What are the strengths of and threats to historical research in Australia today? In this post we hear from Michelle Arrow and Kate Fullagar, President and Vice-President respectively of the Australian Historical Association, about the experience of being a historian and the broader landscape in which research is currently undertaken.
As in the UK, teaching and researching history and the humanities in Australia are currently at risk, due to political decisions and narratives, and structural changes within higher education.
At the same time, AHA members continue to produce world-class research that not only advances but often leads global historical endeavours.
This post is the first in an occasional series on the Society’s blog— ‘Global Histories: Disciplinary Perspectives from International Subject Associations’ — in which we’ll hear from the leaders of national historical associations, worldwide.
In 2023 the Australian Historical Association celebrated its fiftieth birthday – certainly a youthful anniversary compared to those marked by some of its counterpart organisations in Britain, but no less a time of reflection or summation for us. We observed the moment by commissioning a new history of ourselves, entitled “An Important and Necessary Institution” (Eureka Henrich & David Carment, 2023).
In the preface, then-President Frank Bongiorno remarked that our past had unfolded as something like a ‘saga’ but also as ‘a story of possibility’ (2). Two years on, after more saga-worthy travails but also after more remarkable achievements, we consider here some of the most pressing challenges facing the Australian profession today as well as some of our members’ most notable contemporary contributions.
Saga-worthy travails
Australian higher education has matched Britain’s experience closely for the last fifteen years or so – a relentless contraction of government funding, pushing universities into greater corporatisation, a greater divide between emerging and established institutions, and a greater reliance on international students.
In 2021 the Federal Government added a punitive twist for Australian historians by introducing the Job-Ready Graduate Package, which effectively increased fees for undergraduates in the humanities and social sciences by 113%. This drastic and instant hike was based on the demonstrably false assumption that humanities and social sciences degrees produced graduates who were less ‘job-ready’ than others.
The effects of this legislation have been uneven. Early observations suggest that the government could only manipulate choices for the least secure students—enrolments for history have suffered in more regional or lower socio-economic institutions. They have remained remarkably buoyant in our so-called elite universities, known in Australia as the Group of Eight. This means that more of the traditional cohort for history—women, Indigenous, and poorer students—are now missing out, but also that history students across the board have taken on exorbitant debt.
Promptly and consistently, the AHA has responded to attacks on the profession.
The knock-on effects have been immediate. Postgraduate enrolments in history have declined by more than 45% since 2016. And the intense messaging from government about its low esteem for the study of history has translated into administrative cuts to history departments as well as a deepening of public disrespect for the discipline.
Promptly and consistently, the AHA has responded to attacks on the profession: with direct submissions to governments about their ill-planned Job-Ready reforms, reports documenting the decline in students and staff numbers, and ready contributions to newspapers and radio.
We helped advise the only MP to have the courage to submit a bill to reverse JRG, Dai Le, which landed our evidence permanently in Hansard.
In late 2024, the Australian government tried to manufacture an international student crisis, following the British government’s example a few months earlier. Where Britain succeeded via more stringent rules to its student visa, however, the Australian government’s proposed caps ultimately failed in parliament. Vice Chancellors have nonetheless responded as if those caps are certain (possibly seeing them occur eventually through non-governmental means). Several universities announced massive redundancy plans for 2025; one, the University of Wollongong, has already gone through with its cuts. The AHA was devastated to learn this meant an exact halving of the history department faculty at Wollongong.
In reply, the executive of the AHA has built its own Australia-specific toolkit for historians, with varied advice for talking to students, parents, legislators, and deans about the value of history. We continue to decry in public spaces the erosion of investment in history education and resources.
Stories of possibility
Despite the attacks on history and the energies expended by historians to fight them, our members continue to produce world-class research that not only advances but often leads global historical endeavours. Two areas where Australian historians lead especially are in what might be termed ‘Truth-Telling about Colonial Pasts,’ and ‘Reimagining a Civics Education.’
The term ‘truth-telling’ was popularised in 2023 during Australia’s failed referendum campaign to enshrine an Indigenous Voice in its constitution. It refers to the telling of truths about the erasure of Indigenous history during Britain’s colonisation of Australia. Naturally, it has been led by Indigenous scholars and knowledge-holders such as Bronwyn Carlson on family violence, Hannah McGlade on incarceration rates, and Shino Konishi on expedition intermediaries.
