Settler Societies

In Convict Workers (1988), a controversial landmark work of revisionist history, Stephen Nicholas and Peter Shergold discussed one of the most pertinent problems facing historians of convict Australia. Despite possessing 'a high level of literacy, convicts have been made inarticulate by the passage of time. First-hand written records of their experiences in Australia are rare'. 1 Compounding the problem is that surviving forms of convict life writing rarely convey 'authentic' convict 'voices'. Extant convict narratives were mostly written by transported political prisoners. Published throughout the nineteenth century, historians have explored how these writings were moulded by middle-class editors for widespread consumption. 2 Other, less common accounts, such as those published in newspapers, were often similarly shaped. 3 To better understand the lives of Australia's convicts, then, historians have turned to other sources. In doing so, they have asked different questions of a plethora of source types and interpreted them using various frameworks. And yet, despite the importance of methodology in comprehending Australia's convict past, critical discussion of it in the historiography has been limited. There has been a steady evolution in how the convict past has been deployed in Australian historiography; indeed, writing about convict lives has a long history. It has provided rich fodder for fictional narratives that are nonetheless grounded in archival research. Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life (1875) is a classic example, and it has been followed by a host of novelised accounts, including prominent works such as Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish (2001) and Kate Grenville's The Secret River (2005). 4 Such works though also reflect the limitations of the official record as biographical sources. The archives of convict Australia are not and were never intended 8

In Convict Workers (1988), a controversial landmark work of revisionist history, Stephen Nicholas and Peter Shergold discussed one of the most pertinent problems facing historians of convict Australia. Despite possessing 'a high level of literacy, convicts have been made inarticulate by the passage of time. First-hand written records of their experiences in Australia are rare'. 1 Compounding the problem is that surviving forms of convict life writing rarely convey 'authentic' convict 'voices'. Extant convict narratives were mostly written by transported political prisoners. Published throughout the nineteenth century, historians have explored how these writings were moulded by middle-class editors for widespread consumption. 2 Other, less common accounts, such as those published in newspapers, were often similarly shaped. 3 To better understand the lives of Australia's convicts, then, historians have turned to other sources. In doing so, they have asked different questions of a plethora of source types and interpreted them using various frameworks. And yet, despite the importance of methodology in comprehending Australia's convict past, critical discussion of it in the historiography has been limited. There has been a steady evolution in how the convict past has been deployed in Australian historiography; indeed, writing about convict lives has a long history. It has provided rich fodder for fictional narratives that are nonetheless grounded in archival research. Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life (1875) is a classic example, and it has been followed by a host of novelised accounts, including prominent works such as Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish (2001) and Kate Grenville's The Secret River (2005). 4 Such works though also reflect the limitations of the official record as biographical sources. The archives of convict Australia are not and were never intended 8

This paper argues that it was environmental knowledge, which Aboriginal people held and traded, that formed the basis of the slender chances they had for survival in the changed circumstances of British settlement in Sydney. The case study is centred on the life and work of William Rowley, about whom the little evidence which exists revolves around his use of and trade in his knowledge of the resources of Botany Bay, notably oysters and mangroves. Reference is also made to Biddy Giles, who used her knowledge to act as guide and cultural interpreter but also traded in native flowers. Rowley's life is less well known but focused on the capture of and trade in food resources. This included his employment by Thomas Holt in the series of attempts to establish oyster culture on the shore of land purchased originally as for pastoral enterprise.

During the 1830s, the Bushranging Act and the Vagrancy Act were crafted to prevent crime, revolt and insurrection in the colony of New South Wales. These statutes contained exceptional methods to police and control colonial populations and suspended legal safeguards designed to protect the population from abuses of power. Supporters of the laws argued that extreme measures were necessary due to the emergency of the occasion. Understanding the Bushranging Act and the Vagrancy Act’s enactment and operation, as well as the purposes they were designed to serve and the liberties they infringed to achieve these ends requires attention to local circumstance. A fine-grained analysis, rooted in the peculiarities of life in colonial New South Wales and anchored by the law’s operation on the ground is needed to understand the malleability of British law at this place and at this time. In this article, I argue that rather than a select criminal contingent, the New South Wales’ authorities incre...

