Fractured lives : Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese and their families

Examines how the particular nature of captivity by the Japanese during World War II intensified and complicated the impact, legacy and memory of war for POWs and their families. It presents insights into the experience of the prisoners' wives and how battalion associations protect and promote the remembrance of war.

'Statesmanship of the highest order': Governor-General Ronald Munro-Ferguson and Australia's war of 1914-1918

A study of Governor-General Ronald Munro-Ferguson with particular attention to the views of modern historians. It describes his constitutional role and interventions in the Australian political process. It concludes that he was a conscientious King’s representative, with a deep interest in Australian political and social affairs and was accepted by members of both parties.

"A lasting gift to his descendants” : family memory and the great war in Australia

This article examines the processes of remembering and transmitting experiences of the Great War within families of Australian veterans now passed on. It focuses on a recent boom in private publishing of ancestors’ personal letters and diaries and argues that these practices continue to reimagine and reshape family memories of the war. In so doing it exposes the range of family members implicated in family remembrance then and now, and so complicates any process by which a war almost beyond living memory is to become entirely understood by its public myths and representations.

McCoy and Clarke : their dispute over the age of Australia's black coal

From 1847 until his death in 1899, Professor Frederick McCoy, palaeontologist in Melbourne, maintained a war of words in the scientific literature with Rev. William Clarke, geologist in Sydney, concerning the age of Australia’s black coal deposits. McCoy was convinced that the coals were all of Mesozoic age and Clarke, during the period from 1847 to his death in 1878, maintained equally vehemently that they were Palaeozoic. In fact, Clarke was correct in placing the New South Wales coals in the Palaeozoic, and McCoy’s placing of the Victorian coals in the Mesozoic was also correct. The two men were both particularly stubborn and neither would admit that they might have been arguing about coals of differing ages. Both stood unbendingly by their Northern Hemisphere, European backgrounds, and neither would change their views in the face of new evidence from the Colonies.

Vietnam veteran as ventriloquist

Because of the shame and controversy surrounding the Vietnam war, a stifling of Vietnam veterans' voices resulted. This paper looks at how this came about, as well as the different ways veterans were regarded in society, and the concomitant affects of this on their psychological welfare. The many films dealing with these events are also discussed.

Messages from Long Tan, Vietnam: memorialisation, reconciliation, and historical justice

This article explores the changing ways in which Australians and Vietnamese remember and memorialize their involvement in the Vietnam War and how these processes intersect with notions of reconciliation and historical justice in postwar contexts. It uses the Battle of Long Tan of August 1966 as an entrée into these considerations and questions how heritage-making and memorialization processes can facilitate the achievement of reconciliation between parties formerly in conflict. Not surprisingly, the Australian and Vietnamese veterans of the battle and the two states, the Commonwealth of Australia and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, have different motivations for wanting to remember Long Tan. On the Australian side, a sense that reconciliation and atonement are needed is often reflected in official government and veterans’ statements about the war and Australia-Vietnam relations, in the memorialization process at Long Tan and in the involvement of Australian veterans groups engaged in local economic development and community building in Vietnam. On the Vietnamese side, where the Vietnam War played out as a civil as well as an international war, efforts by those who actively supported the former Republic of Vietnam based in Saigon in the south and among the overseas Vietnamese (Viet kieu) to memorialize their engagement in the conflict have been frustrated. The usefulness of the notion of seeking historical justice is therefore questioned in post–civil war situations where people are locked into fixed histories and are unprepared or unable to revisit and retell personal and collective memories and histories.

US foreign policy in the Middle East : the roots of anti-Americanism

Over the last sixty years, Washington has been a major player in the politics of the Middle East. From Iran in the 1950s, to the Gulf War of 1991, to the devastation of contemporary Iraq, US policy has had a profound impact on the domestic affairs of the region. Anti-Americanism is a pervasive feature of modern Middle East public opinion. But far from being intrinsic to ‘Muslim political culture’, scepticism of the US agenda is directly linked to the regional policies pursued by Washington. By exploring critical points of regional crisis, Kylie Baxter and Shahram Akbarzadeh elaborate on the links between US policy and popular distrust of the United States. The book also examines the interconnected nature of events in this geo-strategically vital region. Accessible and easy to follow, it is designed to provide a clear and concise overview of complex historical and political material. Key features include: •maps illustrating key events and areas of discontent •text boxes on topics of interest related to the Arab/Israeli Wars, Iranian politics, foreign interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the wars of the Persian Gulf, September 11 and the rise of Islamist movements •further reading lists and a selection of suggested study questions at the end of each chapter.

