Latest news with #Crotty
Irish Independent
5 days ago
- Politics
- Irish Independent
Obituary: Cathal MacLiam, activist who helped ensure Irish voters had a bigger say on European issues
A strong supporter of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and active campaigner against the apartheid regime in South Africa, he also helped to ensure Irish voters got a greater say on European political issues. MacLiam was born on Christmas Eve, 1931, in Galway city to Charles Wilson and Elizabeth (nee Goulding), both from Dublin. Originally given his father's name, he opted for the Irish-language version at an early stage. He attended a Christian Brothers national school, but his parents were unhappy with the corporal punishment he suffered and secured early admission to the Jesuit school Coláiste Iognáid/St Ignatius College. He later became a medical student at University College Galway, but dropped out after a year, moving to Liverpool and later London. Jobs he held included laboratory work at Birkbeck College, part of the University of London. At his 23rd birthday party in London in 1954, he met and fell in love with Helga Boehmer, a German physiotherapist. They married in 1955, and had five children. He was a firm friend of political activist and historian Desmond Greaves. Both were key figures in the Connolly Association in London and used its newspaper, The Irish Democrat, to promote the rights of the Irish immigrant community as well as urging British Labour politicians and trade unionists to get involved in the Northern Ireland situation. MacLiam returned in 1956 to an Ireland caught up in an employment and emigration crisis, but managed to secure a position in the developing telecommunications sector. He and Helga lived in Finglas, north Dublin, before moving permanently to Rathmines. He later became an official in Liberty Hall with the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU, which later merged with another union into Siptu). Cathal MacLiam worked closely on political issues in Dublin with scientist and activist Roy Johnston, and they had many discussions with the 'official' wing of the republican movement, led by Cathal Goulding (a first cousin of MacLiam) and Tomás Mac Giolla, both of whom took a more political approach than the Provisionals at the time. MacLiam was chairman and secretary of the Wolfe Tone Society, which he and Johnston were involved in founding. When Ireland joined the EEC, he became active in the Irish Sovereignty Movement, with Trinity College lecturer Anthony Coughlan, in seeking to protect Ireland's independence within the common market. MacLiam played an active role in the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement They were strong supporters of the Crotty case, as it was called, taken in 1986-87 by agricultural economist Raymond Crotty, which sought a referendum on the Single European Act (SEA), aimed at creating a single internal market throughout the EEC. The Supreme Court found in Crotty's favour and a referendum took place on May 26, 1987. As a result of the Crotty case, major European treaties since then have to be put to the Irish people by way of referendum. MacLiam and his associates also supported court actions taken by political activist Patricia McKenna, which ultimately resulted in a Supreme Court decision that public money could not be used in a partisan way in a constitutional referendum. MacLiam played an active role in the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, which organised a major protest in January 1970 against the visit of the South African rugby team that played against Ireland at Lansdowne Road. Having been in poor health for some time, Cathal MacLiam died peacefully at home on July 14. Helga MacLiam died in August 2016. In accordance with their wishes, their bodies have been donated to the School of Anatomy in the UCD Medical Department. A memorial occasion celebrating his life will be held later. Cathal MacLiam is survived by his sisters Joanna and Cecily, and his five children: twins Fionnula and Egon, Conor, Bébhinn and Kilian, as well as four grandchildren.
