Conflict & Society seminars

Conflict & Society Seminar 1

Join the first installment of the Conflict and Society Seminar Series for 2022 ‘Plunder and Prize in 1812 Java': the restitution and legality of the Raffles Collection presented by Dr Gareth Knapman and Dr Sadiah Boonstra.

Dr Gareth Knapman

Dr Gareth Knapman is a Research Fellow on Indigenous Repatriation at the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies, the Australian National University. Gareth previously worked as a curator and repatriation officer at Museum Victoria’s Indigenous Cultures department. He has written extensively on museum collections and collecting, and has made significant contributions to Australian Aboriginal history. His recent works on repatriation include ‘“Let Them Rest in Peace”: Exploring interconnections between repatriation from museum and battlefield contexts’ in The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Repatriation: Return, Reconcile, Renew (2020). He is a leading authority on nineteenth century British colonialism in Southeast Asia. His books are Race and British Colonialism in Southeast Asia (2017), which creates a new understanding of colonial Southeast Asia, Liberalism and the British Empire in Southeast Asia (2019), with Anthony Milner and Mary Quilty, and the recently published ‘Settler colonialism and usurping Malay sovereignty in Singapore’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, (September 2021.)

Dr Sadiah Boonstra

Dr Sadiah Boonstra is a post-doctoral researcher in the Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums program at VU University Amsterdam and Honorary Fellow at Melbourne University. She has a broad cultural practice as an independent curator based in Jakarta, Indonesia. She combines curation of visual arts, public programming, and producing performing arts. Her research and curatorial interests focus on the history, heritage, and art of colonial and contemporary Indonesia. Previously Sadiah was Asia Scholar at Melbourne University/Curator Public Programs Asia TOPA, Melbourne, Senior Manager Programs at National Gallery Singapore, and post-doctoral fellow at Royal Holloway University of London/British Museum.

Colonial plunder of material culture represents a continuing legal, ethical and political conundrum. The assumption in much of the heritage literature is that there were few protections for cultural heritage until the twentieth century. This belief fails to recognise that European colonialism was obsessed with property and plunder and was a regulated activity. Articles taken during colonial military operations were regulated by the Law of Prize

This paper examines the East India Company’s plunder of the Yogyakarta Craton in 1812; £500,000 worth of silver coins were seized which, in 2021, would be worth £415,800,000. The Sultan’s private possessions were auctioned between the British soldiers and raised $4,493 (Spanish dollars), which would in 2021 be worth US$1,150,000. Some of these objects became the Raffles Collection in the British Museum, the British Library, and the Royal Collection Trust. Prize law dictated that it was illegal for soldiers to take objects; they only had the right to purchase them from the colonial government at an auction.

This paper examines the context and legality of the Raffles Collection in the existing laws and regulations of the time. It argues that acquiring plunder was an objective of the colonial forces in Java. This plunder was taken despite orders to return the island of Java to its native rulers. Consequently, the redress of colonial crimes is inseparably linked to the return of objects from the Raffles Collection. 

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Conflict & Society Seminar 2

Join the second instalment of the Conflict and Society Seminar Series for 2022 ‘‘Heavily and permanently overworked’ – Australian defence attaché staff to Saigon, Vietnam from 1952 to 1975. 

Presented by Blair Tidey

Blair Tidey is a part-time PhD candidate at the Australian National University. His thesis focuses on the clandestine Viet Cong infrastructure in Phuoc Tuy province from 1966 to 1971. He completed undergraduate study at Griffith University, and postgraduate study at UNSW Canberra and the Queensland University of Technology. He is a full-time member of the Australian Army, having completed several operational deployments and postings in Australia and overseas, including in the Defence Attaché staff in Hanoi, Vietnam. He is the author of Canberra Paper 160, Forewarned Forearmed: Australian Specialist Intelligence Units in South Vietnam, published in 2008.

