Eat My Dust

The history of the automobile would be incomplete without considering the influence of the car on the lives and careers of women in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. Illuminating the relationship between women and cars with case studies from across the globe, Eat My Dust challenges the received wisdom that men embraced automobile technology more naturally than did women.Georgine Clarsen highlights the personal stories of women from the United States, Britain, Australia, and colonial Africa from the early days of motoring until 1930. She notes the different ways in which these women embraced automobile technology in their national and cultural context. As mechanics and taxi drivers—like Australian Alice Anderson and Brit Sheila O'Neil—and long-distance adventurers and political activists—like South Africans Margaret Belcher and Ellen Budgell and American suffragist Sara Bard Field—women sought to define the technology in their own terms and according to their own needs. They challenged traditional notions of femininity through their love of cars and proved they were articulate, confident, and mechanically savvy motorists in their own right.More than new chapters in automobile history, these stories locate women motorists within twentieth-century debates about class, gender, sexuality, race, and nation

Challenges of the large survey subject: teaching and learning how to read history

The large survey subject is a challenge to all humanities, but many of the problems it poses are specific to each discipline. This paper tracks the difficulties of teaching a first year university history subject, as class sizes increase and the traditional tutorial delivery mode is under pressure through fiscal constraints and administrative policy. It utilises the emerging literature on teaching and learning history, History SoTL, which reflects a new interest in disciplinary-specific pedagogical practices. This paper outlines the moves I have made - in keeping with the recent historiographical emphasis on developing students\u27 historical consciousness, rather than simply expecting students to acquire knowledge of past events - to give students a better understanding of how historians think, read and write

An end to Australia’s auto dream: why we loved Holden

Yesterday we learned that our collective support for Holden is coming to an end. The demise of “Australia’s Own” has been on the cards for years. After all, this country is one of the most expensive places in the world to produce cars. We are not alone or even the biggest subsidisers of car manufacturing, of course. National economies as different as China, Japan, France and the USA have always offered incentives to keep cars rolling off assembly lines. But public funding for private enterprise runs deep in Australia – and it has never been just a matter of economics

Women\u27s leadership in the trades: an overview

Advocacy to encourage women to enter male-dominated trades has a long history, though leadership in this sphere of activism has rarely been documented in feminist histories. Efforts to improve women\u27s working lives have most often focused on facilitating women\u27s entry into the professions, company boards or upper management, and on campaigns to secure equal pay for work of equal value. Throughout the 20th century, however, numbers of women have promoted women\u27s entry into skilled, working-class jobs that were thought to be the natural domain of men. One important reason for questioning the high levels of gender segregation in these trades and encouraging women to enter them has been the recognition that men\u27s social power was bolstered by their claim that they had a special relationship with technologies. The need to expand women\u27s opportunities into trade employment was also linked to key feminist goals of eliminating gender wage inequality and enhancing women\u27s employment choices. Male-dominated trades promised employment that was better paid and more highly valued than female trades and often opened up opportunities for interesting work, independence and mobility that were unusual for working-class women

Mobile encounters: Bicycles, cars and Australian settler colonialism

At the turn of the twentieth century bicycles and motorcars constituted a significant break from organic modes of mobility, such as walking, horses and camels. In Australia, such mechanical modes of personal transport were settler imports that generated local meanings and practices as they were integrated into the material, cultural and political conditions of the settler nation-in-the-making. For settlers, new technologies confirmed their racial superiority and reinforced a collective sense of their own modernity. Aboriginal people frequently expressed fear and epistemological confusion when they first encountered the strange vehicles. Contrary to settler investments in Aboriginal people as outside of the contemporary world, however, they soon incorporated bicycles and automobiles into their lives. Aboriginal people complicated that imagined divide between primitivism and modernity as they devised new pleasures, accommodations, resistances and collaborations through those new technologies

The flip side: women in the Redex Around Australia Reliability Trials of the 1950s

In August 1953 almost 200 cars set off from the Sydney Showgrounds in what popular motoring histories have called the biggest, toughest, most ambitious, demanding, ‘no-holds-barred’ race, which ‘caught the public imagination’ and ‘fuelled the nation with excitement’.1 It was the first Redex Around Australia Reliability Trial and organisers claimed it would be more testing than the famous Monte Carlo Rally through Europe and was the longest and most challenging motoring event since the New York-to-Paris race of 1908.2 That 1953 field circuited the eastern half of the continent, travelling north via Brisbane, Mt Isa and Darwin, passing through Alice Springs to Adelaide and returning to the start point in Sydney via Melbourne. Two Redex trials followed, in 1954 and 1955, and each was longer and more demanding than the one before. The last two trials circled the entire continent to include Western Australia, returning to Sydney via Perth and the Nullarbor Plain

Still moving: bush mechanics in the Central Desert

Brake fluid made from washing powder mixed in water? Welding a muffler with jumper leads, fencing wire and a car battery? Replacement brake pads carved from mulga-wood with a tomahawk, or an emergency clutch plate shaped out of an old boomerang? Spare parts filed in collective memory, and scattered in old car wrecks along dirt tracks? Strips of blanket wound into windscreen-wiper blades? Such is the car repair advice offered in Bush Mechanics, the series recently screened on ABC Television.1 Presented with humour and enthusiasm, as well as a large dose of self-parody, this is mechanical advice unlike any other. Nyurulypa ( good tricks ) are what the heroes of the series – five bush mechanics from Yuendumu in the Central Desert – call them. They are tricks offered as special knowledge, hard-won in collective experience, and first learned by the old men who tell some of their stories in the series. They suggest a particularly localised knowledge, presented as something that everyone should know, and all who love mutikars will enjoy

Pedaling power: bicycles, subjectivities and landscapes in a settler colonial society

Mobilities across contested terrains are key to the formation of settler societies. This paper explores how safety bicycles were drawn into the Australian settler project at the turn of the twentieth century, just as the six independent colonies were federating into the Commonwealth of Australia. As recently imported objects, bicycles afforded settler men unprecedented mobility across remote landscapes that had not been smoothed by the infrastructures of the ‘old world’. In those years of national formation, bicycles were received as objects that could fill ‘empty’ land with people, things, activities and stories, at the same time as they generated masculine, settler subjectivities. A practice approach to settler mobilities helps to tease out the entanglements between bicycle ‘overlanding’ and two fundamental imperatives of settlerism: transforming indigenous places into settler places and creating ‘nativised’ settler subjectivities