The Age
09-07-2025
- General
- The Age
History's booming in podcasts – but many of its academics are out of a job
When the Australian Historical Association held its annual gathering at Flinders University in Adelaide last year, the title for its conference was 'Home Truths'. This seemed a fitting rubric for an academic discipline in the grip of a worsening recession. 'Australian Historical Association conferences are usually a time of celebration, and with good reason,' said Associate Professor Martin Crotty from the University of Queensland, when he addressed a session entitled, 'The Future of Academic History in Australia: A conversation starter.' 'Most of us have just filed results after a semester of teaching, culminating in a marking frenzy, and the opportunity for a change of scenery away from the daily grind comes as a relief.' But he was about to mug the session with reality. 'We cannot just pretend that all is well,' he continued. 'We are a discipline in decline.' Crotty, along with a fellow historian from the University of Adelaide, Paul Sendziuk, had crunched the numbers. There were now 30 to 40 per cent fewer academics in Australian history than there were 35 years ago. Over a period when the university sector had expanded enormously, the study of the past was on a downward trajectory. 'History has not only failed to share in this growth,' said a despairing Crotty, 'but has declined.' Since 2017 alone, there has been a further significant decline of 10 to 20 per cent in the number of history staff positions at Australian universities. 'There are fewer and fewer positions in history,' Crotty tells me now, 'and fewer students.' Of particular concern was the 45 per cent reduction in the number of postgraduate history candidates. These are the scholars who, after completing their doctorates, often go on to pursue academic careers – the future of the discipline. Another speaker, Dr Tamson Pietsch from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), deepened the gloom. 'Enrolments in history-degree programs in Australian universities are crashing, and academics are exhausted and disillusioned,' was her message. 'As academic historians, our predicament is made more galling by the huge public appetite for history that exists beyond the university.' The low point of the session came when Crotty spoke of colleagues being on antidepressants. 'It was really bleak,' recalls Michelle Arrow, a history professor at Macquarie University, who was then about to take up the presidency of the Australian Historical Association. 'A real wake-up call.' Delivering his outgoing presidential address at the conference, Professor Frank Bongiorno of the Australian National University hardly boosted morale. 'History staff in several large Australian universities would now fail to muster sufficient numbers for a cricket team,' he opined, 'where once they could have fielded three or four XIs.' Since last year's conference, the crisis has deepened. Last November, faced with a $35 million shortfall in funding following a drop in international student enrolments, the University of Wollongong announced plans to cut more than 100 jobs. These included all the academics in its history department. After an academic outcry, the university backtracked. The history department was saved, but will still lose half its staff. This near-extinction event highlighted a sector-wide problem. Not only are staff and student numbers down, history professors who retire are not being replaced, which means specialist subjects, such as European history, are sometimes no longer available. 'Universities are shitting in their own nests, by blowing off so many staff,' Crotty tells me. History is not always taught any more as a standalone discipline. In some universities, it has been absorbed into more fashionable degree subjects, such as journalism and even creative writing. 'It's in danger of being sidelined,' says Anna Clark, the author of Making Australian History, a masterful account of the telling of the country's national story, and a professor at UTS, which does not have a history department. The breadth of curriculum has narrowed. The University of Queensland no longer offers courses in American or Middle Eastern history. And this at a time when the need for historical elucidation has rarely been greater. Caps on international student numbers brought in by the Albanese government have created a cash crunch, which has been especially damaging to the humanities. No one can point to a history department at an Australian university that is presently expanding. Morale within the history profession is at a low ebb, if not rock bottom. 'Far too many of my colleagues are working themselves into a frazzle,' says Crotty, who is even more pessimistic now than he was at the AHA conference last July. 'To be perfectly blunt, it's a shithouse situation,' he told me. 'And it's getting worse.' Before traversing more of this barren terrain, I should declare an interest. After failing spectacularly as an architectural student in the 1980s, I found refuge in my university's history department. There, to the surprise of both me and my tutors, I became something of a born-again academic. Rather than mix it with medievalists or trace the ancestral bloodlines of Britain's royal houses, I gravitated towards the modern, and focused as much as I could on the United States. A final-year undergraduate thesis, peering through a critical lens at the myth of John F. Kennedy's Camelot, became the launchpad for a doctorate in history. Part of the reason I became a journalist after completing my PhD was to report history in real-time. More seriously than most did I embrace the cliché of foreign correspondentland: that we get to occupy a front-row seat of history. If, as the legendary American journalist H.L. Mencken once suggested, reporting was the 'life of kings', that front-row seat was its throne. Loading The present, it seemed to me, only made sense if you understood the historical forces shaping it. American writer William Faulkner's oft-quoted maxim became a go-to: 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' Then I woke up to the fact that Faulkner was everyone's go-to, so I parroted others instead. The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl once dryly noted that history is an argument without end, a thought tailor-made for modern-day history wars. 