Introduction: ruptured histories – Australia, China, Japan

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Notes

1 Private archives of Sophie Loy-Wilson.

2 Carol Gluck, ‘The End of Elsewhere: Writing Modernity Now’, American Historical Review 116, 3 (2011): 676–87.

3 Cathy Weiszmann, Correspondence with Sophie Loy-Wilson, 12 October 2023.

4 Ibid.

5 Here we are drawing on a large body of work critical of the ‘nation’ in settler colonial historiography, ranging from Ian Tyrell’s work which sought to dislodge American exceptionalism, to Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynold’s insistence on a transnational history of the White Australia Policy, to Tracey Banivanua-Mar’s mapping of Indigenous mobilities across Australasia and the Pacific, and to Neville Meaney’s field-defining intervention, ‘Britishness and Australian Identity: The Problem of Nationalism in Australian History of Historiography’, Australian Historical Studies 32, no. 116 (2001): 76–90.

6 Wanning Sun, ‘What Does National Interest Mean When it Comes to Labor’s China Policy: The Language Around National Interest and National Security has the Albanese Government Walking a Tightrope’, Crikey, 15 November 2023; James Curran, ‘Excess Baggage: Is China a Genuine Threat to Australia?’, Australian Foreign Affairs 19 (2023): 6–28; Marilyn Lake, ‘The China Threat: Can We Escape the Historical Legacy of Anti-Chinese Racism?’, Arena, 29 June 2023; David Brophy, China Panic: Australia’s Alternative to Paranoia and Pandering (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2021). See also: Alecia Simmonds, Anne (now Yves) Rees, and Anna Clark, ‘Testing the Boundaries: Reflections on Transnationalism in Australian History’, in Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History, ed. Simmonds, Rees and Clark (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1–14.

7 Raymond Williams, quoted in Ewan Gibbs, ‘Blood all over the Grass’, review of Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984–85, ed. Robert Gildea, London Review of Books 45, no. 21 (2 November 2023).

8 Simmonds, Rees, and Clark, ‘Testing the Boundaries’, 3.

9 Christina Twomey, ‘Is Australian History over Determined by the Transnational Turn?’, in Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History, ed. Simmonds, Rees, and Clark (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 89–101.

10 Sophie Loy-Wilson, ‘Trouble in White Australia: Marilyn Lake, Australian History and Asian Exclusion’, in Contesting Australian History: Essays in Honour of Marilyn Lake, ed. Joy Damousi and Judith Smart (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2019), 175.

11 Stephen Fitzgerald, quoted in Geremie Barmé, ‘Australia and China in the World: Whose Literacy?’, China in the Word Annual Lecture, Australian National University, Canberra, 18 July 2011.

12 Jon Picinni, Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s: Global Radicals (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2016); Claire Lowrie, Masters and Servants: Cultures of Empire in the Tropics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); Sophie Loy-Wilson, ‘Liberating Asia: Strikes and Protest in Sydney and Shanghai, 1920–1939’, History Workshop Journal 71, no. 1 (2011): 74–102; Adrian Vickers, ‘From Oriental Studies to Inter-Asia Referencing: The 2019 A.R. Davis Memorial Lecture’, JOSAH: Journal of the Society for Asian Humanities, 52 (2020–21): 12–35; Andrew Levidis, ‘Cold War Archives: Return to the Jakarta–Tokyo–Canberra Trilateral’, East Asia Forum, 19 February 2023.

13 David Walker, ‘Know Thy Neighbour: Save the Date, 7 July 1937’, Griffith Review 48 (2015): 194–201; Lachlan Strahan, Australia’s China: Changing Perceptions from the 1930s to the 1990s (Hong Kong: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Kate Darian-Smith and David Lowe, The Australian Embassy in Tokyo and Japan–Australia Relations (Canberra: ANU Press, 2022).

14 David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, eds., Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century (Crawley, Western Australia: UWA Press, 2012), 2.

15 Agnieszka Sobocinska, ‘Overturning the Point: Exploring Change in Australia–Asia relations’, History Compass 12, no. 8 (2014): 642–50.

16 Frank Mount, Wrestling with Asia: A Memoir (Ballan: Connor Court Publishing, 2012).

17 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, ‘Liquid Area Studies’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 27, no. 1 (2019): 209–39.

18 Nicholas Ferns, Australia in the Age of International Development, 1945–75: Colonial and Foreign Aid Policy in Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

19 Miranda Johnson and Caitlin Storr, ‘Australia as Empire’, in The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, ed. Peter Cane, Lisa Ford, and Mark McMillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 248–80.

20 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn., 1990).

21 James Curran and Stuart Ward, eds., Australia and the Wider World: Selected Essays of Neville Meaney (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2013).

22 Ibid., 51.

23 Curran and Ward, eds., Selected Essays of Neville Meaney, 59.

24 Ibid., 67.

25 Mark Hearn, ‘Writing the Nation in Australia: Australian Historians and Narrative Myths of Nation’, in Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective, ed. Stefan Berger (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 103.

26 Curran and Ward, eds., Selected Essays of Neville Meaney, 73.

27 Allan Gyngell, Fear of Abandonment: Australia in the World Since 1942 (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2017).

28 Paul Thomas Chamberlin, ‘Beyond Americentrism: Thoughts on Internationalizing America and the World’, American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (2023): 263.

29 The phrase ‘habit of historiographical seeing’ comes from Carol Gluck in Sabine Frühstück, Carol Gluck, Andrew Gordon, and Laura Hein, with Eiko Maruko Siniawer, ‘Modern Japan History Association Roundtable: “The State of Our Field”’, Modern Japan History Association, 17 October 2023.

30 Maria John, ‘Doing Comparative and Transnational Indigenous History’, American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (2023): 298.

31 Martin Dusinberre, Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and its Migrant Histories (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023), 5.

32 Arunabh Ghosh, ‘Reflections on Global History’, American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (2023): 281.

33 Tianna Killoran, ‘Visible participation: Japanese migrants in north Queensland, 1880–1941’, History Australia, 18, no. 3 (2021): 508–525.

34 Dennis Lewis from Bendigo Historical Society, Conversation with Sophie Loy-Wison, 16 January 2023.

35 Benjamin Mountford, Britain, China, and Colonial Australia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Keir Reeves and Benjamin Mountford, ‘Sojourning and Settling: Locating Chinese–Australian History’, Australian Historical Studies, 42, no. 1 (2011): 111–25.

36 Leigh McKinnon from Golden Dragon Museum Bendigo, Conversation with Sophie Loy-Wilson, 16 January 2023.

37 Elizabeth Kwan, ‘Matriarch of Darwin’s Chinese community’, Inside Story, 7 March 2019, https://insidestory.org.au/matriarch-of-darwins-chinese-community/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Levidis

Dr Andrew Levidis is a lecturer of modern Japanese history at the Australian National University and an international historian of modern Japan and its empire-state.

Sophie Loy-Wilson

Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson is a senior lecturer in Australian history at the University of Sydney and a historian of Chinese–Australian communities.