Convicts Life In James Tucker’s The Adventures Of Ralph Rashleigh.  Convicts transported from Britain to Australia are one of historical phenomenon. This research is aimed to describe the convicts life in the late eighteenth century to early nineteenth century in Australia as illustrated in The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh by James Tucker. This research was a descriptive qualitative research. The data were collected by using library research and it was analyzed by applying sociological approach proposed by Swingewood (1972) who revealed three classifications of sociology of literature. In this case, the researcher focused on the classification of sociology as the mirror of age. The result of this research showed that the convicts alive harshly in Australia where the flogging was a common punishment for them

The savings-development nexus is a topical issue in current development literature. No study has yet explored this relationship in nineteenth-century 'South African' colonies. An historical analysis of the development of the savings' trends in South Africa may assist in understanding development trends in the twentieth century. Apart from general descriptions of the nature of economic activity in the Cape Colony very little is known about the role of savings and financial sector development in the growing colonial economy. This paper describes and surveys the nature of financial markets in the Cape Colony between 1850 and 1909 and seeks to explain the relationship between savings and economic growth. Savings is defined in the broad sense of monetary and non-monetary savings and would be assumed to be a proxy for financial development in the Cape Colony. This paper contributes to the economic history literature on the colonial past of South Africa by using recently compiled data on the GDP (Greyling & Verhoef 2015) as well as monetary savings and non-monetary savings (livestock) to test whether the general view that 'financial development is robustly growth promoting' can be substantiated in the last half of the nineteenth-century Cape Colony. The Johansen vector error correction model technique is applied to determine the relationship between savings and economic growth. It is found that despite the expectations in the literature that financial deepening contributes to economic growth, the Cape Colony did not display such causal relationship in the period under review.

Grace Karskens's biographical essay 'Nah Doongh's Song' tells the story of an Aboriginal woman from Mooro Morack, Penrith. In 2019 the essay won the Australian Book Review's Calibre Prize, and in June that year Grace and historian Mark McKenna met at Sydney's Gleebooks for an 'In-conversation' evening to discuss Nah Doongh's story and the historical thinking, sources and methods that made writing her story possible, as well as the wider implications of writing biographies of Aboriginal people. This is an edited transcript of their conversation. Mark: We're here this evening to discuss Grace's recent essay 'Nah Doongh's Song', which has won the 2019 Australian Book Review's Calibre Prize. 1 To my eyes it is nothing short of a masterclass in how to write history. So to begin, could you tell us a little bit about Nah Doongh? Why did you become interested in her? 2 Karskens, People of the River.