'History's what people are trying to hide from you, not what they're trying to show you,' was the British novelist Hilary Mantel's near-perfect take. As a history boy myself, it pains me to see the discipline fall on hard times. Also, I struggle to recall a moment in my lifetime when the need for historians to help make sense of the mad tumble of world events has been greater. With Gaza, Ukraine, the tensions between Pakistan and India, which came close to exploding earlier this year, and the conflict between Israel and Iran, historical context is everything. US President Donald Trump's actions in bombing Iran, and his reluctance to draw the US into a forever war with the Tehran regime, is obviously influenced by America's misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq and, before that, Vietnam. To make sense of Vladimir Putin's imperial ambitions, it's necessary to understand his sense of the Tsarist empire's lost greatness. The same is true of Xi Jinping. His belief that China historically has been belittled by Western powers is key to understanding his modern-day mindset. At the very moment, of course, that the US could be seeking guidance from its scholars, the Trump administration has launched an assault on its academic powerhouses. Harvard University, the president's prime target, boasts one of the world's premier history faculties. What's galling is that the decline of Australian academic history comes at a time when popular history has rarely been more popular. With 12 million downloads a month, The Rest Is History, presented by British historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland, has become one of the world's most-liked podcasts. Their live shows play to packed houses, including here in Australia. Presidential biographers, such as Robert A. Caro – whose tomes on Lyndon Baines Johnson are as eagerly awaited among US history buffs as new Harry Potter titles used to be among children – have become literary celebrities. Here in Australia, much of the shelf-space in bookstores is taken up by military history books on Gallipoli, Kokoda, Long Tan and Villers-Bretonneux. More than 1300 military history books have been written by Australian authors since the mid-1970s. In 2023, sales of historical and mythological fiction were up 17 per cent, according to Nielsen BookScan Australia. Then there is the fascination with family history, underscored by the success of shows such as the SBS's Who Do You Think You Are? and websites such as On the internet, genealogical search engines are almost up there with online shopping and porn. This modern-day malaise in Australian academia is a far cry from the golden age of Australian history in the 1970s and '80s. Back then, scholars such as Geoffrey Blainey, the author of The Tyranny of Distance, and Manning Clark, who penned a six-volume history of Australia, were national figures and almost household names. In 1980, Clark was even named Australian of the Year, an accolade which later that decade went to comedian Paul Hogan and crooner John Farnham. As a result of the 'new nationalism' of the Whitlam years, fresh fields of study, such as convict, Aboriginal, welfare and religious history, had taken root. A sisterhood of feminist historians, including Anne Summers, Jill Roe and Ann Curthoys, became part of this historical renaissance, as Frank Bongiorno noted in his address in Adelaide last year. 'Interest in Australian history burgeoned,' said Bongiorno that night. 'History, it seemed, was a prince among the disciplines.' Paradoxically, it was a historical commemoration, the Bicentenary in 1988, that brought to an end these halcyon days. Arguments over whether January 26, 1788, marked a moment of settlement or invasion ignited the history wars, and the profession entered a different, darker era. 'The phase of discovery and freshness was followed by a period of controversy and subordination of history to ideological warfare,' Bongiorno tells me. 'History operated almost as a kind of banner.' In 1993, Geoffrey Blainey coined the term the 'black armband' view of history, as a rejoinder to the work in the 1970s and '80s of historians such as Henry Reynolds, who told the Australia story from more of an Indigenous viewpoint. When prime minister, John Howard, as part of his pushback against Paul Keating's rethinking of Australian national identity, took up the 'black armband' slogan. Early this century, the cultural conflict escalated when the right-wing historian Keith Windschuttle published his 2002 book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Boosted by cheerleaders in the Murdoch press, Windschuttle's work became a broadside against left-wing humanities departments accused of teaching young Australians to feel guilty about their country's past. Some academics felt bruised, and became reluctant to raise their heads above the parapet. 'Historians were punished,' says UTS' Pietsch, 'and a lot of historians were bruised by that. Historians have retreated.' 'There has been a sustained political attack on the humanities.' Michelle Arrow, a history professor at Macquarie University 'I don't think anybody wants to be the subject of a media scandal, so there was probably a retreat,' reflects Michelle Arrow. But she also points to how the history wars sparked new areas of research. At the University of Newcastle, Professor Lyndall Ryan produced a digital map documenting more than 150 Aboriginal massacres that occurred from 1780 to 1930, which has greatly increased our understanding of the brutality meted out by settlers during the Frontier Wars. The profession incurred other collateral damage. The reform brought in at the fag end of the Howard years, making the compulsory teaching of Australian history a condition of the federal-state funding agreement, had a dampening effect on higher education. 'Since they made history compulsory, elective history went down,' says Anna Clark, the granddaughter of Manning Clark. 'Maybe it was a case of, 'I've done that, I don't need to do it again.' ' The Job-Ready Graduates Package brought in by the Morrison government, which prioritised science subjects by making them cheaper for students than humanities degrees, was another hammer blow. From 2020 to 2021, when the scheme came into effect, the cost of history degrees jumped 117 per cent. 'There has been a sustained political attack on the humanities,' says Arrow, 'which is trying to reduce the number of students studying history at university.' The Albanese government has not repealed those changes. 'The Labor government has been too gutless to reverse it,' says Crotty. 