Academic literature on the topic 'Australia History 1788-1900 Historiography'

This article traces the history of child welfare in Australia, showing the ways in which policies and practices, deriving primarily from Britain, were adopted and adapted in a nation in which jurisdiction was split between colonies/states and further divided, within states, on the basis of race. It argues that child welfare has always been part of the nation-building project, central to national objectives when children could be constructed as future citizens, marginal, and more punitive, when they were more easily understood as threats to social stability. In this first part it examines the history of welfare provision for non-indigenous children in Australia from 1788 to 1939. The second part, to be published in a subsequent issue, will discuss post-war developments in services for non-indigenous children, indigenous child welfare services and the historiography of child welfare in Australia.

AbstractBiological control of arthropods emerged as a scientific enterprise in the late nineteenth century and the orchard industry of California was an early centre of expertise. In 1900, as the Australian colonies prepared for federation, each had a government entomologist attached to its agriculture department. The hiring of George Compere from California by the Western Australian Department of Agriculture began a controversial chapter in the early history of biological control that was linked to a late, local popularization of acclimatization. Compere became known as the ‘travelling entomologist’ and for a decade brought ‘parasites’ of pest insects from overseas and released them in Perth. His antagonistic disciplinary rhetoric and inflated claims for the ‘parasite theory’ created conflict with his counterparts in the eastern states. The resulting inter-state entomological controversy was played out in the press, revealing the political use of science for institutional and even state identity. It is a story of transnational exchanges, chance discoveries and popular public science: popular because of the promise of a simple, natural solution to agricultural insect pests and because of the public nature of the disputes it generated between the experts. This microcosm contributes to the global historiography of acclimatization, biological control, scientific exposition and the professionalization of agricultural science.

Although much of the history of women's suffrage has focused on the American and British struggles of the early twentieth century, a newer generation of interdisciplinary scholars is exploring its global trajectory. Fundamental to these cross-cultural comparisons is the establishment of an international timeline of women's suffrage; its order at once shapes and is shaped by its historiography. According to the currently dominant chronology, “Female suffrage began with the 1893 legislation in New Zealand” (Ramirez, Soysal, and Shanahan 1997: 738; see also Grimshaw 1987 [1972]: xiv). In this timeline, “Australia was next to act, in 1902” (ibid.). Despite the geographical location of New Zealand and Australia in greater Southeast Asia, the narrative that accompanies this timeline portrays “first world” women as leading the struggle for suffrage and “third world” women as following their example.1As Ramirez, Soysal, and Shanahan write, “A smaller early wave of suffrage extensions between 1900 and 1930 occurred mostly in European states. A second, more dramatic wave occurred after 1930” (ibid.). Similarly, Patricia Grimshaw writes, “It was principally in the English-speaking world, in the United States, in Britain and its colonial dependencies, and in the Scandinavian countries that sustained activity for women's political enfranchisement occurred. Other countries eventually followed suit” (1987: xiv).

There is, among many students of Australian law, a tendency to regard the establishment of constitutional government in Australia in positivistic terms: as a result of the passage of the New South Wales Act in 1823, or of the Australian Courts Act in 1828, or of the Australian Constitution Acts of 1842 and 1850, or even of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act in 1900. This is understandable, for, as Sir Victor Windeyer once put it, there was in the foundation of European society on these islands no element whatever of a social contract. Rather, the move to populate the Australian territories was a consequence entirely of a prospectively looking determination made by the government in London. And, as Windeyer went on to note, the formal establishment of local government was effected by ceremonies that were by their very essence positivistic in nature. On 26 January 1788, there was first a formal ceremony in which the Union flag was raised and a salute fired. Then, on 7 February, the whole population of the colony was assembled and the royal letters patent were read, which formally instructed Captain Phillip to go about the duty of creating a penal establishment.