In common with other Western nations, Australia’s overseas defence representation is under-studied, both in its own right and in connection with Australia’s involvement in Cold War conflicts. Although Vietnam was for many years considered to be Australia’s ‘longest war’, with troops deployed from 1962 to 1972, the presence of the defence attaché staff spanned an even broader period of time. The first attaché arrived in 1952, mere days after the first Australian diplomatic staff, and the final attaché departed on one of the last RAAF evacuation flights in April 1975, with the years between them spanning the conflicts against the French and the Americans.

This webinar explores the people and activities of the defence attaché staff posted to Saigon in Vietnam from 1952 to 1975. It examines the personalities involved, their selection, their intelligence and reporting functions and relationship to the Ambassador, and their living and working conditions. It also examines Australia’s increasing military involvement through to the final years of withdrawal and evacuation. While concentrating on one country, the experience of the Saigon attaché staff reveals key aspects of the wider Australian diplomatic and defence overseas presence during the Cold War era.

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Conflict & Society Seminar 3

Join us for ‘Love and War': The Clash of Loyalties Experienced by Married Australian Soldiers Serving Abroad, 1915–1918.

Presented by Cody Davis

Cody Davis is a PhD Candidate at the University of New England, under the supervision of Richard Scully and Nathan Wise, researching an epistolary history of emotions covering the experiences of married soldiers from Australia, Britain, and Canada during the First World War. He has a forthcoming publication entitled ‘“A Man’s Lot”: Marriage, Military Service and the First World War’ in the Australian Journal of Politics and History (2022). Cody is also an active army reservist of the 12/16 Hunter River Lancers.

The Australian Imperial Force was a collection of men who had temporarily departed from their civilian lives to fight for nation and empire, with many leaving behind wives and children. The duties of a man to his family were paramount within contemporary constructions of identity. The war, however, brought into question this prioritisation of family over nation resulting in many married men enlisting. Separation from families generated considerable anxieties about their financial, emotional and physical welfare as well as a sense of isolation and lost experiences. This webinar examines how those soldiers expressed their anxieties, attempted to overcome them by conducting their marriage via correspondence, and used their epistolary conversations as a means to rationalise their experiences. The vast distances between Australia and its theatres of combat and the uncertainty of life at war, however, presented significant obstacles to the exchange of letters and contributed to men’s sense of isolation; the possibility of intimacy became more remote. As this webinar will show, in spite of these challenges, men persisted in maintaining their connections with home and mediating their clash of loyalties.

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Conflict & Society Seminar 4

Join us for ‘Australia’s Second World War Manpower Release Schemes: Fairness Lessons Learned from Early Demobilization Programs.'

Please note that we have unfortunately had to cancel this webinar.

Conflict & Society Seminar 5

Join us for ‘Grand Strategy for the 21st Century-Era of Entangled Security and Hyperthreats'.

Presenter: Dr Elizabeth G Boulton

Liz Boulton, an ex-Army Officer, has re-imagined military theory for the Anthropocene, developing PLAN E as an alternative approach to humanity’s response to the hyperthreat of climate and environmental change. In this webinar, she will discuss PLAN E and present an argument for a dramatic change in threat posture.

Dr Elizabeth G. Boulton is an independent researcher at ‘Destination Safe Earth’. A former cadet and instructor at ADFA she was deployed to East Timor in 1999 and Iraq in 2004. As a civilian, she undertook logistics and humanitarian work in Ghana, Nigeria, and Sudan. In 2007 she completed a masters of climate policy at the University of Melbourne with a focus on sustainable freight transport, later consulting in this area for government agencies. She then worked in climate risk communication with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s Pacific Climate Change Science Program and National Climate Centre. She was awarded a PhD by Australian National University in 2020 for her thesis, ‘Climate and environmental change: time to reframe threat?’ and is the author of ‘PLAN E: Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century Era of Entangled Security and Hyperthreats’, Journal of Advanced Military Studies, 2022.

Although the dangers of climate change and ecological collapse are often described as existential or catastrophic threats, in practice they are approached as scientific policy and governance issues. ‘Securitising’ the issue has long been regarded as problematic, with an assumption that it will lead to draconian top-down solutions.

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Conflict & Society Seminar 6

Join us for ‘‘The Sunshine Song’: a biography of an Australian Imperial Force Soldiers’ chorus'.

