Articles and Book Chapters
This article extends the transnational history of Anzac by shifting the focus from Britain to the United States. It tells a history of Anzac in the United States, focused on New York and California, that shows how both Anzac Day and the broader language and iconography of ‘Anzac’ has been core to the production of Australian community and identity in the United States from the 1920s until the 2020s. Over multiple generations, stateside Australians have reached to Anzac to enact their Australianness and build ties with fellow expatriates. As result, ‘Anzac’ has come to serve as a metonym for Australians and Australianness within the United States. At the same time, Anzac in the United States has indexed Australia’s shift from British to American empires. Once a British affair, it is now an annual event to renew the transpacific alliance.
Yves Rees, “Feminism Beyond the Binary,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, no. 28 (2022): 123-27.
If we accept the reality of nonbinary genders, and hence acknowledge the existence of people other than ‘men’ and ‘women’ (cis or trans), what does that mean for a political project traditionally structured around advancing women’s interests in the face of male domination? A feminism for the 2020s must be a feminism that can reckon with the existence and patriarchal oppression of non- women such as nonbinary, genderqueer, transmasculine, transfeminine, agender and Two-Spirit peoples. Put simply: how to reimagine feminism beyond the gender binary?
Environmental degradation is the most serious challenge of the twenty-first century. To date, academic historians, among many others, have failed to fully confront the climate and biodiversity crises, often engaging in disavowal of the problems and our contribution to them in the course of our historical work. This article discusses mitigation efforts underway among other professional bodies, higher education institutions, and academic disciplines, before addressing how we might embrace sustainability more meaningfully through our practices and elsewhere. We explain why a focus on decarbonisation is important, canvas the multiple benefits of reducing travel, and consider what individuals and institutions can do to better respond to a crisis that is already with us. Our particular case study is Australia, though the implications of our findings – such as the effects of global heating and environmental destruction – are global.
We had 12 years left. Twelve years remaining to avert catastrophic climate change. That was the headline message of the special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in October 2018. Time was ticking down and there wasn’t a minute to waste. Only a dozen short years to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. If we failed, the consequences would be horrific: drought, flood, deadly heat, food shortages, poverty – all experienced by hundreds of millions. There’d be resource wars and countless refugees. Earth might become uninhabitable altogether.
By this point, we’d been hearing warnings about climate collapse for decades. Anyone who’d been paying attention knew things were dire. But this report felt different. For the first time, the notoriously circumspect IPCC had given us a hard deadline in the imminent future. Twelve years wasn’t our grandchildren’s lifetimes; it was us, not too far down the track. And if the IPCC, with its culture of consensus and compromise, was willing to make this alarming call, who knew how bad things really were?
At the time, I was 30 and newly minted as a historian. I’d set my sights on a career in history while still a teenager and had spent my entire twenties learning the tools of the trade. Now I was finally here, researching the past for a living, only to look up and discover that the world was hurtling towards calamity while I toiled in the archives, breathing in centuries-old dust. In 2030, the deadline given by the IPCC, I’d be only 42 – still in the prime of life. I’d be there to see the climate unravel and had a personal interest in helping stave off nightmare scenarios. But what did my profession have to offer? What use was history to a warming earth?
The New Histories of Capitalism (NHC) boast a foundational narrative that decries the supposed elision of the “economic” during the long reign cultural and social history. Yet, at the same time, the NHC are themselves based on a recognition that ideas of “economy” are not natural, and hence must be historicised using the same intellectual tools that powered the cultural turn in the first place. In practice, however, the demographics and structuring assumptions of the “new” histories of capitalism are remarkably similar to the “old” labour and economic history. Both its historical actors and its practitioners remain, by and large, white cisgender men engaged with normative visions of “capitalism” and “economy” that privilege finance, waged labour, business and trade. As the NHC take shape within Australia, this article highlights the imperative to learn from - but crucially, not appropriate - the expertise of communities who have long theorised and critiqued “capitalism” due to their subordinate position within its cultural and economic hierarchies. Using examples from feminist, queer and crip theory, I argue that the knowledges of those marginal to or excluded from waged labour, capital accumulation and material consumption constitute a rich repository of intellectual tools with potential to engender more robust historicisation of “capitalism” and the worlds it helps create.
