1954 : did Petrov matter?

Occurring well into the Cold War years, the ‘Petrov’ election of 1954 demonstrates, even more than most elections, the peril of hindsight. We tend to see its significance as arising out of the tumultuous circumstances surrounding the announcement of Prime Minister Menzies, on 13 April 1954 – just as Parliament was to rise for the election campaign – that the Third Secretary at the Soviet Embassy, Vladimir Petrov, had defected. But this Cold War script was not played to the gallery, due in part to Menzies’ gag on Petrov talk during the campaign (albeit an order not universally observed). The greatest significance of the return of the Liberal-Country Party coalition on 29 May 1954 is not as an affirmation of repressive anti-communism, but as an example of the mundane expectations of Australians. Voters are revealed as wishing to tend the first green shoots of post-war recovery, rather than engage in an ‘all-in’ effort against the Red menace. In a year typified as quintessentially ‘Cold War’, the final result – a swing to the Australian Labor Party, but not sufficient to oust the coalition – illustrates the tendency of the electorate at this time to pull towards the centre, rather than decisively towards left or right. The 1954 election is a reminder of one of the things Australian voters commonly prize about their governments: the promise of stability in the midst of high drama

Mary Booth's imperial nationalism in the aftermath of the Great War

During the two aftermath decades following the end of the Great War, Australia came to terms with its wartime loss and evaluated its contribution to the war through grief and memorialisation but also through a sense of national identity that honoured its contribution to this imperial war. The decades that follow show how much Australia has changed in its nationalist aspirations since the nineteenth-century emergence of radical, or ‘bush’, nationalism that sought separation from the British Empire. While radical nationalism represented a minority of Australians, the zeitgeist in the Federation era had been more accommodating of ideas of independence. In 1887, Alfred Deakin coined the term ‘independent Australian Briton’, establishing a distinction between both radical nationalism and craven imperial loyalty, but in the aftermath decades, this independent, middle way became less so – many who shared these dual loyalties nevertheless placed greater emphasis on the ‘Briton’

Mnemosyne and Athena : Mary Booth, Anzac, and the language of remembrance in the First World War and after

The enduring impact of the wars of the twentieth century has given rise to an ever-expanding scholarship on grief and memory. Such sensitive material often causes us to reach for a language that does justice to the subject matter. And so, in the history of war remembrance, the ancient Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, is sometimes invoked. She is more fitting still when we consider that women—as mothers, wives, sweethearts, and sisters—are traditionally at the heart of war remembrance. According to Jay Winter, the vast majority of war memorials gained their impetus from the people personally affected by the conflict being commemorated.1 Their language has shaped the language of remembrance

Federation to the Second World War : Australian identity and Anzac

Teaching the story of Federation inevitably prompts classroom discussions about why we are so unmoved by the process compared to, say, the celebration of Anzac as an exercise in Australian nation-building. Yet, as previous chapters have demonstrated, the idea of ‘Australia’ has been contested over time, even in the political act of Federation. And contesting the predominantly settler-colonial imagining of Australian identity is becoming more urgent in the light of a greater recognition of Indigenous history, as we have seen in Chapter 2. Against these reworkings of national identity, Anzac continues to stake its claim, largely through a mythologising of the original Anzac ‘story’, a process of nation-building in 1915 that has come down to modern-day Australians as something timeless, while remaining largely settler-colonial in tone

Claiming Anzac : the battle for the Hyde Park Memorial, Sydney

The decade after the end of the Great War saw many disagreements taking place as to how the war should be commemorated. The Anzac Memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park was a particularly contested space, with heated disagreement over the projected memorial's site and function continuing from 1919 until 1929. Drawing on some of the previously published scholarship on the memorial, and on feminist analyses of war grief, this article expands on what is currently known about the Anzac Memorial controversy, and explores how civilian women felt that they, too, had a claim on Anzac and the values that it symbolised