'There are no votes in it. It would open up a front of criticism. Cultural warriors can attack them by saying this is a 'woke agenda'. I don't think the Labor government is brave enough to take them on.' Where the Albanese government has been more active is in shoring up institutions vital for the craft of history, such as the National Archive, National Library and National Museum of Australia in Canberra. At the same time historians were coming under political fire, the discipline was evolving. History was more hyphenated and siloed, leading to what Bongiorno calls 'the decline of the generalist'. This 'undermined collective identity and solidarity'. Historians became more cut off and cloistered. Nor were they incentivised to take a more active role in public debate. Quite the opposite. Career advancement is based on publishing peer-reviewed work in academic journals, most of which are behind paywalls and inaccessible to the public. Getting published by a prestigious university press, such as Cambridge or Oxford, is another yardstick of scholarly achievement. Yet academic titles often retail for more than $150. Upon these kinds of metrics university rankings are based. 'Australian academics have done what the profession has asked them to do,' says Pietsch, 'which is often to produce articles read by only a handful of people. They have become detached from a local audience. Re-engaging with that audience is not rewarded by the status system. There are no promotion structures that reward that. In that context, they've lost the habit and the muscles to do it. It's not the individual academic's fault. We're doing what's asked of us.' Bongiorno agrees. As he noted while addressing his colleagues last year: 'We have also overwhelmingly become the captives of a university culture driven by the quest for international student fees and the related phenomenon of global rankings that privileged the so-called international journal or academic press – almost invariably British or American – over every other means of scholarly communication.' Certainly, there is a lot of blame to go around. But are historians authors of their own grief? Are there other explanations for why academic historians struggle to connect with the public when podcasts such as The Rest Is History achieve this so effortlessly? The podcast's co-host Dominic Sandbrook, who has a doctorate in US history from Cambridge University, has some thoughts on this topic. 'People are bored with history being told in a hand-wringing, pious, judgmental and moralistic way,' he told the UK's Daily Telegraph last year. 'They want it brought to life by people who are genuine enthusiasts and love the past.' Writing in The Daily Mail in 2021, at a time when statues were being toppled and figures such as Winston Churchill were coming under assault for their racism and colonialism, he spoke of the motivation behind his successful Adventures In Time children's history books as a 'personal crusade to convert Britain's young readers to the joys of the past, free from political dogma or ideological prejudice'. Has political dogma among academics proved off-putting here? 'In Australia, we've had this perception that there are only two ways of telling the national story,' says Arrow, 'a hand-wringing way and a celebratory way. It misses the shades of grey.' Bongiorno thinks historians should avoid delivering moral lessons. 'I don't think we produce histories to induce guilt in our audiences,' he tells me, 'but I probably accept that strand is still there … 'Let's find the worst things they did and said in the past and set them out in our histories' is clearly not a very satisfactory or useful way of doing history. But my sense is that most of us would avoid that kind of approach, and we do try to provide a rounded sense of the past.' Loading In a polarised world, where binary narratives increasingly predominate, nuance often gets lost amid all the noise. And though the fashion on the left, especially in the US, has been for cancellation, historians should be in the contextualisation business. Here, I am not arguing in favour of a wishy-washy both-siderism, or squeamishness in the telling of historical truths. As a scholar of the struggle for black equality, my firm sense, rooted in empiricism, is that critical-race theory in the US is, at its core, a statement of the obvious: the simple and incontestable proposition that racial discrimination was implanted in legal and social institutions, mainly slavery, from America's founding. Manifestly, that theory applies here in Australia, too. Yet much of history does not lend itself to such declaratory findings, and there's much to be said for adopting a both/and approach to the past, embracing complexities and contradictions, rather than a binary either/or. Not romanticism or retribution, but historical realism. At a time when degree courses are increasingly being assessed on their economic worth rather than intrinsic value, historians also need to mount a stouter defence of the kind of graduates they are moulding. 'History teaches communication skills, research skills, synthesised thinking, how to evaluate when you're reading real information and not stuff produced by bots,' says Anna Clark. 'I don't know many historians who do not have good jobs. It's hard to persuade them of that at the beginning. It's not a tangible pathway. But they're really transportable skills.' Loading As part of this professional protectionism, it is also worth stressing how humanities departments have proven, over the generations, to be among the most productive engines of social mobility. History departments have long been the gateway into academia for kids who became the first in their families to attend universities, partly because the entrance requirements are not as exacting as in the sciences. In the 1960s especially, the humanities attracted many female students determined to get degrees and launch careers. At this crucial history juncture, which is as much a watershed in global affairs as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the fall of Berlin in 1945, historians should be front and centre. 'If historians have a kind of domain, it's the domain of citizenship,' says Pietsch. 'That is why the discipline rose to prominence in the late 19th century. It is what sustained it throughout the 20th century. And if the profession is to survive, it has to have a rapprochement with that concept … It's a question of democracy. History is central to the democratic future of our country.' She's right, and perhaps that should serve as something of a mission statement for the profession. After all, nobody should want to see the end of history, especially at a time when it is coming at us so thick and fast.