Capitalism is back. Three decades ago, when all alternatives to liberal democracy and free markets appeared discredited, talk of capitalism seemed passé. Now, after a decade of political and economic turmoil, capitalism and its temporal critique of progress and decline again seems an indispensable category to understanding a world in flux. Among the social sciences, historians have led both the embrace and critique of this ‘re-emergent’ concept. This roundtable discussion between leading and emerging Australian scholars working across histories of economy, work, policy, geography and political economy, extends this agenda. Representing the outcome of a workshop convened at La Trobe University in November 2018 and responding to questions posed by conveners Huf and Rees, five participants debate the nature, utility and future of the new constellation of ‘economic’ historical scholarship. While conducted well before the outbreak of COVID-19, the ensuring discussion nevertheless speaks saliently to the crises of our times.
As we enter the 2020s, our times are daily getting more urgent. The climate and ecological emergency, catastrophic Australian bushfires, and now the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic meltdown have launched us into a new era of seemingly incessant crisis. Through it all, history remains omnipresent. In press conferences and Zoom meetings, in newspapers and Twitter feeds, history is invoked to bring sense and meaning to our disorienting present. As public commentary mythologises the past in order to manage a destabilised and unknown future, what should the response of professional historians be? What are our responsibilities in the face of cataclysmic change? In this forum on ‘History in Urgent Times’, we present three attempts to grapple with what it means to be a historian in this alarming historical moment, and ask how historians ought to respond.
Yves Rees and Ben Huf, “Training Historians in Urgent Times," History Australia 17, no. 2 (2020).
The next generation of Australian historians face daunting challenges: the imperative to craft new historical narratives that inform and redirect unfolding ecological, economic and political crises, while facing escalating academic precarity and associated anxiety and depression. Honours level and PhD pedagogy, which remains little changed from the mid-twentieth century, is arguably insufficient for these challenges. How might we, as educators, find creative and pragmatic ways to better train and nurture tomorrow’s scholars? Critically reflecting on our Histories of Capitalism Winter School piloted in 2019, this article argues for the potential of grassroots ‘micro-utopias’ structured around interdisciplinarity, collegiality, inclusivity and public mindedness.
Yves Rees, “Sojourns: A New Category of Female Mobility,” Gender & History 31, no 3. (2019).
This paper seeks to theorise and historicise a new category of female mobility termed the ‘sojourn’. By drawing upon existing scholarship, as well as the case study of twentieth-century Australian women in the United States, it identifies the sojourn as a well-documented yet under-theorised form of women’s mobility, characterised by three core features: the sojourn was prolonged yet time-bound; it was vocational; and it was freely chosen and opportunistic. Equipped with this concept, historians can gather otherwise disparate women into a collective that together unsettles the persistent coding of self-willed and careerist mobility as masculine. To name the sojourn is hence also to recalibrate the gendered landscape of historical mobility.
In 1921, the United States introduced national immigration quotas. Although designed to curb the arrival of ‘undesirables’ from south-east Europe, this quota system also applied to Britain and its white Dominions. By 1929, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were each allocated 100 quota places per annum. The British quota was far greater, but still struggled to meet demand. Through a focus on the Australian example, this article investigates how an immigration regime intended to bolster America’s ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity also exposed the limits of Anglospheric kinship by closing the gates to white Britons. Although the quotas had a comparatively minor impact on Britons, their exclusion held great significance in the context of Anglo-American relations, where the rhetoric of transnational white solidarity produced expectations of unqualified welcome in the United States. After 1921, as such welcome disappeared and then failed to rematerialize, the global community of white men’s countries was shaken and remade.
During the 1920s, the discipline and profession of economics in Australia underwent a dramatic transformation. As of 1918, ‘economics’ was deemed inseparable from ideology, and its practitioners were conceived as activists whose political agendas brought their knowledge claims into disrepute. By 1929, the same word denoted a ‘science’, a field of knowledge production populated by disinterested experts who proffered truths deemed essential to modern governance. This article returns to the decade in which economists went from pariahs to prophets and restores a sense of contingency to what transpired. Through a focus on R.F. Irvine and D.B. Copland, I argue that this process was underpinned by a reconceptualisation of the epistemic status and function of economic expertise. As Copland's positivism usurped Irvine's normative approach, economic knowledge was seemingly depoliticised. Once positioned above ideology, ‘economic scientists’ accumulated political power and assumed the norm-shaping role they have inhabited ever since.
