Antipodean Intimacies: Medical Sex Advice for Women in the Australian colonies, 1857-1890

This article examines a genre of medical sex advice literature that emerged in colonial Australia at the close of the 19th century. While historians have examined medical discourse as a site for the production of raced bodies, this article points out that in the settler colonial context of Australia, what is notable is the systematic *absence* of Aboriginal people from this discourse

The Book of Marriage: Histories of Muslim Women in Twentieth-Century Australia

From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Yet, the life‐worlds of these women are absent from Australian historiography and the field of Indian Ocean studies alike. When women do appear in Australian histories of Muslim communities, the orientalist accounts work to condemn Muslim men rather than shed light on women's lives. Leading scholars of Indian Ocean mobilities on the other hand, have tended to equate masculinity with motion and femininity with stasis, omitting analyses of women's life‐trajectories across the Indian Ocean arena. In this article, I rethink the definitions of ‘motion’ that underpin Indian Ocean histories by reading marriage records as an archive of women's motion. Using family archives spanning from Australia to South Asia, this article examines five women's marriages to South Asian men in Australia. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al‐Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this article proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women

Beyond Blank Spaces: Five Tracks to Late Nineteenth-Century Beltana

From the 1860s, the colonial settlement of Beltana in the northern deserts of South Australia emerged as a transportation hub atop an existing, cosmopolitan center of Aboriginal trade. Viewing a colonial settlement on Kuyani land through a mobilities paradigm, this article examines intersecting settler and Aboriginal trajectories of movement through Beltana, illuminating their complex entanglements. Challenging the imperial myth of emptiness that shaped how Europeans saw the lands they invaded, this article renders visible the multiple imaginative geographies that existed at every colonial settlement. Examining mobility along Kuyani and Wangkangurru tracks alongside British and Australian mobilities, this article makes a methodological argument for writing multiaxial histories of settler colonialism

Intersectionality, Resistance, and History-Making: A Conversation Between Carolyn D'Cruz, Ruth DeSouza, Samia Khatun, and Crystal McKinnon, Facilitated by Jordana Silverstein

A good, solid, history-writing practice is one which, I think, shakes people's ideas of the world and their place in it, compelling them to imagine new social, cultural and political formations which can provide an account of life. Kimberle Crenshaw's development of the term 'intersectionality', and the ways it has been taken up by people of colour within the academy internationally, as well as by activists, provides one example of such imaginative work. Because when you spend some time in the Australian History academic scene, at conferences, in departments, talking to other academics, it's quickly noticeable that one of its key features is its hegemonic whiteness. Even in those spaces that aspire to avoid whiteness, it's inescapable, visible daily, as well as in the themes at conferences, the keynote speakers chosen, the food served, the knowledge shared. When it came time for the Australian Women's History Network conference in 2016, which carried the theme of 'Intersections in History', it felt like this could provide a way of modelling a different kind of Australian academic History space. What would a conversation look like that skipped over the presence of white Anglo Australians, I wondered? What if we just left them to the side? What if we gathered together some of the smartest, sharpest thinkers in Melbourne academia, and spoke amongst ourselves, coming up with new formations of knowledge? And so we did: Crystal, Samia, Ruth and Carolyn gathered together, I asked them some questions, and we had a conversation that, in numerous ways, challenged white hegemonies. We've recreated some of that conversation below, as a way of continuing to think together, and to find new ways of making this thinking public

How can humanitarian services provision during mass displacement better support health systems? An exploratory qualitative study of humanitarian service provider perspectives in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.

Health services provision in mass displacement settings is a humanitarian imperative and essential to promoting international and regional security. Internationally displaced populations experience a range of issues pre-, peri-, post-displacement and residing in host countries that affect their health and well-being. This study examined links between humanitarian and government health services provision for forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals (FDMN) in Cox's Bazar to consider how improved knowledge sharing and collaboration might better support health systems during mass displacement. We conducted a qualitative descriptive study, interviewing 25 humanitarian service providers in-person in Bangladesh in early 2021 and analysing data thematically. We found that government restricted what essential services humanitarian health actors could provide and FDMN had to undergo stringent screening and referral to receive tertiary healthcare. Concurrently, the government health system was challenged by accessibility, affordability and availability of medicines, equipment, and trained staff. Humanitarian health service providers augmented government responses by working with community groups, recruiting and training Rohingya volunteers, and involving religious leaders. Findings suggest that easing barriers to a fuller range of health services, allowing access to digital devices, and hiring FDMN to support their communities would improve health system responsiveness to the legitimate needs of FDMN displaced around Cox's Bazar. It is imperative to amplify and listen to the voices of FDMN and collaborate in addressing structural and social barriers constraining their access to effective health services, both to increase trust in and responsiveness of the health system

Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia

Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonised by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of Muslim-majority countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonised by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of non-white people. Australianama challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonised. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonised geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonised tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future

Race, Gender, Empire: A Postgratuate Intensive Co-Taught by Catherine Hall and Samia Khatun

This collaboratively designed syllabus was taught at the University of Melbourne in April 201

Bring up the Bodies: What the Shahbag Protests Mean for Bangladesh

As Bangladesh tries and sentences the war criminals of 1971, two contrasting ideas of nationalism come into conflict