have is a series of competing nationalisms operating across both national terrains, including internally (whose is the indigenous nation of Aotearoa?); nonetheless countless filiations continue to span the Tasman, connecting people, language, politics, sentiment, ecology, history, art and literature. The first ASAL conference to be held outside Australia, in Wellington in July 2012, considered the long and tangled histories of our two literatures. The call for papers took its starting point from Grace Karskens's history of Sydney, The Colony, praised for its outstanding sense of place, and contributors were invited to disaggregate contemporary national binaries in ways that would allow us to see the many continuities as well as the divergences with which we generate our sense of place. The conference asked contributors to revisit the literary history of our two nations and uncover the ways in which the 'Tasman World,' as James Belich terms it, continues into the twenty-first century. Contributors were also asked to consider if the old postcolonial verities and paradigms become less important as critical writing shifts focus and gear-to eco-criticism, transnationalism, or indeed, to invoke the title of the 2011 ASAL Conference, to 'field', curriculum and emotion. There was a great range of papers and those selected for publication in this issue of JASAL reflect the diverse and imaginative ways in which the history and literatures of our two countries might be reconsidered in terms of their competing nationalisms, as well as of the cross currents, shared interests and people which connect them. Keynote Essays Three keynote essays are included here: the 2012 Barry Andrews Address 'The Village' presented by Martin Edmond; the 2012 Dorothy Green Lecture 'Archipelagic space and the uncertain future of national literatures' by Elizabeth McMahon; and Grace Karsken's 'The Colony.' All three of these keynote contributors have taken up the question of dialogue and hiatus between Australia and New Zealand quite directly, suggesting something of the possibilities opened up by a move to think of alternatives to an imagined clear division between the two landmasses, nationally conceived. 'The Village' goes to the heart of the complicated trans-Tasman nexus by unfolding the many threads spreading out from a little-known Australian sojourn of New Zealand's major twentieth-century artist, Colin McCahon. In 1951 McCahon visited Australia for the first time and took lessons from Mary Cockburn Mercer, a Melbourne artist who had known Chagall and Picasso. McCahon said she taught him how to be a painter, and Edmond remarks that it seems typical of our antipodean relationships that this important history of cross fertilisation has not been told. McCahon's trip to Melbourne was funded by Charles Brasch, founder and editor of Landfall, a New Zealand literary equivalent of Meanjin, and his visit was facilitated by Brasch's cousin Lina Bryans. Both Brasch and his cousins were descended from Hallenstein brothers and this leads Edmond to an analysis of what he calls 'the 'Village'-a 'cosmopolitan community, with roots in old Europe, and…the Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora as well, which, transplanted to the Antipodes, included as a matter of course

During the first half of the nineteenth century, one of the uses Britain made of its Australian penal colonies was as a repository for incorrigible indigenes from its various colonies. Included amongst this largely forgotten cohort were several dozen Aboriginal men transported from New South Wales. Sent to such far-flung places as Van Diemen's Land and Norfolk Island, Aboriginal captives were incorporated into the system and worked as convicts. Factors that set them apart from other convicts include their different pathways into captivity, their different understandings of and responses to imprisonment, and the different rationale informing the punishment meted out to them by the colonial authorities.

This article explores the way a colonial gentry was constituting itself as a social grouping in the mid nineteenth century through shaping the landscape and material culture of suburbs such as Darling Point in Sydney. In doing so , they sought to create an 'infrastructure of certainty' for themselves in the challenging and volatile world of what was still predominantly a penal colony. Important to this investigation is an understanding of the lack of stability of this social grouping, particularly in its earliest years, and how this was played out in the subdivisions of land and the building, ownship and furnishing of the early stone villas of this area. I am interested in what this built environment might suggest about the effectivity of material culture in the mobilisation and performance of class, gendered and racial identities in particular urban environments in the nineteenth century.

Social movements emerged quickly in Australia and exerted a rapid and important influence on the development of politics and society. Not only were Australian men among the first to enjoy the privilege of the suffrage, they were also among the first to extend this privilege to women, to form powerful unions, to forge parties of labour capable of wielding national power, and to host movements of environmental protection. Indigenous people also used methods of petitioning and demonstration from the nineteenth century, though with notably lesser success. The precocious mobilisation of Australian social movements reflected the nation's history as a penal colony and a settler colony. The state was a powerful agent and the object of political claims. It acted to repress the most radical political agents, but also to incorporate and legitimate the demands of major political campaigns. This process was evident from the nineteenth century until the twenty first. It was jeopardised by the...

, in addition to first-rate work by others like Jim Smith, Keith Vincent Smith and James Kohen. For this reason, I waited in some anticipation for the publication of this book. Although it doesn't quite match up to the others, it is a very welcome addition to Sydney Aboriginal historiography. Despite its comprehensive title, the book is essentially a history of only a rather narrowly defined coastal region of Sydney from La Perouse to the southern shore of Sydney Harbour, and the lower Georges River.

This essay examines the spaces in which Irish immigrants renegotiated negative stereotypes of wanton violence that accompanied them to New South Wales in the Early Victorian period. This process occurred by way of legitimizing violence through an Anglicized cultural filter or by curbing violence in instances where it was expected and publicly denounced. As these immigrants adapted to normative notions surrounding proper forms of violence and masculinity, they contributed to an overall shift in Australian cultural identities that recognized the significant Irish minority as a viable and valuable component of colonial society.