The 1920s : a good decade for women in politics

The work of Australian scholars in the field of between-wars feminism has allowed us to move on from the ‘wave’ metaphor of feminist activity over the past 120 years or so, which posited a trough of inactivity between gaining the vote and the ‘second wave’ cresting in the 1970s. Feminism’s journey is more aptly described as one taken on foot: slow and arduous in places, but always continuing. In such a journey, the 1920s represents something of a bend in the road. Following the more singular suffrage campaign, many feminist ideas in the 1920s clustered around a less singular, but still broad and in many ways unifying, set of beliefs about women’s work as homemakers and child rearers, usually described as maternal or maternalist feminism. The galvanising force of this widely accepted form of feminism was combined with new opportunities for women to enter, and assume leadership roles in, the public realm. This chapter examines the political lives of two women active in NSW politics in this turbulent, exciting decade: Mary Booth and Millicent Preston Stanley

The Soldiers’ Club, 1915-1923

My interest in this subject arose out of an interest in the women who supported Australia's involvement in the first world war. The general soon led to the particular in the form of the physician and conservative social activist Dr Mary Booth who had a high profile on the Sydney home front, principally through the Soldiers' Club, which was formed on 3 June 1915. The Club leased part of the old Royal Hotel in George Street and was a place where 'other ranks' of the AIF could go instead of roaming the Sydney streets. It had a Board of Trustees and a Committee which took care of policy, administration and daily maintenance, of which Booth was Honorary Secretary. This article represents some early findings about the daily and nightly life of the Soldiers' Club which offer glimpses of Booth's patriotic activity set in the wider picture of the home front during the war. While the work of women's organisations on behalf of soldiers has been documented to some extent, the records of the Soldiers' Club afford the opportunity to look in on the relationship of Booth and other women like her with the soldiers of the first AIF

A Tendency to See This as Monolithic: Unpacking the 1954 Election

In this episode of the Afternoon Light podcast, Robert Menzies Institute CEO Georgina Downer talks to Western Sydney University Lecturer Dr Bridget Brooklyn about the intricacies of the pivotal 1954 election

Review essay on global and world histories of feminism and gender struggle

This review essay examines three recent works about global or world histories of feminism and gender struggle, considering their methodological frames and epistemological reflections, their approaches to temporality and periodisation, how they define what count as feminisms in their studies, their geo-cultural breadth and temporal depth, the authorial or editorial process that informed them, and the purposes of their histories in relation to feminist agendas. The three works are considered here together because they all tackle in differing ways the same important problem of how to write global and world histories of feminism and gender—addressing questions of how to make breadth coherent, how to include subjects who are under-represented in the archives, and how to bridge conceptual differences in how gender struggle has been understood in diverse historical contexts. The word ‘feminist’ became globalised only in the early twentieth century, so how can historians trace forms of challenge to gender power that occurred prior to this time or in cultures that had no engagement with the Western political movement of women’s rights? All works discussed provide a variety of ways of addressing these challenges, in addition to advancing the still-unusual adoption of world and global approaches to historical inquiry in considering multiple different cultures and their relations to one another. All three works provide important answers to the questions of how gender struggle became necessary, possible to imagine, and able to take so many forms

When and where is Australia?

When Is Australia? On 24 September 2018, then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison posted an angry tweet after Byron Bay Shire council decided to move their Australia Day ceremony from 26 January. The decision came in response to growing public unease about using the date as a national celebration. Although Britain had claimed the continent and islands now called Australia in 1770, 26 January 1788 marked the beginning of European colonisation with the Gadigal people of Sydney being the first to be physically dispossessed of the land they had occupied for hundreds of generations. Like all First Nations, their sovereignty was never ceded and it is increasingly accepted that terra nullius was ‘legal fiction’ and was not used by the British to justify dispossession.1 In 2017, three councils in Melbourne and a fourth in Fremantle decided to stop holding official celebrations on 26 January out of respect for First Nations people.2 Then Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull responded by stripping the councils of their right to hold citizenship ceremonies. Likewise, Morrison removed Byron Bay Shire’s right to hold citizenship ceremonies (until the Shire backed down and reversed the decision) but he went further than his predecessor by presenting any change to the Australia Day narrative as a form of national self-sabotage