Presenters:

Professor Daniel Reynaud

Daniel Reynaud is Professor of History at Avondale University. He has published on aspects of the AIF experience, especially its spiritual and religious life, on AIF food, and on Anzac cinema. His biography of Chaplain William McKenzie, The Man the Anzacs Revered’, was published in 2015, while his book The Anzac Table, co-authored with Emanuela Reynaud, is due for release in December 2022.

Dr Aleta King

Dr Aleta King (co-author) is head of the Conservatorium of Music at Avondale University. Her interests include community singing and period music.

Popular songs across British Empire armies in World War One were remarkably homogenous. Most were topical and therefore ephemeral. A rare survivor was ‘The Sunshine Song’, popularised by Chaplain William McKenzie. While it was not an Australian composition, it was a rare wartime song exclusive to the AIF. It was also one of the few to have survived the war, remaining in currency not only at soldier reunions but passing into wider circulation, being sung in shearing sheds and at Salvation Army meetings.

This presentation explores the song’s origins and its use by Australian soldiers during the war, seeking to account for its popularity with the Australians but lack of broader appeal. It also examines the reasons for its post-war survival and its rare spread into civilian use.

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Conflict & Society Seminar 7

Join us for ‘‘Mapping the Politics of Place and Redemption in Veterans’ Returns to Vietnam".

Presenter: Dr Mia Martin Hobbs

Dr Mia Martin Hobbs is an oral historian of war and conflict. She has published research in Australian Journal of Politics and History and Oral History Review and commentary in The Conversation and Australian Policy & History. Her book, Return to Vietnam: An Oral History of American and Australian Veterans’ Journeys, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. Mia is now undertaking a second transnational oral history project with women and minorities who served in the British, American, and Australian militaries in the War on Terror. She is currently a research fellow at Deakin University.

Since the 1980s, Australian and American Vietnam veterans have returned to Vietnam in search of resolution over ‘their’ war. Drawing on oral histories, Dr Mia Martin Hobbs shows in this webinar how returnees attempted to redeem the social as well military effects of ‘their’ war.

Using a new spatial-temporal digital mapping technique to highlight the geographic relationships between veterans’ wartime tours and return journeys, Mia locates three themes in return journeys – addressing war legacies, winning hearts and minds, and romantic relationships – showing that each was a reaction to specific wartime conduct. Through these redemption acts, returnees found a measure of peace in Vietnam.

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Conflict & Society Seminar 8

Join us for 'Fate, Pre-Destination, and the Ancient and Modern Understanding of the Traumas of War'.

Presenter: Dr Chris Matthew

Chris Matthew holds a PhD in ancient history from Macquarie University, a Masters in astrophysics from the University of Southern Queensland, and a PhD in astrophysics from Western Sydney University. Chris is the author of many books and articles on a range of topics: from Greco-Roman warfare, to ancient religion, to areas of ancient and modern science. Chris has appeared in television documentaries, on radio interviews and podcasts, and has consulted for museum exhibitions. He is currently a lecturer of ancient history at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney.

Western military tradition begins with the ancient Greeks. Greek literature contains some of the first recorded instances of physical and psychological reactions to the traumas of war. Yet how both the ancient Greek world and modern societies have faced and dealt with these terrors is vastly different. This is, in part, due to the nature of many of the different religious and socio-political parameters found within these two time periods. 

This presentation will discuss one of the main contributors which has helped both modern and ancient warriors account for the seemingly randomness of war – the concept of Fate.

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Conflict & Society Seminar 9

Join us for 'Faking it? The RAAF’s adoption of flight simulation, 1936–60'.

Presenter: Dr Peter Hobbins

Dr Peter Hobbins leads the curatorial, library and publications team at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. He is also Chair of the Professional Historians Association (NSW & ACT) and a Councillor of the Royal Australian Historical Society. Peter’s historical studies have explored medical research, snakebite and its remedies, epidemics and quarantine. Over 2016–19, his DECRA project at the University of Sydney investigated the development of aviation medicine and flying safety systems in Australia. Peter’s current work includes the Royal Navy’s role in the nineteenth-century Pacific Ocean and how life aboard troopships has reflected Australian ideas of citizenship.