Convicts Life In James Tucker's The Adventures Of Ralph Rashleigh. Convicts transported from Britain to Australia are one of historical phenomenon. This research is aimed to describe the convicts life in the late eighteenth century to early nineteenth century in Australia as illustrated in The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh by James Tucker. This research was a descriptive qualitative research. The data were collected by using library research and it was analyzed by applying sociological approach proposed by Swingewood (1972) who revealed three classifications of sociology of literature. In this case, the researcher focused on the classification of sociology as the mirror of age. The result of this research showed that the convicts alive harshly in Australia where the flogging was a common punishment for them.

n one of the earliest accounts of the 1808 mutiny against Governor Bligh by the New South Wales Corps, William Charles Wentworth explained the event in classic Whig terms. Arguing for the necessity of an elected assembly to balance the executive and prevent tyranny, Wentworth insisted that the absence of such a representative institution in New South Wales (NSW) had allowed Bligh to deprive the free citizens of the colony of their inherited rights and privileges and forced the New South Wales Corps to depose him. 2 In other words Bligh's tyranny resulted from a faulty system of government, rather than from his natural authoritarian tendencies. Over one hundred years later, H. V. Evatt turned this argument on its head, denying that Bligh was a tyrant and portraying him instead as the champion of small farmers and free immigrants. He was the victim of the machinations of John Macarthur who had a vested interest in maintaining a corrupt system that privileged the economic interests of the officers of the Corps. 3 In his study of John Macarthur, published in 1955, Malcolm Ellis challenged this view. Ellis revived the notion of Bligh as despotic and corrupt, almost Stalin-like in his irrational authoritarianism. He attributed the rebellion to the governor's inherently flawed 1

The nineteenth-century architectural history of what Philippa Mein Smith (among others) has called the 'Tasman world' has long been shaped by the nationalist historiographies of twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand. Developments in the region's colonial architecture from the 1780s onwards have thus fed later narratives of national foundations. The call for this session invited scholars to work against the grain of that problematic nationalism by addressing the architecture and infrastructure of those colonial industries operating across the early colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land and New Zealand, and connecting that 'world' to the economies of the British Empire, the 'Anglosphere', and architectural geographies defined by trade. These papers thus return to the colonial era of the South Pacific informed by the gains of post-colonial history, four-nations British historiography, studies of global colonial networks and systems, and an appreciation for 'minor' forms of historical evidence and architectural practice. Armed thus, the papers in this session consider the architecture of the Tasman world from the 1780s to the 1840s in its historical circumstances, exploring architecture across three different registers: intentioned works definitively cast as Architecture; the 'grey' architecture (after Bremner) of industries, transhipping and colonial infrastructure; and as an analogy for the relationships, systems and structures of the colonial project and its economic underpinnings. Papers move around and across the Tasman Sea.

This paper forms part of a collaborative project that aims to reframe the architectural histories of Australia and New Zealand by producing the first connected history of early colonial architecture in the Tasman world, a concept defined connectively as a working region of traffic across the Tasman Sea. In the early nineteenth century the Tasman world denoted a sub-set of imperial ventures between the south-eastern Australian colonies and pre(proto)-colonial New Zealand that were also linked commercially to British India and to imperial encroachments in China. Avoiding nationalist frameworks, the project expects to show how the earliest colonial architecture in ‘our’ region was an outcome of the industries that brought into being and shaped the colonial world. Seal hunting was foremost among these early European industries, providing the first export profits for the British colony of New South Wales. Yet the legacy of the sealing entrepreneurs based in New South Wales (here termed ‘sealer dealers’) and their frontier gangs of seal hunters remains unexamined in architectural history. Using historical methods, this paper argues that the sealing industry, while ephemeral in time, was foundational in place-making by establishing the Tasman world’s early-colonial built environment from the 1790s to about 1830.

An introductory essay on Manning Clark's A Short History of Australia, framed on Clark's presentation in his passages of four views of the 'Age of Revolution and Nationalism'. The essay is followed by a re-organisation of the selected passages from the book, according to the presentation of the four views.

