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25.01.2022 CHRG SEMINAR SERIES: We are delighted to announce that Niro Kandasamy and Mia Martin Hobbs will each present a paper at the next CHRG seminar, which will take p...lace on Wednesday 23rd September at 11am via Zoom. To register, please contact Jacqui Baker ([email protected]) Mia Martin Hobbs. Title: Codes, Nodes, and Memos: Using NVivo to Map Themes and Analyse Dynamics in Oral Histories of the US Military Reconstruction of Iraq. Abstract: Despite the widespread use of computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software in social science research, many historians primarily analyse their historical sources manually, or combine multiple digital technologies for different stages of analysis. Software such as NVivo supports most stages and aspects of historical research, including data storage, examination, organization, analysis, and interpretation. Rather than doing the work for you, NVivo facilitates deep qualitative analysis, encouraging review and refinement of concepts, themes, and connections. Drawing on research conducted with the United States Institute for Peace Oral History Iraq Experience Project, I will demonstrate how I use NVivo for mapping (coding) concepts and themes (nodes), reflecting on and interpreting dynamics (memos), and visualizing data in oral history research. I find NVivo useful for thinking through relationships between themes and concepts such as interviewee observations on the impact of regime legacies on the occupied population and attributes and meta-data such as the interviewee’s gender identity, or the time of the interview in historical research. I will also demonstrate how to use coding to create timelines in NVivo, allowing users to analyse change over time in qualitative data. Niro Kandasamy. Title: A middle power in the Indian Ocean? Australia’s foreign relations with Sri Lanka, 1972-1989. Abstract: Australia’s foreign policy in the 1970s and 1980s is generally characterised by its role and status as a ‘middle power’ striking a balance between its ‘rights’ and ‘responsibilities’. During this period, the much tighter integration of the international community and the gradual recognition of interdependency advocated by Australia involved a key site: the Indian Ocean. Australia’s first white paper in 1976 placed the Indian Ocean as a potential site for an international crisis, mainly due to the military presence of the USSR and the US, with the former viewed as a threat to critical lines of oil supply, food, and other resources to Australia. For these reasons, Australia adopted an outward restraint against the Indian Ocean activities of both the US and USSR, showing support for key measures such as the Indian Ocean Zone of Peace that was initiated by Sri Lanka at the United Nations in 1971. Drawing on archival materials, this paper examines Australia’s foreign relations with Sri Lanka in the 1970s and 1980s in relation to the Indian Ocean. By considering the Indian Ocean as a key site for political and cultural-historical development, the paper aims to ‘think through oceans’ and complicates Australia’s status as being less a middle power than a ‘functional power’.

25.01.2022 Medieval historian Kathryn Smithies recently published a new history of the donkey, exploring human attitudes towards this common domesticated animal in the Middle Ages. In this blogpost, she examines the place of the donkey in the history of labour: https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/shaps-research//20/donkeywork/

24.01.2022 Historians play a vital role in the work of New Zealand's Waitangi Tribunal Unitone of the key institutions engaged in protecting Mori rights under the 1840 Treaty. Five(!) graduates from our History program have ended up working for the Waitangi Tribunal Unit. Read about their work in this interview by current PhD candidate in History Jonathan Tehusijarana:... go.unimelb.edu.au/48ai

23.01.2022 Mia Martin Hobbs comments on the ADF Afghanistan Inquiry report, and traces parallels to US and Australian atrocities in the Vietnam War, for the Australian Policy & History project.

22.01.2022 Molly Mckew (PhD in History, 2019) looks back on the history of sharehousing and counter-culture in 1970s Melbourne

21.01.2022 2020 has been grim, but there have been worse years. In the latest edition of 'Pursuit' Claudia Hooper asked Frederik Vervaet, Catherine Kovesi, Hayden Dalton and Deirdre Coleman to take us through some of History's other terrible times.

20.01.2022 Fay Woodhouse, "Gita: Melbourne's First Yoga School 65 Years of History" (Hindsight Consulting Historians, 2019) The Gita School of Yoga, now Gita World, has seen three significant phases in its 65-year history. Founded by Margrit Segesman in 1954, in 1960 the Gita School of Yoga was the first full-time permanent yoga school in Melbourne. During the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, yoga offered women both a healthy regime and a viable career path. When Margrit retired... in 1983, Gita was transferred to Lucille Wood and Di Lucas, beginning the second phase of the school’s history. Their plans for a yoga school in the modern age were embraced by the increasing number of enthusiastic students. In their first decade as leaders of the school, they introduced teacher training courses, a teachers’ guild, a charitable foundation and turned the idea of yoga tours on its head when they began tours to explore the roots of yoga in Egypt. Now in its third phase, Gita retains its flagship teacher training course while embracing the digital world offering classes, courses and meditations across the airwaves. Gita: Melbourne’s First Yoga School 65 years of history provides the context to the development of yoga in Australia since 1950. It demonstrates that the yoga scene in Australia would not be what it is today without Gita, Melbourne’s first yoga school. https://www.historyvictoria.org.au//gita-melbournes-first/

18.01.2022 A reminder that the excellent Unimelb History Society is running its AGM via Zoom this evening, followed by a Trivia Night -- if you can, please come along and support our students, who have done an amazing job at keeping History Society activities going through the pandemic.