In 1947, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) suffered the highest flying accident rate in its history. Its newly established Synthetic Training Panel soon investigated the novel Dehmel-type flight simulators entering service with American and British air arms. Unlike the generic Link Trainer, flight simulators employed analogue computers to replicate the flight envelope, procedural drills and emergency responses for a specific aircraft type. Combat experience from Korea also fed into the RAAF’s 1952 decision to order two dedicated flight simulators for its Avon Sabre fighter. Did this new approach truly transform Australia’s airpower preparedness, flying safety and operational capabilities? This webinar seeks to answer this question, and more. 

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Autonomy and independence in German captivity during the First World War.

Presenter: Dr Aaron Pegram

This examination of the 4,000 First World War Australian servicemen held prisoner in Germany departs from the usual focus on victimhood and trauma. Although conditions and treatment varied significantly, Dr Aaron Pegram from the Australian War Memorial exposes how Australian prisoners of war frequently took pride in their health and appearance, attended daily parades, and respected the rank of their captors and fellow captives. Prisoners used their few freedoms to create the best possible conditions to improve their chances of survival. Dr Pegram’s most recent book is Surviving the Great War: Australian Prisoners of War on the Western Front, 1916-18 (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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About the presenter

Dr Aaron Pegram is a senior historian at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. As well as working on a number of permanent and temporary exhibitions at the Memorial and other cultural institutions, Aaron is the editor, co-author and author of Both Sides of the Wire: the Memoir of an Australian officer Captured on the Western Front (2011), Beyond Surrender: Australian Prisoners of War in the Twentieth Century (with Joan Beaumont and Lachlan Grant, 2015), For Valour: Australians awarded the Victoria Cross (with Craig Blanch, 2018) and Surviving the Great War: Australian Prisoners of War on the Western Front, 1916-18 (2020). He is the recipient of the C.E.W. Bean Prize in Military History (2018), has a BA (Hons) from Charles Sturt University and a PhD from the Australian National University.

Managing First World War Naval Battle Casualties

Presenter: Dr Neil Westphalen

Following the outbreak of the First World War, the British and Australian army medical services on the Western Front faced new types of wounds that had never been seen before. This resulting in a three-year period of what the Australian medical historian, Arthur Graham Butler, called an ‘orgy of human vivisection’. Even so, the practical application of the clinical lessons learned as to how these wounds were best treated would have been far less effective, without the parallel development of an effective casualty evacuation system that pushed medical treatment services as far forward as military circumstances permitted, while restricting casualty evacuation any further rearwards than absolutely necessary.

The aim of this presentation is to fill an important gap in the medical historiography of the First World War, regarding the British Grand Fleet’s North Sea operations. It will examine how wounds sustained during naval actions such as the Dogger Bank in January 1915 and Jutland in May 1916 differed from those sustained in the Western Front, and how the British Admiralty’s casualty evacuation system likewise pushed naval medical treatment services as far forward as possible, while restricting casualty evacuation ashore.

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About the presenter

Dr Neil Westphalen, MBBS, MPH, DAvMed, FRACGP, FACAsM, FAFOEM (RACP), psc, Commander, Royal Australian Navy

Dr Neil Westphalen graduated MBBS from the University of Adelaide in 1985, and joined the Royal Australian Navy in 1987. His postgraduate qualifications include Fellowships of the Australasian Faculty of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (AFOEM), the Australasian College of Aerospace Medicine (ACAsM), and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP). He also has a Diploma of Aviation Medicine and a Master of Public Health, and is a Navy Staff College graduate.

Since transferring to the Reserve in 2016, Neil has performed staff roles for Exercise KAKADU 16, the Director General Navy Safety and Environment Policy Coordination, and the Navy Personnel Career Management Agency, and has an ongoing clinical role as a Duty Fleet Medical Officer. From 2016 to 2020 he was also a member of the Australasian Faculty of Occupational and Environmental Medicine Policy and Advocacy Committee. He is a PhD candidate at UNSW Canberra.