Despite a wealth of scholarship on Australian travel, economic motives for transnational mobility remain little studied. Tourists, soldiers, reformers and students dominate the pantheon of Australians in the world, while the aspirational jobseeker is near forgotten. As a result, Australian international engagement has been closely associated with social and economic elites. Yet recent research hints that economic opportunism was a central motivation for white Australians’ travels to interwar China. This article argues that the same was true of the United States. Drawing upon state and private archives, it examines how the famed prosperity of the United States led non-elite Australians to seek work and money across the Pacific. Throughout the early 20th century, steamers ploughed between Sydney and San Francisco carrying economic migrants in pursuit of their own American Dream. Consequently, a wide diversity of white Australians would demonstrate an everyday engagement with the “international” that derived more from economic need than high-minded ideals. By recovering their journeys, this article draws new connections between Australians’ physical and economic mobility, unsettles the idea of travel as an elite or dutiful phenomenon, and asks how a more materialist analysis of transnational lives might recalibrate our understanding of Australia in the world.
This article examines how women's broadcasting promoted consciousness and appreciation of the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. These were decades in which Australians had limited access to US news and culture, and Hollywood dominated local imaginings of US society. In this climate, Australians who had lived Stateside were hailed as authorities on the nation and its people, and they often spoke on radio. Among these “America educators” were significant numbers of women. Armed with firsthand knowledge of the wider world, these female travelers could claim space in a broadcasting landscape otherwise dominated by men. Through their radio broadcasts, they aspired to foster transpacific understanding and friendship. Women's broadcasting was therefore a cultural force at the vanguard of Australia's “turn to America.” More than a manifestation of US popular culture, radio depicted the United States as an ally of and model for Australia during an era of entrenched British allegiance.
Anne Rees, “A War of Card Indexes: From Political Economy to Economic Science,” World War One, the Universities and the Professions in Australia, 1914-1939, eds. Kate Darian-Smith and James Waghorne (Melbourne University Press, 2019).
Australian women travelers in early twentieth-century New York often recoiled from the frenetic pace of the city, which surpassed anything encountered in either Britain or Australia. This article employs their travel accounts to lend support to the growing recognition that modernity took different forms throughout the world and to contribute to the project of mapping those differences. I argue that “hustle” was a defining feature of the New York modern, comparatively little evident in Australia, and I propose that the southern continent had developed a model of modern life that privileged pleasure-seeking above productivity. At a deeper level, this line of thinking suggests that modernization should not be conflated with the relentless acceleration of daily life; it thus complicates the ingrained assumption that speed and modernity go hand-in-hand.
What did Australian modernity look like? Over the last two decades, Australia's entrenched reputation for ‘cultural belatedness’ has been displaced by the study of ‘colonial modernity’. No longer beholden to the idea that a singular modernity was disseminated from core to periphery, scholars now speak of many localised modernities that arose across colonial and provincial sites. According to this new ‘multiple modernities’ paradigm, Australia was home to its own home‐grown incarnation of modern life. But what was distinctively ‘Australian’ about Australian modernity? Although widely discussed in recent historiography, scholars have yet to delineate its distinguishing features. This article posits mobility as a central component of the Australian modern. Drawing upon new scholarship in settler colonial studies and transnational history, it argues that early twentieth‐century Australia was home to intense cultures of both domestic and global mobility that were entangled with the geographies and anxieties of the settler colonial project. It shows how the nation's ‘unsettled settlers’ also became its chief agents of modernity, and in doing so draws together several strands in recent historiography. Although mobility also signified modernity beyond Australia, it was within this settler colonial nation tyrannised by distance that the modern appetite for motion reached especial heights.
This article uses the career of Australian-born economist and United Nations lobbyist Persia Campbell (1898–1974) to track the influence of Federation-era Australian welfarism into the postwar international sphere. I argue that Campbell, a pioneer of American consumer economics and an influential commentator on international development, derived her lifelong preoccupation with consumer welfare and living standards from a youthful immersion in Australian economic thought. Although she lived abroad from 1929, her worldview was indelibly shaped by this early training. Campbell’s example therefore points to the international afterlives of Australia’s foundational welfarism, and offers an Australian corrective to a development historiography dominated by the United States.
Anne Rees, “Rebel Handmaidens: Transpacific Histories and the Limits of Transnationalism,” in Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History, edited by Anna Clark, Alecia Simmonds and Anne Rees, 49-67 (London: Palgrave, 2017).
Alecia Simmonds, Anne Rees and Anna Clark, “Testing the Boundaries: Reflections on Transnationalism in Australian History,” in Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History, eds. Anna Clark, Alecia Simmonds and Anne Rees, 1-14 (Palgrave, 2017).