Convicts Life In James Tucker's The Adventures Of Ralph Rashleigh. Convicts transported from Britain to Australia are one of historical phenomenon. This research is aimed to describe the convicts life in the late eighteenth century to early nineteenth century in Australia as illustrated in The Adventures of Ralph Rashleigh by James Tucker. This research was a descriptive qualitative research. The data were collected by using library research and it was analyzed by applying sociological approach proposed by Swingewood (1972) who revealed three classifications of sociology of literature. In this case, the researcher focused on the classification of sociology as the mirror of age. The result of this research showed that the convicts alive harshly in Australia where the flogging was a common punishment for them.

In his landmark book The Biggest Estate on Earth, historian Bill Gammage argues that before the arrival of white settlers, the whole Australian continent was a manicured cultural landscape, shaped and maintained by precise, deliberate and repeated fires. In Aboriginal hands, fire made the entire country ‘beautiful and comfortable’, and so Australia was one vast ‘estate’, a giant ‘park’, a series of ‘farms without fences’. These words imply that Aboriginal rights to land are closely tied to universal fire regimes. Gammage’s book has been well-received and celebrated. But it has also polarised debates on fire regimes, especially the extent to which fire really did shape every corner of the continent, and the related assertion that contemporary ecologies are the result of the cessation of fire since 1788.
This paper integrates ethnographic history and archaeology with geography, soil science and ecology in order to set Gammage’s model against a particular ecological zone – the dense River-flat Forests that once lined Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River in New South Wales, Australia. Dyarubbin was occupied by Aboriginal people for perhaps 50,000 years, and from 1794 it became the site of the first major settler farming frontier.  Paying attention to the local and the particular, this paper asks: was this fiercely contested country a tidy mosaic of open forests, water and grasslands created by cultural fire?  Was Aboriginal burning here extensive or limited? What aspects of human and ecological history might be obscured by the universalising model in which cultural fire dominates above all other factors? Did the Aboriginal landscape in turn shape the settler one, and what were the consequences for land and people?

(REVISED 18 Feb. 2018 to incorporate discussion on academia.edu prompted by Dr Kristyn Harman)

A Personal History of Family History & its wider contribution

My current project about the female convicts has caused me to think deeply about the historiography on this topic. To realise how famiily history put flesh and blood on the skeleton of writing 'history from below'. I'll use my ten minutes to ponder the significant methodological shift this caused. How focus on the personal and the ordinary also produced changes in interpretation and perspective. Family history has led to the discovery of new sources. It has influenced the digitisation of existing sources. Family history's role in Australia has been significant beyond the personal for more than thirty years. It is at its best when combined with academic scholarship. Now Aboriginal historians are also researching their family history, academic and family historians can potentially play a vital role towards Reconciliation between the Aboriginal  people and other Australians.

A Personal History of Family History & its wider contribution

My current project about the female convicts has caused me to think deeply about the historiography on this topic. To realise how famiily history put flesh and blood on the skeleton of writing 'history from below'. I'll use my ten minutes to ponder the significant methodological shift this caused. How focus on the personal and the ordinary also produced changes in interpretation and perspective. Family history has led to the discovery of new sources. It has influenced the digitisation of existing sources. Family history's role in Australia has been significant beyond the personal for more than thirty years. It is at its best when combined with academic scholarship. Now Aboriginal historians are also researching their family history, academic and family historians can potentially play a vital role towards Reconciliation between the Aboriginal  people and other Australians.

This paper was presented at the MLA conference in New York (January 2018).

