THE PROGRAM
The History Program has for many years been a major centre for research in the social, cultural, and political history of Australia and related societies. Over the past few years, it has developed important new focuses on environmental, Indigenous, and gender history. Within these broad categories, the Program carries out major work on ageing and death, health and sickness, fire and ice, landscape and food, work and welfare, social policy, intellectual life and modern gender relations. This work ranges in scope from microhistories of particular peoples and places to broad ranging comparative histories and macrohistories of global dimensions. Geographically it covers Australia, Antarctica, Great Britain, the United States, and the Caribbean. Methodologically it covers a broad range, from theoretically and conceptually oriented approaches, to analytical narrative, biography, diachronic and geographical comparison, and quantitative social science history. The Program’s research is firmly rooted in empirical analysis, depending on systematic work in archives, oral history collections, material culture studies, landscape studies, interviews, and other forms of fieldwork. Historical research requires a painstaking approach to the identification, collection and analysis of available evidence, a careful sifting of potentially applicable theoretical approaches, and the refinement of ideas as part of a process of literary crafting. All members of the History Program have significant international profiles within the historical profession as a result of their success in applying these techniques and their innovative approaches to the study of particular problems and periods. They also make significant contributions to public debate and the formulation of public policy.
2003 PROGRAM OVERVIEW
Australian Centre for Indigenous History
A major new phase of the Program began in 2003 with the establishment of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History (ACIH) under the directorship of Professor Ann McGrath, whose prize-winning ‘Born in the Cattle’: Aborigines in Cattle Country (1987) was a pioneer in what is now a burgeoning field. Frances Peters-Little, of the Kamilaroi/Uralarai peoples of New South Wales and Dr Gordon Briscoe, of the Marduntjara/Pitjantjatjara speaking peoples of Central Australia, are the Centre’s inaugural Research Fellows. Gordon Briscoe, who was made a member of the Order of Australia in the 2004 Australia Day honours for his longstanding services to Indigenous health, legal services and education, completed his doctorate with the Program in 1997. Frances Peters-Little is a prize-winning television producer and incisive cultural commentator who completed her MPhil in the School of Social Sciences, ANU, in 2002.
The ACIH was launched by Senator Aden Ridgeway in March 2003 in a moving ceremony that featured Jimmy Little, Frances Peters Little’s father, 
singing his own composition, ‘Yorta Yorta Man,’ and speaking about the history of his family and his people. Among the outstanding events of the Centre’s first year were the forum on ‘Aboriginal Activism; Then and Now’ organised by Frances Peters-Little in association with the exhibition Proof: Portraits from the Movement 1978–2003 at the National Portrait Gallery; the launch of Counting, Health and Identity: A History of Aboriginal Health and Demography in Western Australia and Queensland, 1900– 1940, Gordon Briscoe’s magisterial book on Indigenous demography and health; and Ann McGrath’s invitation to be Keynote Speaker at the Annual Symposium of the Howard R Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders at Yale. In a very busy year, Professor McGrath and her staff and other interested staff, students, and visitors such as Dr Tim Rowse, Rebe Taylor, and Professor Lyndall Ryan, have developed or strengthened strong national and international links with Yale University Lamar Center, the ANU Institute for Indigenous Australia (ANUIIA), the National Museum of Australia (NMA), the Australian Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), Charles Darwin University (CDU), Indigenous Higher Education Centres, the Sydney Film Festival and ScreenSound Australia. In addition, the journal Aboriginal History is now based in the Program under the managing editorship of Ingereth Macfarlane. An important research direction for the Centre was established by the three-year ARC Discovery grant for ‘Unsettling Histories: Indigenous Modes of Historical Practice’ won by Ann McGrath and Frances Peters-Little in collaboration with Margo Neale, Program Director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program, First Australians Gallery, NMA.
Postgraduate students
The Program’s postgraduate students continue to make outstanding contributions to the discipline. Rebe Taylor won the Adelaide Festival Award for Literature (Non-Fiction) for her widely acclaimed Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island (Wakefield Press, 2002). Unearthed was also shortlisted, along with major established historians, for the Ernest Scott Prize for History Writing and the Nita B Dobbie Prize for Women’s Writing. Janet Doust’s prizewinning ‘Setting up Boundaries in Colonial Eastern Australia: Race and Empire’ will be published in Australian Historical Studies in 2004. Program Visitor Brigid Hains’s ‘accessible, engaging and illuminating’ The Ice and the Inland: Mawson, Flynn and the Myth of the Frontier (MUP, 2002) was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Australian History Prize. Rebe Taylor will be one of the presenters of the new ABC program, Rewind, that premieres in August 2004 and Radio National’s Hindsight is producing a documentary on Unearthed. A new initiative to develop closer ties between postgraduate students at the ANU and CDU was inaugurated during 2003 with the Australian National University and Charles Darwin University Annual History Colloquium, New Directions In North Australian History, supported by the History Program, the Centre for North Australian and Asian Research and the Office of the Dean, Faculty of Law, Business and Arts, CDU and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. Professor McGrath gave the Keynote Address on Microhistories, Grand Narratives and Transnational Frontiers and students Maxine Pitts and Barbara Dawson attended the conference and gave papers.