Abstract Post and rail fences had a relatively minor role in England in the eighteenth century, primarily to protect young hedges. However, they rapidly became the most advanced form of fences in the new Australian colonies founded in 1788 and later. The key feature is that thinned tenons on the ends of rectangular split rails fit closely into mortises cut in the rectangular split posts. Post and rail fences were widespread but never common because of the high cost, lack of secure land tenure, and ubiquitous use of shepherds to guard against predatory dingoes. With the introduction of cheap iron wire in the mid-1850s, farmers and pastoralists gained many advantages from fencing their boundaries and paddocks. By 1900 post and rail fences were obsolete technologically, although farmers built decreasing numbers up to the 1960s. More recently, many people are relocating old post and rail fences onto peri-urban subdivisions and erecting new ones to create a rustic appearance. Post and rail fence use in advertisements and other media shows that they have achieved a new status as an icon of rural Australia.

Introduction In October 2007, the federal Coalition government legislated that all eligible migrants and refugees who want to become Australian citizens must sit and pass the newly designed Australian citizenship test. Prime Minister John Howard stated that by studying the essential knowledge on Australian culture, history and values that his government had defined in official citizenship test resources, migrants seeking the conferral of Australian citizenship would become "integrated" into the broader, "mainstream" community and attain a sense of belonging as new Australian citizens (qtd. in "Howard Defends Citizenship Test"). In this paper, I conduct a genealogical analysis of Becoming an Australian Citizen, the resource booklet that contains all of the information needed to prepare for the test. Focusing specifically on the section in the booklet entitled A Story of Australia which details Australian history and framing my research through a Foucauldian perspective on governmentality that focuses on the interrelationship with truth, power and knowledge in the production of subjectivities, I suggest that the inclusion of the subject of history in the test was constituted as a new order of knowledge that aimed to shape new citizens' understanding of what constituted the "correct" version of Australian identity. History was hence promoted as a form of knowledge that relied on objectivity in order to excavate the truths of Australia's past. These truths, it was claimed, had shaped the very values that the Australian people lived by and that now prospective citizens were expected to embrace. My objective is to problematise this claim that the discipline of history consists of objective truths and to move beyond recent debates in politics and historiography known as the history wars. I suggest that history instead should be viewed as a "curative science" (Foucault 90), that is, a transformative form of knowledge that focuses on the discontinuities as well as the continuities in Australia's past and which has the potential to "delimit truths" (Weeks) and thus heal the fatal impact of an official history dominated by notions of progress and achievements. This kind of cultural research not only has the capacity to influence policy-making in the field of civic education for migrant citizens, but it also has the potential to broaden understanding of Australia's past by drawing on alternative stories of Australia including the ruptures and counter stories that come together to form the multiplicity that is Australian identity. Values Eclipsing History The test was introduced at a time when the impact of globalisation was shifting conceptions of the conferral of citizenship in many Western nations from a notion of new citizens gaining legal and political rights to a concept through which becoming a naturalized citizen meant adopting a nation's particular way of life and embracing a set of core national values (Allison; Grattan; Johnson). In Australia, these values were defined as a set of principles based around liberal-democratic notions of freedom, equality, the rule of law and tolerance and promoted as "central to Australia remaining a stable, prosperous and peaceful community" (DIC 5). The Howard government believed that social cohesion was threatened by the differences emanating from recent arrivals, particularly non-Christian and non-white arrivals who did not share Australian values. These threats were contextualized through such incidents as asylum seekers allegedly throwing children overboard, the Cronulla Beach riots in 2005 and terrorist attacks close to home in Bali. Adopting Australian values was promoted as the solution to this crisis of difference. In this way, the Australian values promoted through the Australian citizenship test were allotted "a reforming role" whilst migrants and their differences were targeted as "objects of reform" (Bennett 105). Reform would be achieved by prospective citizens engaging freely in the ethical conduct of self-study of the history and values contained in the citizenship resource booklet. With some notable exceptions (see e.g. Lake and Tavan), inclusion of historical content in the test received less public scrutiny than Australian values. This is despite the fact that 37 per cent of the booklet's content was dedicated to Australian history compared to only 7 per cent dedicated to Australian