Below the Radar: The secret war in South-East Asia 1942-45

Presenter: Kate Reid-Smith

In December 1941, World War Two came to Southeast Asia. The speed of Imperial Japan's occupation of British Malaya caught the Allies off-guard. Facing a numerically and technologically superior fighting force and without any substantial intelligence assets at hand, the Allies found themselves severely wanting in both. So much so that by June 1942, the Allied Intelligence Bureau (AIB) was formed to combat Allied intelligence shortfalls. 

Although most historical examination of the AIB has focused on military affairs such as behind-enemy-lines, propaganda and coast watching operations, competitive politicking between British and American wartime spheres of influence also influenced AIB outcomes. This paper contends that one of them, MI6’s representative in the Australian AIB's Section B (known as Secret Intelligence Australia), while ostensibly participating in the Allied war effort, may have had another mandate. This organisation may have been more focused on the provision of secret intelligence for later purposes and to assist Britain's post-war policy planning. Potential threats (if any) to Imperial or Commonwealth cohesion in the aftermath of war were identified; as were means of combatting any threatened growth of American presence or the replacement of British dominance in the region.

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About the presenter

Kate Reid-Smith is an independent scholar specialising in intelligence history. Her current research focus is on Allied secret intelligence operations in World War Two Southeast Asia. A former military intelligence officer and graduate of the Australian Defence Force School of Languages, she is fluent in Mandarin and has a working knowledge of other regional languages. Kate is an interdisciplinary researcher combining her academic qualifications in diverse fields from Oxford, ANU, Monash, CDU and Deakin, with extensive practical experience living and working across the region. She first became interested in intelligence history while completing a masters thesis on maritime piracy in Southeast Asia. 

Can we Predict Genocide?

Presenter: Dr Deborah Mayersen

The ability to predict genocide is an important component of attempts to prevent it. In recent years, there has been an increasing number of risk assessment lists that identify and rank countries at risk of genocide, mass killing and/or mass atrocities. This paper offers a critical examination of these risk assessment lists. How accurately do they predict genocide and other mass atrocities? Based on a comprehensive analysis of risk lists, I suggest that they have a good ability to identify countries at the very highest risk levels, and countries in which risk is rapidly rising. They can therefore be a useful tool for practitioners and policymakers in some respects. Their predictive capacity, however, is limited by issues of overprediction, imprecision and inconsistency. This places serious limitations on their current forecasting capacity. At present, therefore, risk assessment lists should be used carefully and critically, and alongside qualitative assessments, when assessing risk of genocide and/or mass atrocities.

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About the presenter

Dr Deborah Mayersen is a Senior Lecturer in International and Political Studies at UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy. Deborah's research expertise is in the field of genocide studies, including the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide and genocide prevention. Her publications include On the Path to Genocide: Armenia and Rwanda Reexamined (Berghahn Books, 2014), and the edited volumes A Cultural History of Genocide in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, in-press), The United Nations and Genocide (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Genocide and Mass Atrocities in Asia: Legacies and Prevention (with Annie Pohlman, Routledge, 2013). 

Furthering the liaison and spirit of co-operation throughout the Forces of the Empire’: Regimental Alliances and the interwar Australian Military Forces (1919-1939).

Presenter: Jordan Beavis

Regimental alliances linked the pre-Second World War militaries of the British Empire together in important ways. A connection based on sentiment, camaraderie, race-patriotism, and a shared commander-in-chief (the King), regimental alliances were a mechanism that demonstrated the interconnectivity of the empire’s armies while also having practical applications by increasing inter-army communication, providing opportunities for liaison, and establishing inter-unit fraternity. Initially used to bind a ‘junior’ Dominion regiment to a ‘senior’ regiment of the British Army and thereby enhance esprit de corps within the former, by the late 1920s direct regimental alliances were being established between Dominion formations. An understudied mechanism, this paper uses deep archival research on four continents to trace the interwar Australian Military Forces’ (AMF) use of regimental alliances to enhance its ties to the military forces of Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. It reviews the theoretical basis for regimental alliances, their pre-First World War establishment, post-war revival, and perceived value. By illuminating the AMF’s use of regimental alliances this paper demolishes any conception of the interwar Australian Army as an isolated and parochial institution – instead revealing it as a networked force with a privileged place within the military structure of the British Empire. 