Major recognition for staff
History Progam staff received major recognition during 2003. Senior Fellow Tim Rowse was appointed to the Chair of Australian Studies for 2003-2004 at Harvard University, where he is teaching courses on Indigenous Autobiography and Governing Aborigines in Australia.
Senior Fellow Tom Griffiths completed a Humanities Fellowship with the Australian Antarctic Division which enabled him to conduct research into the history of Antarctica and to join a resupply voyage to Casey Station on the Antarctic continent from December 2002 to January 2003.(see photo at right)
Dr Rowse’s Nugget Coombs: a Reforming Life (CUP, 2002) was a finalist for the National Biography Award. Professor Desley Deacon’s Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life was selected for the H-Women List of Best-Written Biographies of American Women. Dr Griffiths was keynote speaker at the Forest, Desert, Sea Conference at James Cook University, the Travellers’ Tales Conference at the National Library of Australia and the New Zealand Historical Association National Conference. Professor Barry Higman was invited to write the chapter on ‘Demography and Slave Family Structures, 1420-1804’ in the Cambridge World History of Slavery and to speak at the associated conference at Emory University. Dr Rowse was invited to give a paper on ‘Britons, settlers and Aborigines: civil society and its colonised ‘other’ in colonial, post-colonial and present-day Australia’ to a conference on Civil Society in Kobe. Dr Briscoe gave the keynote speech to the Aboriginal Education Council’s Fortieth Anniversary celebrations. The Program helped win $1.5m in grants from the ARC, the National Institute for the Environment, the Australian Antarctic Division, the Bureau of Meteorology, the National Academies Forum, the Hagley Museum, the Huntington Library and ANUIIA during 2002 and 2003. Former postgraduate student Tim Sherratt joined the Program as ARC Postdoctoral Fellow under the Linkage Grant for The Human Elements: A Cultural History of Australian Weather he won with Dr Griffiths and Dr Libby Robin (CRES). ARC Postdoctoral Fellow Georgine Clarsen took up a post at the University of Wollongong. Contributions to the community Members of the Program contributed to reports to the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training, the Review of Exhibitions and Public Programs, NMA, and an Issues Paper on a Protocol for Filmmakers Working with Indigenous Content and Indigenous Communities. Rebe Taylor and Gordon Briscoe were featured on a number of Writers Festival panels. Professor McGrath and Dr Griffiths commented regularly in the media on major cultural issues. Frances Peters-Little acted as consultant for several documentary films, including the forthcoming television series The Outback House. In an important outreach program, Dr Briscoe gave a series of lectures on Indigenous Justice to accompany Lyneham High School’s Exhibition Program on Human Rights. Visitors The Program expanded its comparative strengths with visits from Professor Marika Ainley, scholar of gender and science from the University of Northern British Columbia, Dr Jane Carruthers, environmental historian from the University of South Africa (Pretoria), and Associate Professor Elizabeth Elbourne, historian of race relations in South Africa. It also benefited from regular visits from Adjunct Professor Graeme Davison and Research Affiliates Professor Eric Richards and Professor Chris Lloyd, and Professor Jill Roe, Macquarie University, Professor Rod Home, University of Melbourne, and Professor Lyndall Ryan, University of Newcastle, spent lengthy periods in the Program working on their biographies of, respectively, Miles Franklin, Baron Ferdinand von Mueller and Edna Ryan.
Gordon Briscoe Awarded the Order of Australia
On Australia Day 2004 Dr Gordon Briscoe, Research Fellow in the History Program’s Australian Centre for Indigenous History, was awarded the prestigious Order of Australia for services to Aboriginal health, legal services and education. Dr Briscoe is from the Marduntjara/Pitjantjatjara speaking peoples of Central Australia. His life story spans many key events in Indigenous history. What is remarkable is the active and energetic role he has played in shaping that history. Most notable are his lifelong struggles for human rights for Indigenous Australians and his involvement as one of the founders of several significant practical initiatives for and by Indigenous Australians. Dr Briscoe was mentor and inspiration to ophthalmologist and Australian of the Year, the late Dr Fred Hollows. Active in equal wages campaigns, he encouraged author Frank Hardy to make the visit to the Wave Hill people that resulted in Hardy’s important book The Unlucky Australians (1968). As his membership of the Order of Australia indicates, Dr Briscoe played a key role in founding crucial Indigenous health, legal and educational services. More recently, Dr Briscoe has become a role model and ambassador for Indigenous history, mentoring Indigenous students throughout Australia. His contributions to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies have also been profound. Dr Briscoe encourages and challenges both Indigenous and nonIndigenous researchers to carry out scholarship of the highest quality in Indigenous history. He played a key role in inspiring the History Program to establish its Centre for Indigenous History. Yet as Professor Mick Dodson pointed out in launching Dr Briscoe’s monograph Counting, Health and Identity (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2003), Gordon ‘did it