values. This is also remarkable since previously, media and scholarly attention over the preceding two decades had agonised over how British colonisation and indigenous dispossession were to be represented in Australian public institutions. Popularly known as the history wars, these debates now seemed irrelevant for regulating the conduct of new citizens. The Year of the Apology: The End of the History Wars? There was also a burgeoning feeling among the broader community that a truce was in sight in the history wars (cf. Riley; Throsby). This view was supported by the outcome of the November 2007 federal election when the Howard government was defeated after eleven years in office. John Howard had been a key player in the history wars, intervening in decisions as wide ranging as the management of national museums and the preparation of high school history curricula. In his final year as prime minister, Howard became involved with overseeing what historical content was to be included in Becoming an Australian Citizen (cf. Andrews; Hirst). This had a lasting impact as even after Howard's electoral defeat, the Australian citizenship test and its accompanying resource booklet still remained in use for another two years as the essential guide that was to inform test candidates on how to be model Australian citizens. Whilst Howard's test was retained Kevin Rudd made the official Apology to the Stolen Generation as one of his first acts as prime minister in February 2008. His electoral victory was heralded as the coming of "a new intellectual culture" with "deep thinking and balanced analysis" (Nile). The Apology was also celebrated in both media and academic circles as the beginning of the process of reconciliation for both relations with indigenous and non-indigenous Australians as well as "reconciling" the controversies in history that had plagued Howard's prime ministership. In popular culture, too, the end of the history wars seemed imminent. In film, the Apology was celebrated with the release of Australia in November of that same year. Luhrmann's film became a box office hit that was later taken up by Tourism Australia to promote the nation as a desirable destination for international tourists. Langton praised it as an "eccentrically postmodern account of a recent frontier" that "has leaped over the ruins of the 'history wars' and given Australians a new past" and concluded that the film presented "an alternative history from the one John Howard and his followers constructed" (12). Similar appraisals had been made of the Australian citizenship test as the author of the historical content in the resource booklet, John Hirst, revealed that the final version of A Story of Australia "was not John Howard's and was organised contrary to his declared preference for narrative" (35). Hirst is a conservative historian who was employed by the Howard government to write "the official history of Australia" (28) for migrants and who had previously worked on other projects initiated by the Howard government, including the high school history curriculum review known as the History Summit in 2006. In an article entitled Australia: The Official History and published in The Monthly of that very same year as the Apology, Hirst divulged how in writing A Story of Australia for the citizenship resource booklet, his aim was to be "fair-minded and balanced" (31). He claimed to do this by detailing what he understood as the "two sides" in Australia's historical and political controversies relating to "Aboriginal affairs" (31), known more commonly as the history wars. Hirst's resolve was to "report the position of the two sides" (31), choosing to briefly focus on the views of historian Henry Reynolds and the political scientist Robert Manne on the one side, as well as presenting the conservative views of journalists Keith Windshuttle and Andrew Bolt on the other side (31-32). Hirst was undoubtedly referring to the two sides in the history wars that are characterised by on the one hand, commentators who believe that the brutal impact of British colonisation on indigenous peoples should be acknowledged whilst those on the other who believe that Australians should focus on celebrating their nation's relatively "peaceful past". Popularly characterised as the black armband view against the white blindfold view of Australian history, this definition does not capture the complexities, ruptures and messiness of Australia's contested past or of the debates that surround it. Hirst's categorisation, is rather problematic; while Windshuttle and Bolt's association is somewhat understandable considering their shared support in denying the existence of the Stolen Generation and massacres of indigenous communities, the association of Reynolds with Manne is certainly contestable and can be viewed as a simplistic grouping together of the "bleeding hearts" in discourses surrounding Australian history. As with the film Australia, Hirst wanted to be "the recorder of myth and memory and not simply the critical historian" (32). Unlike the film Australia, Hirst remained committed to a particular view of the discipline of history that was committed to notions of objectivity and authenticity, stating that he "was not writing this history to embody (his) own views" (31) but rather, his purpose was to introduce to new citizens what he thought captured "what Australians of today knew and valued and celebrated in their history" (32). The textual analysis that follows will illustrate that