During the mid-twentieth century, Hollywood cinema exerted a powerful influence upon Australian imaginings of the United States. In contrast to the flood of information moving between the Antipodes and Britain, America was relatively unknown, with little aside from film reels making the journey across the Pacific. This article examines how saturation in Hollywood imagery mediated the travel experience of Australian women who stepped through the silver screen and visited America itself. The writings of female transpacific travelers are peppered with references to Hollywood, which is cited as a source of crude preconceptions about America, and also appears as a point of comparison to the author’s own experience. Yet these texts almost never refer to specific films or actors, and instead use Hollywood as a shorthand to denote glamour, affluence, and urban living. The article suggests, therefore, that travelers’ discussions of “Hollywood” were often concerned less with American film than American modernity, and therefore also provide insight into Australian attitudes towards the modern.
Between 1930 and 1960, the United States became a mecca for Australian pioneers of the ‘women’s professions’ who were eager to extend their expertise. These visits to America were often combined with study or travel in Britain, but Australian professionals increasingly expressed a preference for the American emphasis on scientific method and university qualifications, and returned home eager to bring the local profession ‘up-to-date’. Focussing on early childhood education and librarianship, this article examines the rising popularity of the American ‘study tour’ and traces the influence of these travels upon Australia. I argue that trans-Pacific mobility had a profound influence upon the modernisation of ‘women’s work’, and suggest that this preference for American professional practice sheds new light on the erosion of imperial ties and Australia’s realignment towards the United States.
Anne Rees, “‘Australians who come over here are apt to consider themselves quite large people’: The Body and Australian Identity in Interwar London,” Australian Historical Studies 44, no. 3 (2013): 405-22. [Winner of the Ken Inglis Postgraduate Prize]
During the 1920s and 1930s, it was believed that an Australian physical ‘type’ had developed under the bright antipodean skies, superior in size and appearance to its English counterpart. When Australians visited the metropole, therefore, locals and visitors alike claimed that they could be identified by sight alone. This article explores the notion of Australian physical distinctiveness, examining the body as a site for the construction and performance of Australian identities in interwar London. I argue that the imagined pre-eminence of Australian bodies became a vehicle of nationalist sentiment, yet could simultaneously connote mental vacancy, vulgarity or even racial otherness. In consequence, the metropole often became a site of physical transformation and re-definition, in which antipodeans sought to improve their chances of assimilation by disavowing the Australianness of their bodies.
This article is an examination of Ruby Rich (1888–1988), an Australian feminist, concert pianist, Zionist, pacifist and eugenicist. Although much lauded by her peers, Rich has gone largely unexamined by historians, particularly in contrast to the recent research on her feminist contemporaries Mary Montgomerie Bennett and Bessie Rischbieth. I draw attention to Rich's remarkable life and varied experiences, and use her example to explore the relationship between feminism and eugenics in twentieth-century Australia. From the early 1920s, Rich became a prominent figure within several Australian feminist organisations and in 1926 was appointed the founding president of the Racial Hygiene Association of NSW, an organisation which espoused eugenics. Although it is often assumed that eugenics is innately anti-feminist, Rich remained an active champion of both feminism and racial hygiene for over 50 years. Her example therefore provides an opportunity to trace the unlikely sympathies between these two movements, and highlights the extent to which eugenics found acceptance among progressive members of the Australian community.
Mary Cecil Allen (1893-1962) was an Australian artist and art educator who moved to New York in 1927, where she became a lecturer and exhibited in leading galleries and museums. Although a resident of the United States until her death, Allen returned to Melbourne in 1935-36, 1950 and 1959-60, becoming an advocate of modern art and a symbol of modernity. On each occasion, she attracted large audiences to her lectures on modernism and controversially exhibited her latest work, thereby exerting a considerable influence on attitudes towards modern art in Melbourne. As a glamorous and confident modern woman, she came to represent the seductive vitality of American modernity and acted as a vehicle of Americanisation. This article examines these three visits, tracing Allen’s activities and reception, and situating them within a wider cultural context.
Yves Rees, “Welcome podcast,” Journal of Australian Studies (2022).
Yves Rees, “Keeping Up the Fight: Brazen Hussies,” Australian Historical Studies (2021).
Katherine Ellinghaus, Nikki Henningham, Andy Kaladelfos, Alana Piper, Laura Rademaker, Anne Rees, Jordana Silverstein, Mary Tomsic, Naomi Wolfe, ‘It destroyed my research career’: survey of sexual and gender-based discrimination and abuse in Australian Academia, Australian Women’s History Network, July 2018. Cited in Overland, Times Higher Ed & SMH.
Catherine Bishop and Anne Rees, “Editorial,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, no. 19 (2013): 1-2.