Restoring truths about how the university settled Indigenous land, hoarded Indigenous remains, and extracted Indigenous knowledge, the volume is a model for other universities around the world to confront their histories.
The recent publication of Dhoombak Goobgoowana is an extraordinary example of truth-telling (which is what the title means in the Victorian Woi Wurrung language). Written by Yiman and Bidjara scholar Marcia Langton and several other scholars at the University of Melbourne, it is a forensic account of that institution’s own dark past. Restoring truths about how the university settled Indigenous land, hoarded Indigenous remains, and extracted Indigenous knowledge, the volume is a model for other universities around the world to confront their histories.
An older but equally landmark truth-telling exercise is the Colonial Massacres Mapping Project, led by the late Lyndall Ryan out of the University of Newcastle. It has worked to identify and map every site of Indigenous massacre in Australia between 1788 and 1930, providing an invaluable teaching resource and conceptual methodology for classrooms everywhere.
Map extracts from the Colonial Massacres Mapping Project at the University of Newcastle, NSW.
Truth-telling historians have made some exceptional impacts and connections. Work by Mark McKenna and Martin Thomas has led directly to the return of Indigenous remains to the Anangu and Bininj people respectively. Work by Jane Lydon and her team in the Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery project has joined the dots between Britain’s slaving capital and the dispossession of Indigenous lands in southern colonies.
In terms of civics education, Australian historians have helped to focus attention on the role of history in revitalising present and future forms of citizenship.
In terms of civics education, Australian historians have helped to focus attention on the role of history in revitalising present and future forms of citizenship. Global concern about the rise of misinformation and a growing distrust in democracy has prompted this scholarly turn. Frank Bongiorno has recently released an authoritative new political history of Australia, Dreamers and Schemers, and Leigh Boucher led a collaborative project examining the impact of ‘personal politics’ on Australian citizenship, arguing that the feminist idea that ‘the personal is political’ has remade the terrain on which all politics is made.
Last year, Clare Wright completed her ambitious ‘democracy trilogy’, with Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions. This book proclaims the petitions, written by the Yirrikala community in Arnhem Land in 1963 to protest bauxite mining on their traditional lands, are founding documents in the history of Australian democracy. Since 2021, the Deakin Contemporary History Survey has been investigating what Australians think, believe and value about history, with particular attention to the implications of this knowledge for civic engagement and national identity. This research will become more important as we work to engage diverse public audiences about the value of history.
The AHA supports all of this vital research in a number of ways. Our annual conference, held in July each year, showcases the work of hundreds of historians working in and on Australia. We recognise outstanding contributions to scholarship through our program of prizes and awards, many of which are dedicated to supporting postgraduate and early career researchers, and which celebrate both historians of Australia and historians working in Australia. Since 2003 the AHA has published, too, a quarterly journal, History Australia, which has become a highly regarded and dynamic forum for new research and historiographical debate.
Neither of the major political parties in Australia has been especially kind to history … Nevertheless, historians continue to produce, under great pressure.
The future of history in Australia is uncertain. Neither of the major political parties in Australia has been especially kind to history, and many universities are signalling that restructures, with job losses, are on the horizon. Nevertheless, historians continue to produce, under great pressure, galvanising work that helps us analyse our past and present discontents and to look forward to a better future.
About the authors
Michelle Arrow is President of the Australian Historical Association, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences, and Professor of History at Macquarie University.
Michelle is the author of Upstaged: Australian Women Dramatists in the Limelight at Last (Currency, 2002); Friday on Our Minds: Popular Culture in Australia since 1945 (UNSW Press, 2009); and The Seventies: The Personal, the Political and the Making of Modern Australia (NewSouth, 2019). She recently co-authored Personal Politics: Sexuality, Gender and the Remaking of Citizenship in Australia (Monash University Press, 2024).
Kate Fullagar is Vice President of the Australian Historical Association, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Professor of History at the Australian Catholic University.
Kate is the author of The Savage Visit: New World Peoples and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain, 1710-1795 (Univ. of California Press, 2012) and The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (Yale Univ. Press, 2020). Her most recent book is Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Simon & Schuster, 2023).
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