despite the declaration of a "balanced" view of Australian history being produced for migrant consumption and the call for a truce in the history wars, A Story of Australia still reflected the values and principles of a celebratory white narrative that was not concerned with recognising any side of history that dealt with the fatal impact of colonialism in stories of Australia. Disrupting the Two Sides of History The success of Australia was built on lands taken from Aboriginal people after European settlement in 1788 (DIC 32). [...]The Aboriginal people were not without friends […]. Governor Macquarie (1810-1821) took a special interest in them, running a school for their children and offering them land for farming. But very few Aboriginal people were willing to move into European society; they were not very interested in what the Europeans had to offer. (DIC 32) Despite its author's protestations against a narrative format, A Story of Australia is written as a thematic narrative that is mainly concerned with describing a nation's trajectory towards progress. It includes the usual primary school project heroes of European explorers and settlers, all of them men: Captain James Cook, Arthur Phillip and Lachlan Macquarie (17-18). It privileges a British heritage and ignores the multicultural make-up of the Australian population. In this Australian story, the convict settlers are an important factor in nation building as they found "new opportunities in this strange colony" (18) and "the ordinary soldier, the digger is a national hero" (21). Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, are described in the past tense as part of pre-history having "hunter-gatherer traditions" (32), whose culture exists today only in spectacle and who have only themselves to blame for their marginalisation by refusing the help of the white settlers. Most notable in this particular version of history are the absent stories and absent characters; there is little mention of the achievements of women and nation-building is presented as an exclusively masculine enterprise. There is also scarce mention of the contribution of migrants. Also absent is any mention of the colonisation of the Australian continent that dispossessed its Indigenous peoples. For instance, the implementation of the assimilation policy that required the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families is not even named as the Stolen Generation in the resource booklet, and the fight for native land rights encapsulated in the historic Mabo decision of 1992 is referred to as merely a "separatist policy" (33). In this way, it cannot be claimed that this is a balanced portrayal of Australia's past even by Hirst's own standards for it is difficult to locate the side represented by Reynolds and Manne. Once again, comparisons with the film Australia are useful. Although praised for raising "many thorny issues" relating to "national legitimacy and Aboriginal sovereignty" (Konishi and Nugent), Ashenden concludes that the film is "a mix of muttering, avoidance of touchy topics, and sporadic outbursts". Hogan also argues that the film Australia is "an exercise in national wish fulfillment, staged as a high budget, unabashedly commercial and sporadically ironic spectacle" that "offers symbolic absolution for the violence of colonialism" (63). Additionally, Hirst's description of a "successful" nation being built on the "uncultivated" indigenous lands suggests that colonisation was necessary and unavoidable if Australia was to progress into a civilised nation. Both Hirst's A Story of Australia and his Australia: The Official History share more than just the audacious appropriation of a proper noun with the film Australia as these cultural texts grant prominence to the values and principles of a celebratory white narrative of Australian history while playing down the unpalatable episodes, making any prospective citizen who does not accept these "balanced" versions of historical truths as deviant and unworthy of becoming an Australian citizen. Our Australian Story: Reconciling the Fatal Impact The Australian citizenship test and its accompanying booklet, Becoming an Australian Citizen were replaced in October 2009 with a revised test and a new booklet entitled, Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond. The Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee deemed the 2007 original test to be "flawed, intimidating to some and discriminatory" (Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee 3). It replaced mandatory knowledge of Australian values with that of the Citizenship Pledge and determined that the subject of Australian history, although "nice-to-know" was not essential for assessing the suitability of the conferral of Australian citizenship. History content is now included in the new booklet in the non-testable section under the more inclusive title of Our Australian Story. This particular version of history now names the Stolen Generation, includes references to Australia's multicultural make up and even recognises some of the fatal effects of British colonisation. The Apology features prominently over three long paragraphs (71) and Indigenous dispossession is now described under the title of Fatal Impact as follows: The early governors were told not to harm the Aboriginal people, but the British settlers moved onto Aboriginal land and many Aboriginal people were killed. Settlers were usually not punished for committing these crimes. (58) So does