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About the presenter

Jordan Beavis is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His doctoral research examines the military connections and linkages that existed between the Australian Military Forces and the other armies of the British Commonwealth in the interwar period. In July 2021 he submitted his thesis, entitled ‘A Networked Army: The Australian Military Forces and the other Armies of the Interwar British Commonwealth (1919-1939)’, to his examiners. Jordan was the 2018 recipient of the prestigious C. E. W. Bean Prize for his Honours thesis. His research has been supported by the Australian Army History Unit, the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand, the Society for Army Historical Research, and the Society for Military History (joint with UNSW Canberra).

‘He ‘assaulted me at the matrimonial home’: Captivity Trauma and Domestic Abuse.’

Presenter: Dr Kristen Alexander

Domestic abuse figured in the post-war lives of some former Australian airmen prisoners of war. This webinar explores the psychological, emotional, and moral dimensions of aggression, violence, and coercive behaviour in the lives of those former POWs and their families. It indicates that, in some cases, physical and emotional abuse were expressions of captivity trauma. It suggests that, in the immediate post-war decades, women did not necessarily present themselves as victims; they demonstrated agency in how they responded to physical and emotional abuse. Former POWs rarely articulated narratives of perpetration. Accordingly, this webinar also explores the evidentiary challenges inherent in women’s testimony, including combative statements from divorce records, veteran-centric accounts from the medical archive, and empathetic composures arising from lived experience.

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About the presenter

Dr Kristen Alexander is a visiting fellow at UNSW Canberra. She is the author of five books including Australia's Few and the Battle of Britain and Taking Flight: Lores Bonney's Extraordinary Flying Career, both of which won ACT Writing and Publishing awards. Kristen was awarded a PhD by UNSW Canberra in 2020 for her thesis ‘Emotions of Captivity: Australian Airmen Prisoners of Stalag Luft III and their Families’. Her research centres on Second World War Australian airmen and prisoners of war. She is particularly interested in their emotional responses to warfare and captivity, as well as the moral dilemmas encountered during their operational and post-war lives.

‘No Saints’: The Anzacs in Malta

Presenter: Diana Sillato

During the First World War, a hospital base was established on the Mediterranean island of Malta, then a British Crown colony. Thousands of sick and wounded Anzacs were treated there during the Gallipoli campaign in one of the 27 hospitals and convalescent homes and camps operated by the Royal Army Medical Corps. The Anzacs’ experience of Malta was largely positive, offering respite from arduous weeks or months on the peninsula and being feted as ‘wounded warriors’ by the British residents and press. However, not all Anzacs endeared themselves to the locals and some were involved in antisocial behaviour and misconduct that saw them become the subject of police reports. In 1916 Australia Hall was opened in an attempt to provide some diversion for the troops and so reduce levels of drunkenness and criminality.

This paper will shed light on this little-known chapter of the Gallipoli campaign and examine the range of experiences of convalescing Anzacs in Malta.

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About the presenter

Diana Sillato is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Newcastle. Her research examines the Anzac experience in Malta, where thousands of Anzacs were evacuated during the Gallipoli campaign. Diana’s research was supported by a grant from the Australian Army History Unit in 2019. She works as a secondary school teacher and has been teaching Modern History for more than two decades.

‘Patrolling the Borders of Intimacy’: Censorship in the Letters of Australian Servicemen and their Partners, 1939-1945.

Presenter: Emma Carson

For couples who were separated by military service during the Second World War, letters were a vital means of communication that ensured the longevity of many relationships. Exchanging correspondence helped servicemen and their partners deal with practical issues and, more pertinently, construct intimacy. Nonetheless, as Australian military officials enforced strict regulations to prevent the spread of sensitive information, it was rare for personal conversations in letters to be shared exclusively between writers.