17.01.2022 Mark Edele is among the speakers at this free online event coming up on Thursday 24 September

17.01.2022 Heather Dalton (ed.), Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Imperial Expansion, and Exile, 15501850 (Amsterdam University Press 2020) Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Imperial Expansion and Exile, 1550-1850 brings together eleven original essays by an international group of scholars, each investigating how family, or the idea of family, was maintained or reinvented when husbands, wives, children, apprentices, servants or slaves separated, or faced ...separation, from their household. The result is a fresh and geographically wide-ranging discussion about the nature of family and its intersection with travel over a three hundred year period during which roles and relationships, within and between households, were increasingly affected by trade, settlement, and empire building. The imperial project may have influenced different regions in different ways at different times yet, as this collection reveals, families, especially those transcending national ties and traditional boundaries were central to its progress. Together, these essays bring new understandings of the foundations of our interconnected world and of the people who contributed to it. https://www.aup.nl//keeping-family-in-an-age-of-long-dista

15.01.2022 Gerhard Wiesenfeldt teaches the Summer intensive subject "Astronomy in World History", covering the development of astronomical thought across ten different civilisations. Gerhard sat down with Samara Greenwood to discuss the thinking behind the subject design.

15.01.2022 Jessie Webb (18801944) was the first woman to teach Ancient History at the University of Melbourne. Emily Simons and Madaline Harris-Schober discuss her life and legacy for the Australasian Women in Ancient World Studies (AWAWS) blog:

14.01.2022 The History Council of Victoria's excellent History Roadshow for Year 11 and 12 History students will this year take place online; it features Peter McPhee and Sean Scalmer, among many other wonderful historians: https://www.historycouncilvic.org.au/history_roadshow

14.01.2022 An op-ed by Julia Hurst, Lecturer in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History, on Australia's failure to protect Indigenous heritage sites.

14.01.2022 Afterstorm: postnational story-telling and Australia’s wars A free online event hosted by the Australian Centre on Wednesday 7 October 2020 https://events.unimelb.edu.au//8453-afterstorm-postnationa

13.01.2022 Rustam Alexander, "Regulating Homosexuality in Soviet Russia, 195691: A Different History" (Manchester University Press, 2021) This ground-breaking book challenges the widespread view that sex and homosexuality were unmentionable in the USSR. The Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras (1956-82) have remained obscure and unexplored from this perspective. Drawing on previously undiscovered sources, Alexander fills in this critical gap. The book reveals that from 1956 to 1991, doctors, e...ducators, jurists and police officers discussed homosexuality. At the heart of discussions were questions which directly affected the lives of homosexual people in the USSR. Was homosexuality a crime, disease or a normal variant of human sexuality? Should lesbianism be criminalised? Could sex education prevent homosexuality? What role did the GULAG and prisons play in homosexuality across the USSR? These discussions often had practical implications - doctors designed and offered medical treatments for homosexuality in hospitals, and procedures and medications were also used in prisons. https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/shaps-rese//rustam-alexander/ https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk//regulating-homos/

07.01.2022 A free online talk coming up: Dr Sophie Cooper (University of Leicester) 'Women and the Shaping of Irish Identities in Melbourne, 1857-1920' Melbourne Irish Studies Seminar Tuesday 18 May 2021, 6:30pm... In 1857, the Irish Sisters of Mercy arrived in Melbourne from Perth becoming the city’s first religious order. These women were figures of authority and played an important role in establishing the city’s Catholic and Irish institutions. They joined Irish teachers in the growing city’s schools and parents who organised and funded the parish networks. Traditional migrant histories have emphasised the role of male ‘culture brokers’ in the shaping of migrant communities to the exclusion of influential women. This paper will argue that the priest, the politician, and the publican need to be joined by the teacher and the nun when assessing the influences on multigenerational Irish and Irish Catholic identity in Melbourne. It places women and children alongside men to investigate ideas of ‘social mirroring’ and the creation of a foundational identity in children which could then be built upon by male culture brokers in adulthood. It takes the Irish Melbourne community out of St Patrick’s Hall and into the everyday world of the family, school, and parish. https://isaanz.org//miss-online-women-and-the-shaping-of-/

07.01.2022 "In the middle of a story with an uncertain ending ... ". Prof. Andrew May spoke with an historian's perspective about the empty city scape of locked down Melbourne on Channel 9 News yesterday, Sunday, 27 September:

06.01.2022 Jordy Silverstein will deliver a free online talk tomorrow afternoon, Thursday 6 May 2021, "Files, Families, and the Nation" as part of the Melbourne Series on Naturalisation presented by the Enlightenment Romanticism Contemporary Culture Research Unit and the Australian Centre.

03.01.2022 Hansen Senior Lecturer, Dr Jenny Spinks, will be presenting the next seminar for the ACU Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry seminar series on the topic "Blood Rain, Crucifixions, and Instruments of the Passion: Christ, Visuality, and Religious Identity in Sixteenth-Century Prodigy Books". Details below, including how to register.

01.01.2022 Congratulations to our staff, fellows and recent graduates, Ruby Ekkel, James Lesh, Sean Scalmer, Sue Silberberg, and Fay Woodhouse, and to all the other fine historians on the shortlist!