Private Lives, Public History

The 'History Wars' have come to dominate discussion of Australian history in recent years, and have been waged over various national sites of celebration and commemoration.Anna Clark suggests that this anxiety over Australia's past has intensified as debate grows over how to teach 'our history' to 'our children'.Arguments rage over whether to teach ... Read more...

'The History Wars is very important. The book will sit on the shelves of libraries as a code stone to help people understand the motivations of players in today's contemporary debate. It sheds light on the political battle which is carried on in the pubs and on the footpaths about who we are and what has become of us.'— Hon. Paul Keating, Prim... Read more...

On a winter's day in 1943, 22-year-old Mischka Danos chanced on a terrible sight as he skied through Latvian woods—a pit filled with the bodies of Jews killed by the occupying Germans. The world was full of such atrocities, which made Mischka's decision to escape conscription to the Waffen-SS by going on a student exchange to Germany all the m... Read more...

In 1908 English gentleman, Ernest Westlake, packed a tent, a bicycle and forty tins of food and sailed to Tasmania. On mountains, beaches and in sheep paddocks he collected over 13,000 Aboriginal stone tools. Westlake believed he had found the remnants of an extinct race whose culture was akin to the most ancient Stone Age Europeans. But in the remo... Read more...

March 1797. Ninety Mile Beach, Victoria. Five British sailors and twelve Bengali seamen swim ashore after their longboat is ripped apart in a storm. The British penal colony at Port Jackson is 700 kilometres to the north, their fellow-survivors from the wreck of the Sydney Cove stranded far to the south on a tiny island in Bass Strait. To rescue the... Read more...

Ride the wave of nostalgia with Surf-o-rama, the largest collection of Australian beach culture memorabilia, including artefacts, ephemera and photographs. Meet Duke Kahanamoku, who gave the first public demonstration of surfboard riding in Australia. Relive the glories of Midget and Gidget and cruise the kitsch and the cool in your salt-encrusted p... Read more...