The aim of this talk is to explore the effect of field censorship on how writers conveyed intimate thoughts and maintained their relationships. The inability of servicemen to describe distressing experiences prevented them from seeking adequate emotional support from their partners. Furthermore, the knowledge that someone else was reading their letters was often enough to make correspondents on both sides employ self-censorship, which fostered emotional repression. The role of the censor is also examined to see how surveying the letters of other men in the battalion could affect their own writing, as is use of censorship to gain insight on the personal issues men faced. I argue that censorship was not an exclusively negative experience for both the censor and censored, especially as servicemen found often ingenious ways to avoid it. 

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About the presenter

Emma Carson is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Adelaide. She holds a First-Class Honours degree from the University of Adelaide, for which she was awarded both the Lynda Tapp Honours Prize and the Tinline Scholarship. She was also the 2020 recipient of the Hugh Martin Weir Prize and an Australian Historical Association/Copyright Agency Writing Bursary. Her PhD research is looking at the emotional impact of separation and military service on married couples during the Second World War. She is generally interested in twentieth-century conflict, and the histories of emotion, gender, and sexuality.

The New South Wales contingent to Sudan, 1885: colonial commemoration and commentary.

Presenter: Dr Thomas J. Rogers

The colony of New South Wales sent a contingent of about 750 infantrymen and artillerymen to aid the British forces in Sudan in early 1885. The sending of this contingent was the first time a self-governing British colony had sent its own troops overseas in aid of an Imperial expedition. Though the contingent was small even by contemporary standards, and though the men of the contingent saw very little action in Africa, the significance of its deployment is still a topic of historical debate.

In this paper, I want to draw particular attention to the commemoration of the few deaths in the New South Wales contingent, none of which occurred at the hands of the enemy. Commemorative services for these soldiers were occasions for reflections on patriotism, Imperial unity, and the future of the Australian colonies. Close examination of the contingent and the society that sent it can offer insights into how colonists understood the place of the colonies in the larger British Empire. In colonial minds, how had the deployment of colonial troops changed the position of New South Wales in the British Empire?

About the presenter

Dr Thomas J. Rogers is a historian in the Military History Section at the Australian War Memorial. His research interests include colonial Australian and British Empire history, the South African (Boer) War, the First World War, Indigenous history, and frontier violence. Tom is on the editorial committee of Wartime, the Memorial’s history magazine. He is the author of The Civilisation of Port Phillip: Settler Ideology, Violence, and Rhetorical Possession (2018), which considers the early years of British settlement in the state of Victoria, and the relationships between settler rhetoric and frontier violence.

‘I ought to have been killed at the War’: Studying Australian First World War Veterans who Died by Suicide

Presenter: Jessie Lewcock

In February 1945, Dr Sylvester J. Minogue published the findings of his study into suicides by First World War veterans in New South Wales. Tens of thousands of coronial files were analysed, and the study concluded, alarmingly, that First World War veterans were significantly more likely to die by suicide than their civilian counterparts. Minogue drew a clear link between war service and an increased risk of suicide, and made it clear that immediate action was needed to prevent veterans of the then-current war from suffering the same fate upon their return. Yet, in 2020, we find ourselves still in the midst of a veteran suicide crisis.

This paper aims to provide historical context to the issue of veteran suicide. Minogue’s study will be revisited and that data compared with the findings of my own analysis of over twelve thousand police and coronial files in South Australia using the same methodology. It will demonstrate how a large number of First World War veterans who died by suicide struggled enormously with social isolation, substance misuse, and both physical and mental illness prior to their deaths – factors that are still resoundingly echoed by the hardships faced by at-risk veterans today.

About the presenter

Jessie Lewcock is a current PhD candidate in History at the University of Adelaide. Her thesis will examine instances of suicide by South Australian veterans of the First and Second World Wars, review the responses of government and veteran groups to the issue of suicide, and shed light on the experiences of the loved ones left behind. Jessie currently holds a Bachelor of Teaching and a Bachelor of Arts in History with Honours. She has also completed a summer school program at Queen’s University Belfast that specialised in post-Troubles policing and restorative justice. In 2019, she was awarded the Hugh Martin Weir prize by the University of Adelaide Library for the meritorious study of Australia’s participation in conflict. 

