From Spiritualists to Flat Whites

We write this editorial in the wake of the Australian referendum to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament. The “no” outcome brings a momentous and emotional end to the year. It signals ongoing turbulence in our national space and a continued deferral of the truth-telling process this country so sorely needs. It suggests, however, that there is meaningful work to be done by scholars of Australian studies, to reckon with the referendum and its many wide-ranging implications.

As we publish this fourth and final issue for 2023, we want to express our honour and respect for 65,000 years of Indigenous custodianship and culture in Australia and to acknowledge, as ever, First Nations peoples as the Traditional Owners of the lands on which we are fortunate to live and work. Sovereignty was never ceded. We continue in our commitment to the constitutional recognition called for by those Indigenous leaders who together composed the Uluru Statement from the Heart—and for treaty, justice, equity and an honest reckoning with our history.

Turning to this issue of the Journal of Australian Studies, we bring you an array of rich offerings, from articles about Spiritualists and “plant racism” to takeaway flat whites.

In “The Victorian Spiritualists’ Union and the Surprising Survival of Spiritualism in Australia”, Andrew Singleton charts the history of the world’s oldest continuously running Spiritualist organisation, the Victorian Spiritualists’ Union (est. 1870) and explores the unexpected survival of the Spiritualist movement in Australia. Spiritualism has persisted here, the article suggests, due to the development of a church movement, the advocacy of groups such as the VSU, the generous volunteer efforts of individual Spiritualists, the acquisition of church buildings, and geographic mobility, all of which have allowed Spiritualist churches to remain responsive to changing social and cultural conditions for more than a century. Singleton argues persuasively that it is one of Australia’s largest and most resilient alternative religious movements—not simply a “Victorian-era curio”.

Kieran James explores the way Croatian-Australian identity is revealed through soccer club support by looking at one Melbourne-based club as a case study: the Melbourne Knights. Since the 1960s, Croatian soccer clubs have been an important fixture of all major Australian cities, and a number of regional towns, with the most significant of these being Melbourne Croatia and Sydney Croatia, both of which played in Australia’s now defunct National Soccer League (NSL) (1977–2004). Effectively barred from the new A-League in 2005 and 2006, these clubs experienced discrimination and marginalisation similar to that experienced historically by Irish-Catholic clubs in Scotland.

Matilda Keynes’s article traces the convergence of state redress and the educational construction of citizenship from the 1990s onwards in Australia. In particular, it examines how successive settler political leaders used the education of a historical consciousness—settler citizens’ relation to past, present and future—as a core strategy to seek resolution to the nation’s problematic national past. Keynes takes us through key political speeches, including Keating’s 1992 Redfern Park speech and Rudd’s 2008 Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples.

In “Aunty and the Sandgropers: The ABC in Western Australia”, Bridget Griffen-Foley investigates the evolution of the Australian Broadcasting Commission there between the 1920s and the 1960s, covering the introduction and spread of radio and then television. This article considers the visits of ABC commissioners and management to Perth, the appointment of commissioners from Western Australia, the building of radio and television studios, the creation of the ABC’s first state Advisory Committee in 1935, and the operations—in Perth—of the broadcaster’s last surviving capital city Television Viewers’ Committee. Griffin-Foley argues that the history of the ABC in Western Australia is distinctive because of the state’s isolation and sparse population and, crucially, the time difference from the east coast.

Jai Cooper’s article, “‘I Guess You Could Call It Plant Racism’: Making Kin in Australian Environmental Workfare”, examines data collected from participants engaged in Australian environmental workfare programs to explore how young workers displayed critical reflexivity and embraced more obscure Others. In the midst of the Australian bush, the author finds that young people have answered Donna Haraway’s call to “make kin in the Chthulucene”. While attempting to generate cultural capital, particularly in the field of environmental science, these workers actively spurned “naïve environmentalism”.

Stepping back in time, Belinda Beattie shines a light on Kalgoorlie’s early sex trade and its relationship with the Kalgoorlie Miner during the period 1896–1900. Around the time of Federation, the community made significant attempts to rid itself of prostitution. Beattie observes that the Kalgoorlie Miner’s framing of prostitution as the “social evil”—antithetical to Christian living, morals and civility—was a successful position because it appealed to the buying public and maintained pressure on the problem. By exploring the place of newspapers in a given context and community, she finds that gatekeeping and community Christianism, particularly the laity, played an essential role in challenging and opposing prostitution in Federation Kalgoorlie.

