Cultural History in Australia

Showcases Australia’s leading historians writing about cultural history, both in theory and practice.

More fashionable than political, social, or economic history, cultural history has become the predominant kind of history produced in Australia today.

Celebrates the diversity of cultural history but also asks hard questions about its popularity and assesses the ways in which it is practised. Leading Australian historians reflect on the theoretical assumptions from which cultural history draws, and its strategies and methodologies. As well as considering cultural history as an approach to history, they consider it as a source of subjects for historical examination. Thus some essays reflect an author’s own specialty, while demonstrating the agendas and problems discussed elsewhere in the book, showing how an author tackles them in his or her own work.

Contributors include:

• Alan Atkinson on communication technologies that shaped Australia
• Ann Curthoys on cultural history and the nation
• Joy Damousi on psychoanalysis in Australia
• Greg Dening on culture and performance
• Stephen Garton on postructuralism and history
• Tom Griffiths on the nature of culture and the culture of nature
• Jan Kociumbas on Aboriginality and national identity
• Marilyn Lake on gender at Federation

Designed for students uniting historiography, theory, international trends and new case studies on diverse subjects. A major contribution to the study of history in Australia, asking the question: does cultural history make good history?

Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Introduction

Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White

PART ONE

IN GENERAL . . .

1. Cultural history and the nation

Ann Curthoys

1. ‘He filled us full of laughter’: contact and community in the Australian experience

Alan Atkinson

1. On the defensive: poststructuralism and Australian cultural history

Stephen Garton

1. The nature of culture and the culture of nature

Tom Griffiths

1. Memory studies and cultural history

Paula Hamilton

1. On being a white man, Australia, circa 1900

Marilyn Lake

1. Cultural transmissions

Richard Waterhouse

1. Performances: indigenisation and postcolonial culture

Jan Kociumbas

1. Multiculturalism and the problem of multi-cultural histories: an overview of ethnic historiography

Hsu-Ming Teo

PART TWO

IN PARTICULAR . . .

1. Cultures of distinction

Penny Russell

1. ‘In spite of it all, the garden still stands’: gardens, landscape and cultural history

Katie Holmes

1. Creating the white colonial woman: Mary Gaunt’s imperial adventuring and Australian cultural history

Angela Woollacott

1. ‘The Empire was a bar of soap’: life stories and race identity among British emigrants travelling to Australia, 1945-1971

Alistair Thompson

1. Making the ordinary extraordinary in the 1950s: explorations of interiority and Australian cultural history

Joy Damousi

1. Culture is Talk. Living is Story

Greg Dening

Notes

Index