The Militia, Conscription and Politics of ‘One Army’, 1939-1945.

Presenter: James Morrison

This presentation analyses how conscription and serving in the militia in the Second Word War was a political issue that has relatively limited historical attention.  It will provide a very brief overview of how the debates were influenced by the highly decisive conscription plebiscites of the First World War and a predilection for volunteerism.  The presentation will then examine how the Pacific War challenged the concept of having ‘two armies,’ one conscripted for home defence and a voluntary force for ‘overseas’ service.  It will argue too many accounts underplay the political significance, and importance, of having two armies. The presentation will also argue that, at the same time, the concept of having two armies was often used a rhetorical ploy that has marred a more comprehensive understanding of the respective forces; and while conceptually distinct, the difference between the AIF and the militia by 1944 was largely immaterial in terms of terms of composition of combat effectiveness.  The presentation will also briefly touch on the role of Australian senior military officers and MacArthur in these political debates, suggesting that the role of the latter was more significant despite ongoing concerns at political interference among the former.

About the presenter

James is a serving Army officer based in Canberra who completed history honours at ADFA in 2003 and a Masters of Arts (International Relations) from Deakin University in 2006. He has also completed a Master of Arts (Defence Studies) from Kings College London. James is a PhD student at UNSW (ADFA) and his thesis is on the Australian Army militia during the Second World War.

Internment by Law in First World War Australia: Franz Wallach and Wilhelm Karl Lude

Presenter: Catherine Bond

Although not all persons considered to be ‘alien enemies’ under law were interned during the First World War, nearly 7000 persons spent time in internment camps around Australia during this period. Underpinning this system was a range of repeatedly revised Federal statutes, regulations and policies that dictated every aspect of internment from who should be interned to how many showers individuals in specific camps could take per week.  

This paper examines the legal structure of internment in First World War Australia, using two men as case studies: Franz Wallach, a successful Melbourne businessman, and Wilhelm ‘Karl’ Lude, a butcher based in Loxton, SA, at the outbreak of the war. While both men were born in Germany, at the outbreak of hostilities these men were in significantly different social, economic and legal positions. However, both men would eventually be interned for the larger part of the war – Lude from 1914 and Wallach from 1915. While Karl Lude’s internment was arguably necessary for public safety, Franz Wallach’s internment was arguably a necessity for Attorney-General William Hughes, and this paper interrogates how law, and in some instances wilfully ignoring the rule of law, enabled this regime.

About the presenter

Dr Catherine Bond is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law, UNSW Sydney. She teaches and researches primarily in intellectual property law, with a focus on the intersection of law and history. She has published in a range of leading Australian and international journals across issues including government ownership of copyright and the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918; plain packaging of tobacco products; and the introduction of a patent system in the Game of Thrones world of Westeros. Her first book, Anzac: The Landing, The Legend, The Law, analysed the regulation of the word ‘Anzac’ in Australia and internationally, from 1916 through to today. Catherine’s second book, Law in War: Freedom and restriction in Australia during the Great War, published by NewSouth Publishing in April 2020, examines the legal experiences of a range of individuals in First World War Australia.

Inventing Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency: The Santal Rebellion of 1855

Presenter: Peter Stanley

In 1855 Lower Bengal was wracked by the second-largest rebellion in nineteenth-century British India when the Santal people rose against exploitative Bengali landlords and money-lenders. A tenth of the Bengal Army was committed to suppress the insurgency; about 10,000 Santals died. Both the Santals and the Bengal Army improvised tactics and strategy. The conflict has been neglected in the history of insurgency and counter-insurgency. Peter Stanley, whose forthcoming book on the rebellion - only the third ever written, and the first to draw on the full lode of the Bengal Army's records - will discuss the relationships between insurgency and Santal culture. In this webinar, he will show how a people with practically no military tradition adopted guerilla tactics and how an army with no counter-insurgency doctrine responded.

About the presenter

Professor Peter Stanley of UNSW Canberra has published over 35 books, including several works on the military-social history of British India. Hul! Hul!: The Santal Rebellion, 1855 is to be published by Hurst, London.