The Sweetland Project. Remembering Gallipoli in the Shire of Nunawading

A chance discovery made on a tour of Anzac Cove provided an immediate link between Gallipoli and Melbourne’s Eastern Suburbs. In the lead up to the Centenary of Anzac, ‘The Sweetland Project’ (named after a Box Hill man, Stephen Sweetland) became a broader search for the connections between Gallipoli and the former Shire of Nunawading, revealing 27 men from the former shire who died during the Gallipoli campaign. This book traces their stories and the reaction to the Great War of the local community, and shows how personal and collective memories of their experiences still resonate today.

Australian citizenship and the two World Wars

This article surveys Australian citizenship: its distinctive characteristics in the first half of the twentieth century, and how these were changed by the experience of the two world wars. It argues that Australian citizenship, at the time of Federation, was racially exclusive, imperial, masculine and deeply anchored in the traditional view of the military obligation of the individual to the state. The world wars, especially the war of 1939-45, encouraged some adjustment to these ideas, particularly in terms of the imperial link, women's status and the social rights of Australians. However, these conflicts were fought within a context of imperial loyalty and the intensity of their demands reinforced military service in defence of the nation as the primary civic virtue. The centrality of Anzac to Australian nationalism also perpetuated a gendered dimension to Australian citizenship. The world wars therefore, for all their dramatic impact on the lives of Australian families and the national political culture, did not force a major reconceptualisation of Australian citizenship.

Iraq's December 2005 election : reporting democratisation in the Australian and Middle Eastern print media

Throughout the coverage of Iraq since the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and especially since September 11, the Western mainstream Media have eschewed key historical and contextual data about Iraq, thereby serving to reduce and homogenize the complexity of the issues surrounding the region and the conflicts therein. In so doing, the media has tended towards Orientalism (Said, 1978) by trivialising Iraq and its people and thereby reinforcing the hegemony of the West over the ‘backward, barbaric’ East. Building on earlier research (Isakhan, 2005a), this paper further examines the reductive and homogenising reporting of Iraq in the Western media by using both quantitative and qualitative assessment methods to compare and contrast the discursive practices used to construct the Iraqi election of December 15, 2005 in Australia’s leading daily newspapers with newspapers from the Middle East. In essence, it finds that while the Australian media propagates Orientalism through its one-eyed coverage, the Middle Eastern papers are more contemplative, focusing on the impact that this election could have throughout the region.

Democracy building in post-Saddam Iraq : 'historical memory' and 'primitive democracy'

Iraq’s long and complex past has played a particularly poignant role in establishing and legitimating the various political movements that have ascended to power since the nation state was first created by the British in the early 1920s (Davis, 2005b). For example, the installed Hashemite monarchy that ruled Iraq until the 1958 revolution utilised their ancestral connection to the Prophet Muhammad to legitimate their claim of being the rightful legatees of the Arab lands, while later Saddam Hussein invoked the power of Iraq’s Mesopotamian past to build nationalism and unite the people against ancient enemies such as during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.What is problematic about these examples of ‘historical memory’ in Iraq is that they have also been used to justify a series of autocratic and despotic regimes that have attempted to quash Iraq’s civil society and curtail any semblance of democratic reform. However, this paper argues that such ‘historical memories’ may well be useful in reinvigorating the Iraqi public sphere and enabling the transition from despotism to democracy. To do this, this paper focuses on the ancient Mesopotamian practise of ‘Primitive Democracy’ and argues that reinvigorating such histories may serve to legitimate and promote democratic governance within Iraq.