all the hard way’. With only the barest educational opportunities earlier in life, he pursued his education whilst he worked to support himself and his family. Throughout his career, he has been actively engaged on behalf of Indigenous Australians, contributing as an activist and as a senior public servant before devoting himself to scholarship. Gordon Briscoe was born in 1938 at a Northern Territory Native Institution outside Alice Springs. When the Japanese bombed Darwin in 1942 he was evacuated with his mother Eileen Briscoe to a Church of England refugee camp at Mulgoa near Blacktown, New South Wales. The family returned to Alice Springs, only to be removed to an aliens camp at Balaclava, 70 km outside of Adelaide. At the end of the war Gordon was ‘released into the care of’ a Church of England priest, Father Percival McDonald Smith, who ran St Francis House, an institution for NT boys of mixed Aboriginal and other descent at Glanville, near Port Adelaide. Gordon left school in 1956 after failing most years and spent three years working casual jobs and a year in the South Australian Railways as a cleaner and a fireman. During these years he became increasingly aware of the widespread discrimination against Aborigines and critical of the South Australian Government’s race-based protection legislation. Along with other young men from St Francis House, including John Moriarty, Charles Perkins, Vincent Copley, Wilfred (Boofa) Huddlestone and Malcolm Cooper, he helped form an Aboriginal Progress Association. In the late 1950s Gordon became a professional soccer player in England, where he met and married his wife Norma. When he returned to Australia with his wife and son, he found he was still a State Ward under the NSW Aborigines Protection legislation. While working at the Canterbury Council in Sydney he studied at night for the NSW School Certificate. In the late 1960s he worked for the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs and the Aboriginal Legal Service (a body he had helped to establish). In 1972, working with Sydney-based Aborigines Shirley Smith and Dulcie Flowers and sympathetic whites such as Professor Fred Hollows, Dr Ross MacKenna and John Russell, he helped establish a health service for the growing urban Aboriginal population. Later that year he returned to his birthplace, the Northern Territory, and stood for election to Federal Parliament. Although unsuccessful, his candidacy helped publicise the need for Land Rights for Aborigines. The following year Gordon became a Field Officer for the Commonwealth Office of Aboriginal Affairs and then a senior liaison officer in the Department of Health and Acting Director of Professor Fred Hollows’ National Trachoma and Eye Health Program, where he advised on cultural protocols for approaching Aboriginal communities. Professor Hollows has paid tribute to Gordon’s significant role as mentor and cultural educator during their collaboration. Dr. Briscoe began his academic career in 1981, studying history and politics at the ANU. He gained his PhD in the RSSS History Program in 1997 with a thesis entitled ‘Disease, Health and Healing: Aspects of Indigenous Health in Western Australia and Queensland, 1900–1940.’ As a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program, he edited, with his long-time collaborator, demographer Len Smith, The Aboriginal Population Revisited: 70,000 Years to the Present (Aboriginal History Monograph 10, Canberra) and completed his recent book, Counting, Health and Identity: A History of Aboriginal Health and Demography in Western Australia and Queensland, 1900–1940 (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2003). He was appointed as an inaugural Research Fellow in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History in the History Program in 2003. Dr Briscoe has made a remarkable and outstanding contribution to Australian life – most significantly as a campaigner for basic human rights for Indigenous Australians, as an organiser and contributor to practical initiatives, as a motivator, a thinker, an ideas person, a researcher, writer, teacher and mentor.
History Program: Staff and Visitors
Professor and Head of Program D.A. Deacon, BA (Qld), PhD (ANU), FASSA
Professors of History
B.W. Higman, BA (Syd), PhD (WI), PhD (Liv), FRHistS, FASSA
P. Jalland, BA (Brist), PGCE (Lond), MA, PhD (Tor), FASSA, FRHistS J. Ritchie, AO, BA DipEd (Melb), PhD (ANU), FRHistS, FASSA, FAHA, Hon FRAHS
A. McGrath, BA (Qld), PhD (La Trobe)
Senior Fellows
T. Griffiths, BA, MA (Melb), PhD (Monash), FAHA
T. Rowse, BA (Syd), MA (Flin), PhD (Syd), FAHA
Research Fellows
G. Briscoe, BA MA PhD (ANU)
F. Peters-Little, BA (UTS), MPhil (ANU)
ARC Postdoctoral Fellows
G. Clarsen, BSocStds (Syd), MA PhD (Melb) (jointly with Demography and Sociology Program) (to June)
T. Sherratt, BA (Melb) (from July)
Adjunct Professor Prof G. Davison, Monash University
Research Affiliates
Prof C. Lloyd, University of New England
Prof E. Richards, Flinders University
Sabbatical Fellows
Prof J. Roe, Macquarie University
Prof L. Ryan, University of Newcastle
Visiting Fellows
Prof M. Ainley, University of Northern British Columbia
Dr J. Carruthers, University of South Africa
Assoc Prof E. Elbourne, McGill University, Montreal
Prof R. Home, University of Melbourne
Em Prof F.B. Smith, Australian National University
Em Prof J. Passmore, Australian National University
Program Visitors
Ms I. Macfarlane, Managing Editor, Aboriginal History
Dr M. Steven, University of Canberra
Administrative Staff
K. Nantes
Summer Scholars
C. Arscott, University of Queensland
M. Watts, University of Sydney