While many contemporary Australian writers pitch their narratives on the coastal fringes, where most Australians reside, Nicolas Rothwell returns to the interior obsessively. In his non-fiction, the Outback is seen as a place where existential crises culminate and find a form of resolution. It is as though Australia's complex postcolonial space acts as a catalyst for unsettling prior forms of knowledge and belief. As he scours the Outback, Rothwell questions the European legacy and finds the conceptual and aesthetic tools Australians were bequeathed with ineffective for articulating a poetics of space that is not merely replicative of older models. He engages the reader in an active experience of space that is ethical and articulated around a particular aesthetic – the sublime. Different aesthetics of the sublime emerged since the concept was first articulated, from a sacred transcendental sublime, to particular expressions of the sublime. Bill Ashcroft argues that Australia inspired a 'horizonal sublime'. This paper outlines parts of Rothwell's representational project – a horizonal, silent sublime. I propose to analyse Nicolas Rothwell's Wings of the Kite-Hawk (2003) to present how and why this form of representation is particularly perceptive for reflecting on Australia's spatial and political issues.

This paper was presented at the ASAL Conference in July 2017.

Ross Gibson’s unsettling spatial history: A resolute irresolution

Settler colonies tend to have an incomplete, fragmented memory of some historical events due to their traumatic or shameful nature. The consequence of denial and repression is the production of a post-traumatic society. For Ross Gibson, Australia is a “society with metaphysical turbulence in its foundations”, a post-traumatic society that sits uncomfortably on space and place, unable to truly belong. Detective work is necessary, Gibson suggests, to uncover and give shape to such a contentious past. This is one of the objectives of his work, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002). The book offers an attempt to recover and make meaning of fragmented memories of the past, and put to rest their ghosts to avert their ongoing haunting of present places.

Gibson represents a post-traumatic society founded on historical, rather than structural, trauma. This is an issue of critical importance because, if some form of resolution may be reached in the case of historical trauma, it is not the case for structural trauma. Gibson adopts a strategy that is reminiscent of “empathetic unsettlement” – a concept developed by Dominick LaCapra in his article “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” (1999) – which proves particularly useful for a settler society like Australia. He goes further, however, insisting on the importance of investigating historical trauma on spatial, as well as temporal grounds. Spatial trauma affects individuals or whole communities when they become alienated from space or place. Gibson’s program aims to re-present regions that were labelled as “badlands” so that instead of being anathema, they become productive areas once more.

Settler societies tend to resort to myths in order to settle contemporary anxieties. If myths have a settling function, what happens when the seams that hold a contentious past together are unpicked? Tim Winton's In the Winter Dark (1988) demonstrates that colonial myths cannot account for a sequence of events that take place in bushland surrounding the protagonist's farm. As the characters fail to resolve this mysterious violence through narrative, the contradictions that demanded the construction of foundational myths reappear. Winton's gothic tale engages with the idea of settler colonial trauma, but the object of trauma is displaced and treated allegorically. I demonstrate how John Docker's concept of 'Epistemological Vertigo' can be used to propose a postcolonial reading of Winton's novel.

By showing how easily the most inflexible settler-farmer gives way to fear and irrational behaviour, this story reveals the fragility of the settler society. The settling myths that hold the nation together are not enough to hold back the violence associated with the colonial past which keeps coming to the surface of the present in the form or personal and collective trauma. The conclusion Winton reaches is that the settler is not settled. The bush defeats settler logic. Space defeats time too. In the Winter Dark challenges romanticised perceptions of the bush and promotes a non-anthropocentric view of space and nature. Only by moving away from traditional representations of nature can Australians re-establish a productive relationship with space.

Keywords: postcolonial studies, settler societies, bush, space, place, gothic, trauma, epistemological vertigo, Tim Winton, John Docker

This paper was presented at the AAALS Conference in April 2017

Settler societies tend to resort to myths in order to settle contemporary anxieties. If myths have a settling function, what happens when the seams that hold a contentious past together are unpicked? Tim Winton's In the Winter Dark (1988) demonstrates that colonial myths cannot account for a sequence of events that take place in bushland surrounding the protagonist's farm. As the characters fail to resolve this mysterious violence through narrative, the contradictions that demanded the construction of foundational myths reappear. Winton's gothic tale engages with the idea of settler colonial trauma, but the object of trauma is displaced and treated allegorically. I demonstrate how John Docker's concept of "Epistemological Vertigo" can be used to propose a postcolonial reading of Winton's novel.

