This issue marks two simultaneous developments for History Australia: a change of publisher and a new team of editors. A few weeks ago, as President of the AHA, I signed the contract with Taylor & Francis to take over the publication of our journal. Taylor & Francis will publish the journal from January, which means a very rapid hand-over to produce this first issue for 2016. The Executive Committee of the AHA became increasingly convinced that we needed to shift to a global publisher, and are delighted that we will now benefit from Taylor & Francis’s publishing platforms and wide distribution networks. Our journal will now be available in every university library in Australia and New Zealand, and over 20,000 libraries worldwide. Research published in History Australia suddenly has a vastly expanded potential readership.
On behalf of the Association I sincerely thank Nathan Hollier and his team at Monash University Publishing for the years of superb publication of our journal. Monash UP is now focussing on book publishing, and are giving us every assistance in the transition process. As publishers of History Australia from 2003 to 2015 Monash UP took our former AHA Bulletin and turned it into a beautiful, accessible and high-quality academic journal. Moreover, they were always professional, friendly and helpful in our dealings with them, and we are truly grateful to them.
The other major transition is that of editorial teams. I want to express, on behalf of the whole Association and the Executive Committee in particular, our enormous gratitude and appreciation for the last three years of hard and creative work by the outgoing editors based at the Australian National University: Tomoko Akami, Frank Bongiorno and Alexander Cook, with Karen Downing as assistant editor. I thank as well Zora Simic (University of New South Wales) who has served as book review editor and Sarah Pinto (Deakin University) as exhibition review editor. Together, the team has done a magnificent job.
The AHA has five core functions: the journal, the annual conferences, the prizes, the newsletter, and advocating for history and the historical profession. The editorial team has thus carried a large proportion of the work of the Association over the last three years – and it is demanding work, with deadlines that necessarily fall on top of other responsibilities such as teaching, supervising, professional commitments and one’s own scholarship.
It is inimical that the current academic accounting systems minimise the value of editing. But, we all know that the bean-counting is only part of our scholarship and our discipline. Editing matters hugely. Editors of a premier journal such as History Australia do much to shape the field and the profession. They are at once gatekeepers and benchmark setters. They have the power to decide what topics and approaches are of current interest to the discipline. In these ways, they make a large and lasting contribution to the field.
In particular, I want to note the ways in which Frank, Alex and Tomoko have modelled the possibilities of team-work and shared roles. From the outside, it has appeared seamless and highly efficient. Bringing their various fields of expertise in Australian, European and Asian history to the job, they have more than fulfilled the Executive Committee’s hopes for a journal with wide geographical reach. In the issues they have edited, we had articles dealing with places from Korea to Japan, from Turkey to India and Senegal; and articles that have addressed environmental history, political history, architecture, refugees, humanitarianism, mobility, war, honours, and a host of other topics as well as issues of historical practice. Moreover, the issues they have edited are marked by high intellectual standards and scholarly rigour. They have edited work by internationally eminent historians, and provided helpful guidance to early career scholars.
History Australia as it now stands is the vibrant product, too, of its former editors: Marian Quartly, Penny Russell and Richard White. Not only has the journal acquired growing prestige, History Australia’s profile is also increasingly distinctive. Fittingly for the AHA, which is for all historians working in or on Australia, it presents scholarship by historians working across continents and across centuries.
We warmly welcome the new editorial team based at Flinders University, Melanie Oppenheimer, Matthew Fitzpatrick and Catherine Kevin with Karen Agutter as assistant editor. With combined expertise ranging from Australian to European history, empires and imperialism, from the history of war and voluntarism, to soldier settlement schemes, postcolonialism, race and miscegenation, film history, gender, reproductive politics, intellectual history, and liberalism and nationalism, the new editors are well equipped to carry forward the journal’s mission of publishing history with geographical, chronological and thematic breadth. The team includes Andrekos Varnava (also Flinders) and Nathan Wise (University of New England) as book review editors, and Laina Hall from the National Museum ofAustralia as exhibition review editor. We wish them all every success for their editorial term!