Hello fellow academics and teachers!
Have you used one of my publications, or digital projects like the Real Face of White Australia, in your teaching (since 2020)?
If so, I would love to hear how you've used my work and how students have responded – and see your unit / course outline, too!
Email [email protected]
"‘Remarkable’ Mithaka cultural landscape featuring Australia’s oldest houses placed on national heritage list"
This area in south-west Queensland has 55 hectares of quarries and was on a major trading route from the Gulf of Carpentaria to the Northern Flinders Ranges.
#OzHist #Australia #Queensland
What a wonderful partnership between The Headstone Project SA and a school in South Australia!
Around 2,500 WWI veterans were buried in unmarked graves in South Australia. Through this partnership, students research these graves so that the deceased veterans can be properly recognised.
#SouthAustralia #OzHist #WW1 #FamilyHistoryAU #FamilyHistory
Descendent emotional to see WWI digger in unmarked grave receive recognition - ABC News
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-04/students-uncover-legacy-of-lost-world-war-i-veterans/106095386
Read about about the colourful life of a bloke called George featuring a riot at a cricket match in Sydney between NSW and England in 1879 with random appearances by Banjo Patterson and Edmund Barton.
This tale is very well written by Geoff Lemon and Adam Collins.
#cricket #OzHist
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/nov/12/ashes-test-cricket-rivalry-1897-sydney-riot
Remembering the day school children around Australia broke the news of the sacking of the Whitlam government by the Governor-General...
The announcement of the sacking by the Governor-General's secretary on the steps of old Parliament House was broadcast to all the children watching kids programmes after school. With no social media and most parents working, the children heard about the dismissal of the government first and told their parents when they got home. I remember running out to my parents with my younger brother shouting the news to them. Coincidentally, our car had broken down so my mother arrived in a tow truck pulling the car.
I was in primary school and old enough to understand how big this news was. At school for years afterwards my friends and I recalled this momentous occasion and how we told our parents.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-11/the-dismissal-50th-anniversary-photo/105958494
I started reading newspapers from a young age and remember reading Michelle Grattan's articles in The Age. Here are her recollections of The dismissal:
https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-remembering-the-day-gough-whitlam-lost-his-job-269387
Biographers muse on the future of biography when our everyday personal records are stored in electronic formats instead of paper, often ephemeral and other times locked away in obsolete formats or password-locked files: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-26/biography-ai-algorithm-letters-diaries-digital-world/105923770
Do historians need to learn how to code? Yes. This is why I regarded the ability to code an important part of my toolkit when I was working as a professional historian. Knowing how to use an API to efficiently and effectively search and download digitised records was important in my work. I developed a particular methodology to ensure that I maintained sound standards of evidence gathering.
Government archives have been born digital for quite a few years now. Digital cameras, OCR and databases, blogs and websites have revolutionised the way historians research for quite a few years.
We stopped writing physical letters quite a few years ago. Historians of the future will develop new research techniques to get a glimpse into the past, just as many historians like me have done today. Missing records have always been something historians have to contend with - letters that were destroyed or never written. We have never had a complete record of the past, and that won't change in the future.
When meeting up with an elderly relation last week he told us that his father had 45 head of dairy cows. This was enough to look after a family with 5 children in the 1930s and 1940s in the Western District of Victoria.
Makes you think. I guess the family would not have had many things, but they had enough.
Over the last few days I have been sharing about the landscape of western Victoria which is covered with volcanos, some of which erupted comparatively recently, as little as 10,000 years ago. The Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland also has quite a few volcanos of a similar age.
The eruptions of both the western Victorian and Far North Queensland volcanos have been remembered by the Aboriginal peoples of the respective regions. They have carefully passed on this history in their oral storytelling traditions for thousands of years.
Today the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) has published some of these indigenous histories. Read these stories about the creation of landscape that includes the stories about the volcanos: https://www.abc.net.au/news/deeptime/topic/landscape-change/
#volcanos #WesternDistrict #AthertonTablelands #TowerHill #Warrnambool #OzHist
From navigation and hunting to volcanic eruptions and the ice age, learn how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived, created and cared for Country for more than 65,000 years.
There were a lot of indigenous peoples living in this area when the European settlers arrived. Sadly, many were driven out by the invaders very early on. This map shows some of the language groups in the state of Victoria.
Kate Bagnall 白碧
Tim Sherratt
Yvonne Perkins