By showing how easily the most inflexible settler-farmer gives way to fear and irrational behaviour, this story reveals the fragility of the settler society. The settling myths that hold the nation together are not enough to hold back the violence associated with the colonial past which keeps coming to the surface of the present in the form or personal and collective trauma. The conclusion Winton reaches is that the settler is not settled. The bush defeats settler logic. Space defeats time too. In the Winter Dark challenges romanticised perceptions of the bush and promotes a non-anthropocentric view of space and nature. Only by moving away from traditional representations of nature can Australians re-establish a productive relationship with space.

Keywords: postcolonial studies, settler societies, bush, space, place, gothic, trauma, epistemological vertigo, Tim Winton, John Docker

Foucault’s theory on Panopticism posits that people who perceive that they are under surveillance act according to the values and rules set forth by the entity that is believed to be watching over them.  Consequently, despite not being able to ascertain whether they are indeed being watched, such people continue to act in such manner out of fear of persecution or punishment.  This theory is traditionally applied to institutions such as hospitals, prisons, schools, and workplaces.  In this paper, I used Foucault’s theory to analyze the values, behavior, and action of men and women and on the seemingly invisible entity that encourages them to uphold gender roles, believe in the inferiority of women and the superiority of men, and perpetrate discrimination and violence against women in various aspects and means.

This essay furthers the debate on the Palestinian case as it relates to Genocide Studies, questioning the lack of substantive discussion of this case to date in traditional Genocide Studies fora. It reemphasises the importance of the settler-colonial dimension to Zionist settlement in Palestine, which, it argues, has so far not been explored sufficiently. The paper suggests that the ‘Nakba’ of 1948, which was based on appropriation of the land of Palestine without its people, comprising massacres, physical destruction of villages, appropriation of land, property and culture, can be seen as an ongoing process and not merely a historical event.

Seeking Sydney From the Ground Up: Foundations and Horizons in Sydney's Historiography GRACE KARSKENS ometime in 1962, my father came home with some exciting news. I had been chosen to be part of a parade! I was to stand on the back of a float contributed by the Good Neighbour Council, Blacktown branch, of which Dad was an enthusiastic and active member, and later Vice President. It was a great honour! What parade? Why? I was four and can't remember. But one thing is still clear: I had to wear 'national costume'. I can imagine my thrilled Dad, grandly imparting this piece of information to my mother. And my mother being rather flummoxed. What on earth was our national costume? She had grown up in Indonesia. Dad was from Holland and his folks hadn't worn 'national costume' for perhaps a century. Both of them were, after all, striving to be modern people in a young, modern nation. But, like lots of housewives then, Mum was a great dressmaker, so soon she was busily S

Ideas and expectations about colonial space and the making and remaking of real places lie at the heart of the early Australian colonies. Over the past forty years, and especially in the last decade, scholars have recovered much of that lost world, a world of polyglot diversity, constant movement, economic social and cultural expansion, cross-cultural encounters, relationships and appropriations, extraordinary adaptations, myriad connections and overlaid human geographies.
Yet in the later nineteenth century, the colonies were also profoundly shaped by discontinuities in memory, place and experience, as wave upon wave of new arrivals started new lives literally unaware of what had happened earlier, or how these places had come to be. The success of later settlers was built upon those earlier foundations, and yet false assumptions about ‘gaol colonies’ and ‘savages’, twinned with assertions of legitimate occupancy and entitlement, easily captured the narrative as well as the literal ground, and are still widespread in Australian historiography, popular history and heritage today.

This article offers a preliminary investigation of illegal movement by British convicts on one of the remote, frontier pastoral districts of New South Wales (Australia) in the 1820s. Principally I am concerned here with some broader questions concerning the redistribution and demographic movement of the NSW convict population during this important period of expansion and reorganisation. What were the frequency and the nature of illegal movement on the remote Bathurst frontier? To what extent was the forced relocation of the convict population countered by their returning illegally? Did they, by clandestinely leaving their employment situations, succeed in improving their situation? Did they find a genuine 'change of place'?