this change in tone in the official history in the resource booklet for prospective citizens "prove" that the history wars are over? This more conciliatory version of Australia's past is still not the "real proof" that the history wars are over for despite broadening its categories of what constitutes as historical truth, these truths still privilege an exclusive white perspective. For example, in the new resource booklet, detail on the Stolen Generation is included as a relevant historical event in relation to what the office of Prime Minister, the Bringing Them Home Report and the Official Apology have achieved for Indigenous Australians and for the national identity, stating that "the Sorry speech was an important step forward for all Australians" (71). Perhaps then, we need to discard this way of thinking that frames the past as an ethical struggle between right and wrong and a moral battle between victors and losers. If we cease thinking of our nation's history as a battleground between celebrators and mourners and stop framing our national identity in terms of achievers and those who were not interested in building the nation, then we recognise that these "war" discourses are only the products of "games of truth" invented by governments, expert historians and their institutions. In this way, official texts can produce the possibility for a range of players from new directions to participate in what content can be included as historical truths in Australian stories and what is possible in productions of official Australian identities. The Australian Citizenship Review Committee understood this potential impact as it has recommended "the government commit to reviewing the content of the book at regular intervals given the evolving nature of Australian society" (Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee 25). In disrupting the self-evident notion of a balanced history of facts with its evocation of an equal society and by exposing how governmental institutions have used these texts as instruments of social governance (cf. Bennett), we can come to understand that there are other ways of being Australian and alternative perspectives on Australian history. The production of official histories can work towards producing a "curative science" that heals the fatal impact of the past. The impact of this kind of cultural research should be directed towards the discourse of history wars. In this way, history becomes not a battlefield but "a differential knowledge of energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes" (Foucault 90) which has the capacity to transform Australian society into a society inclusive of all indigenous, non-indigenous and migrant citizens and which can work towards reconciliation of the nation's history, and perhaps, even of its people. References Allison, Lyn. "Citizenship Test Is the New Aussie Cringe." The Drum. ABC News. 4 Dec. 2011 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/2007-09-28/citizenship-test-is-the-new-aussie-cringe/683634›. Andrews, Kevin. "Citizenship Test Resource Released." MediaNet Press Release Wire 26 Aug. 2007: 1. Ashenden, Dean. "Luhrmann, Us, and Them." Inside Story 18 Dec. 2008. 4 Dec. 2011 ‹http://inside.org.au/luhrmann-us-and-them/›. Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee. Moving Forward... Improving Pathways to Citizenship. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2008. Australian Government. Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond. Belconnen: National Communications Branch of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2009.Bennett, Tony. Culture: A Reformer's Science. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1998. DIC (Department of Immigration and Citizenship). Becoming an Australian Citizen: Citizenship. Your Commitment to Australia. Canberra, 2007.Foucault, Michel. "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 76-100. Grattan, Michelle. "Accept Australian Values or Get Out." The Age 25 Aug. 2005: 1. Hirst, John. "Australia: The Official History." The Monthly 6 Feb. 2008: 28-35. "Howard Defends Citizenship Test." The Age 11 Dec. 2006. Howard, John. "A Sense of Balance: The Australian Achievement in 2006 - Address to the National Press Club, 25 January." PM's News Room: Speeches. Canberra: Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Johnson, Carol. "John Howard's 'Values' and Australian Identity." Australian Journal of Political Science 42.2 (2007): 195-209. Konishi, Shino, and Maria Nugent. "Reviewing Indigenous History in Baz Luhrmann's Australia." Inside Story 4 Dec. 2009. 4 Dec. 2011 ‹http://inside.org.au/reviewing-indigenous-history-in-baz-luhrmanns-australia/›. Lake, Marilyn. "Wasn't This a Government Obsessed with Historical 'Truth'?" The Age 29 Oct. 2007: 13. Langton, Marcia. "Faraway Downs Fantasy Resonates Close to Home." Sunday Age 23 November 2008: 12. Nile, Richard. "End of the Culture Wars." Richard Nile Blog. The Australian 28 Nov. 2007. Riley, Mark. "Sorry, But the PM Says the Culture Wars Are Over." Sydney Morning Herald 10 Sep. 2003: 1. Tavan, Gwenda. "Testing Times: The Problem of 'History' in the Howard Government's Australian Citizenship Test." Does History Matter? Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand. Eds. Neumann, Klaus and Gwenda Tavan. Canberra: ANU E P, 2009. Throsby, David. "A Truce in the Culture Wars." Sydney Morning Herald 26 Apr. 2008: 32. Weeks, Jeffrey. "Foucault for Historians." History Workshop 14 (Autumn 1982): 106-19.

