. Isabel (born in 1899), Phyllis (1900), and Paulette (1901) were the beneficiaries of two intertwined revolutions – modernism and feminism – that encouraged them to develop skills outside the domestic sphere and to become experts in their field. Daringly, they chose filmmaking, the great obsession of the period; and they were very good at it.