I was meant to spend the first half of 2020 on research study leave at the University of Cologne. My partner and I rushed back to Australia in mid-March, disrupting our plans and forcing me into a ...new working paradigm. The disruption wound up sending me into one of the most productive periods of my career. In this article, I reflect on how my privileges-both earned and unearned-have contributed to a boom in my academic work at the same time that it has wreaked havoc on the entire sector. I also reflect on how COVID-19 has exposed and exacerbated inequalities in Australian universities.
Since the Second World War the Australian military has undergone remarkable transformations in the way it has treated lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex service members: it has shifted ...from persecuting, hunting and discharging LGBTI members to embracing them as valued members who enhance the Force's capabilities. LGBTI people have served in the Australian military since its very beginnings, yet Australian Defence Force histories have been very slow to recognise this. Pride in Defence confronts that silence. It charts the changing policies and practices of the ADF, illuminating the experiences of LGBTI members in what was often a hostile institution. Drawing on over 140 interviews and previously unexamined documents, Pride in Defence features accounts of secret romances, police surveillance and traumatic discharges. At its centre are the courageous LGBTI members who served their country in the face of systemic prejudice. In doing so, they showed the power of diversity and challenged the ADF to make it a far stronger institution.
In the campaign against Japan in the Pacific during the Second World War, the armed forces of the United States, Australia, and the Australian colonies of Papua and New Guinea made use of indigenous ...peoples in new capacities. The United States had long used American Indians as soldiers and scouts in frontier conflicts and in wars with other nations. With the advent of the Navajo Code Talkers in the Pacific theater, Native servicemen were now being employed for contributions that were unique to their Native cultures. In contrast, Australia, Papua, and New Guinea had long attempted to keep indigenous peoples out of the armed forces altogether. With the threat of Japanese invasion, however, they began to bring indigenous peoples into the military as guerilla patrollers, coastwatchers, and regular soldiers.
Defending Whose Country?is a comparative study of the military participation of Papua New Guineans, Yolngu, and Navajos in the Pacific theater. In examining the decisions of state and military leaders to bring indigenous peoples into military service, as well as the decisions of indigenous individuals to serve in the armed forces, Noah Riseman reconsiders the impact of the largely forgotten contributions of indigenous soldiers in the Second World War.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been protecting country since time immemorial. One way they have continued these traditions in recent times is through service in the Australian ...military, both overseas and within Australia. In Defence of Country presents a selection of life stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ex-servicemen and women who served in the Australian Army, Navy and Air Force after World War Two. In their own words, participants discuss a range of issues including why they joined up; racial discrimination; the Stolen Generations; leadership; discipline; family; war and peace; education and skills development; community advocacy; and their hopes for the future of Indigenous Australia. Individually and collectively, the life stories in this book highlight the many contributions that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander servicemen and women have made, and continue to make, in defence of country.
This article examines key historical moments in 1982, 1996, 2013 and 2015 when current or formerly serving gay military personnel have publicly asserted their membership in Australia's Anzac legend ...and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community. Through using the public spaces of Anzac Day and Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, LGBTI service organisations have strategically positioned gay service personnel as past, present or future members of Australia's Defence and LGBTI communities. Their public demonstrations have challenged Australians' constructs of gay men's masculinity, the Anzac legend, digger mythology and the Australian Defence Force.
In 1957, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Radio ran a 30-minute feature entitled 'The Story of Douglas Grant: The Black Scotsman'. The broadcast narrated the life of Douglas Grant, an ...Aboriginal man raised in a white Sydney family who served in the First World War. Brian Hungerford reported: 'It Grant's story means that if you take a newborn baby straight from its mother, you can bring it up to fit into any society at any level. There is no inherent mental or emotional difference between the primitive man and the civilised one'. How Douglas Grant's life sits as an assimilation narrative and the role of military service in that account is complex. Whereas the ABC and other media reports promoted Grant as a 'poster-child' for assimilation, by his death in 1951 the unfulfilled promises of equality left Grant questioning whether Australian society would ever allow Aboriginal people to assimilate.
When I started researching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander military service history in 2004, this was a very niche academic area. David Huggonson did some work in the 1980s and 1990s on the ...First World War, and Robert Hall's canonical texts 'The Black Diggers' (1989) and 'Fighters from the Fringe' (1995) had set a dominant narrative of the First and Second World War experiences: notwithstanding regulations explicitly prohibiting enlistment of persons 'not substantially of European origin or descent', Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people managed to circumvent the rules and served in both conflicts. For those men and women enlisted in regular units, it was largely an egalitarian experience - often for the first times in their lives - yet they returned home to continuing discrimination. Huggonson estimated about 400 Aboriginal men served in the First World War; Hall estimated approximately 3,000 Aboriginal people and 850 Torres Strait Islanders formally served in the Second World War, not to mention the hundreds more who served in informal, labouring capacities in remote northern Australia. Some local histories enhanced this dominant narrative of participation, including the works of scholars such as Heather Goodall, Kay Saunders and Elizabeth Osborne. Now the estimates have increased to at least 1,000 and 5,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander personnel in the First and Second World Wars respectively. These men and women came from diverse cultural, educational, linguistic, regional and employment backgrounds.
PDF