"Warriors and Wanderers: Making Race in the Tasman World, 1769-1840" is an exploration of the development of racial thought in Australia and New Zealand from the period of first contact between British and the respective indigenous peoples to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. It analyses four groups of primary documents: the journals and published manuscripts of James Cook's Pacific voyages; An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales by David Collins published in 1798; documents written by and about Samuel Marsden, colonial chaplain in New South Wales and the father of the first mission to New Zealand; and the Reports from the British House of Commons Select Committee into the Treatment of Aborigines in the British Empire from 1835 to 1837. This study employs a transnational methodology and explores the early imperial history of the two countries as a Tasman world of imperial activity. It argues that ideas of human difference and racial thought had important material effects for the indigenous peoples of the region, and were critical to the design of colonial projects and ongoing relationships with both Maori and Aboriginal people, influencing the countries; and their national historiographies, right up to the present day. Part 1 examines the journals of James Cook's three Pacific voyages, and the ideas about Maori and Aboriginal people which were developed out them. The journals and published books of Cook's Pacific voyages depicted Maori as a warrior race living in hierarchical communities, people who were physically akin to Europeans and keen to interact with the voyagers, and who were understood to change their landscape as well as to defend their land, people who, I argue, were depicted as sovereign owners of their land. In Australia encounter was completely different, characterised by Aboriginal people's strategic use of withdrawal and observation, and British descriptions can be characterised as an ethnology of absence, with skin colour dominating documentation of Aboriginal people in the Endeavour voyage journals. Aboriginal withdrawal from encounter with the British signified to Banks that Aboriginal people had no defensive capability. Assumptions of low population numbers and that Aboriginal people did not change their landscape exacerbated this idea, and culminated in the concept that Aboriginal people were not sovereign owners of their country. Part 2 examines debates informing the decision to colonise the east coast of Australia through the evidence of Joseph Banks and James Matra to the British Government Committee on Transportation. The idea that Aboriginal people would not resist settlement was a feature not only of this expert evidence but dominated representation of the Sydney Eora community in David Collins's An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, such that Aboriginal attacks on the settlement were not said to be resistance. A report of the kidnapping of two Muriwhenua Maori men by Norfolk Island colonial authorities was also included in Collins Account, relaying to a British audience a Maori view of their own communities while also opening up further British knowledge of the resources New Zealand offered the empire. The connection with Maori communities facilitated by British kidnapping and subsequent visits by Maori chiefs to New South Wales encouraged the New South Wales colonial chaplain Samuel Marsden to lobby for a New Zealand mission, which was established in 1814, as discussed in Part 3. Marsden was a tireless advocate for Maori civilisation and religious instruction, while he argued that Aboriginal people could not be converted to Christianity. Part 3 explores Marsden's colonial career in the Tasman world, arguing that his divergent actions in the two communities shaped racial thought about the two communities of the two countries. It explores the crucial role of the chaplain's connection to the Australian colony, especially through his significant holdings of land and his relationships with individual Aboriginal children who he raised in his home, to his depiction of Aboriginal people and his assessment of their capacity as human beings. Evidence from missionary experience in New Zealand was central to the divergent depictions of Tasman world indigenous people in the Buxton Committee Reports produced in 1836 and 1837, which are analysed in Part 4. The Buxton Committee placed their conclusions about Maori and Aboriginal people within the context of British imperial activity around the globe. While the Buxton Committee stressed that all peoples were owners of their land, in the Tasman world evidence suggested that Aboriginal people did not use land in a way that would confer practical ownership rights. And while the Buxton Committee believed that Australia's race relations were a failure of British benevolent imperialism, they did not feel that colonial expansion could, or should be, halted. Evidence from New Zealand stressed that Maori independence was threatened by those seen to be "inappropriate" British imperial agents who came via Australia, reinforcing a discourse of separation between Australia and New Zealand that Marsden had first initiated. While the Buxton Committee had not advocated the negotiation of treaties, the idea that Maori sovereignty was too fragile to be sustained justified the British decision to negotiate a treaty with Maori just three years after the Select Committee delivered its final Report.

This thesis is about white Australian history and public spectacle. It analyses the representation of white colonisation—'heroic history'—in elaborate public spectacles which were staged in Sydney in 1938 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of white settlement. The uses of history in these spectacles are discussed in terms of their structure, organisation, opposition, and relationship to a wider field of historical representation. The operations of two kinds of heroic history are examined in detail: visionary history, to do with the visionary anticipation of white Australia by singular historical individuals, notably Arthur Phillip; and pioneering history, concerned with the experience of settlers on the frontier.