In “Files, Families and the Nation: An Archival History, Perhaps”, Jordana Silverstein also draws on the archives, taking a microhistory approach to thinking through the role of migration archives, and family histories of migration, within the settler-colony. By combining family history with autoethnography, Silverstein reflects on her grandparents’ naturalisation applications to consider what we can learn from bureaucratic archives and how we can approach the problem of how to use these archives. This article ponders the devastating ruins of knowledge that we are left with in the long aftermath of the Holocaust, and the ways that those of us from migrant families are implicated within the ongoing genocide in Australia. Trying to think ethically alongside the work of Aboriginal scholars, and using frameworks offered by other Jewish scholars, Silverstein takes seriously the question of how we can address questions of statelessness, naturalisation, citizenship, and belonging in the settler-colony as we write our own histories.

Yves Rees considers Australians abroad in their article “Gumtree Skyscrapers and Takeaway Flat Whites: Anzac in the United States”. Extending the transnational history of Anzac by shifting the focus from Britain to the United States, Rees 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 out to Anzac to enact their Australianness and build ties with fellow expatriates. As a 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, Anzac Day is now an annual event that renews the transpacific alliance.

In “‘The More Horrible the Thing Was, the More They Laughed’: Laughter, Solidarity and Refugees’ Negotiation of Trauma During Resettlement in Postwar Queensland”, Jessica Stroja considers the role of laughter and its relevance within refugee studies and trauma recovery in European diasporas in Australia. This article provides a case study of Latvian, Ukrainian and Polish refugees in Queensland and explores the vital role of laughter in their long-term recovery from trauma. The project on which this article is based included over 50 oral history interviews, files from over 10 archives, and more than 300 case studies of displaced families resettled in Queensland, an approach that has never before been undertaken in an extensive study of refugee resettlement in Queensland. It establishes the importance of laughter during resettlement and shows how it intersects with shared community experiences that resonate for decades. Stroja highlights the practical role of laughter for refugees’ trauma recovery, particularly for those without access to pre-existing support structures and migrant networks upon arrival.

Finally, Jessica Gerrard charts how a disdain for progressivism in schooling was central to the development of conservative interests in Australia across the 1970s and 1980s, by analysing the Australian Council for Educational Standards (ACES) Review (1973–1987). This under-examined newsletter offers important insight into the cultivation of cultural conservatism, with links to influential Australian conservative forums. The article identifies the diverse conservative interests and actors who set an agenda to intervene into educational practice via the newsletter, and it illuminates how ACES Review writers depict progressivism as dangerous social engineering in contrast to their defence of traditional disciplines and educational standards. ACES Review writers positioned themselves as speaking on the outside of power, providing a voice of dissent against progressivism in government bureaucracies and taking a leading role in conservative challenges to union leadership.

Frank Bongiorno concludes this issue with his 2023 Menzies Lecture, “Australia: A New Political Geography?”, which explores the recent transformation of the nation imagined by the first prime minister, Edmund Barton, into something that would likely have dismayed him and his fellow Federation founders. Barton believed there was nothing more natural than “a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation”. However, the pandemic reminded Australians that soft state borders can quickly turn hard, that differences between states still matter, and that state and territory governments remain embedded in everyday life in ways Australians have often overlooked or underestimated. The resurgence of Indigenous Australia, Bongiorno notes, has offered a different kind of challenge to conventional understandings of settler sovereignty and national space. Australians, settler and Indigenous, have received a crash course in a new political geography inhabited by dozens of First Nations peoples, each increasingly recognised by name and Country, and each with culture, language and stories it proudly calls its own.

We thank Professor Bongiorno for this timely contribution to our final issue of the Journal of Australian Studies for 2023, a powerful collection of articles that is representative of the innovative scholarship and multivalent perspectives the journal aims to foster. We encourage you to dip into this issue, one that extends into the diverse spaces and concerns of contemporary Australian studies. Thanks, as usual, to our production manager, Amber Gwynne, and to our many authors, reviewers and other contributors for the crucial work that sustains our Australian studies community.