Sydney Morning Herald
09-07-2025
- General
- Sydney Morning Herald
History's booming in podcasts – but many of its academics are out of a job
When the Australian Historical Association held its annual gathering at Flinders University in Adelaide last year, the title for its conference was 'Home Truths'. This seemed a fitting rubric for an academic discipline in the grip of a worsening recession. 'Australian Historical Association conferences are usually a time of celebration, and with good reason,' said Associate Professor Martin Crotty from the University of Queensland, when he addressed a session entitled, 'The Future of Academic History in Australia: A conversation starter.' 'Most of us have just filed results after a semester of teaching, culminating in a marking frenzy, and the opportunity for a change of scenery away from the daily grind comes as a relief.' But he was about to mug the session with reality. 'We cannot just pretend that all is well,' he continued. 'We are a discipline in decline.' Crotty, along with a fellow historian from the University of Adelaide, Paul Sendziuk, had crunched the numbers. There were now 30 to 40 per cent fewer academics in Australian history than there were 35 years ago. Over a period when the university sector had expanded enormously, the study of the past was on a downward trajectory. 'History has not only failed to share in this growth,' said a despairing Crotty, 'but has declined.' Since 2017 alone, there has been a further significant decline of 10 to 20 per cent in the number of history staff positions at Australian universities. 'There are fewer and fewer positions in history,' Crotty tells me now, 'and fewer students.' Of particular concern was the 45 per cent reduction in the number of postgraduate history candidates. These are the scholars who, after completing their doctorates, often go on to pursue academic careers – the future of the discipline. Another speaker, Dr Tamson Pietsch from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), deepened the gloom. 'Enrolments in history-degree programs in Australian universities are crashing, and academics are exhausted and disillusioned,' was her message. 'As academic historians, our predicament is made more galling by the huge public appetite for history that exists beyond the university.' The low point of the session came when Crotty spoke of colleagues being on antidepressants. 'It was really bleak,' recalls Michelle Arrow, a history professor at Macquarie University, who was then about to take up the presidency of the Australian Historical Association. 'A real wake-up call.' Delivering his outgoing presidential address at the conference, Professor Frank Bongiorno of the Australian National University hardly boosted morale. 'History staff in several large Australian universities would now fail to muster sufficient numbers for a cricket team,' he opined, 'where once they could have fielded three or four XIs.' Since last year's conference, the crisis has deepened. Last November, faced with a $35 million shortfall in funding following a drop in international student enrolments, the University of Wollongong announced plans to cut more than 100 jobs. These included all the academics in its history department. After an academic outcry, the university backtracked. The history department was saved, but will still lose half its staff. This near-extinction event highlighted a sector-wide problem. Not only are staff and student numbers down, history professors who retire are not being replaced, which means specialist subjects, such as European history, are sometimes no longer available. 'Universities are shitting in their own nests, by blowing off so many staff,' Crotty tells me. History is not always taught any more as a standalone discipline. In some universities, it has been absorbed into more fashionable degree subjects, such as journalism and even creative writing. 'It's in danger of being sidelined,' says Anna Clark, the author of Making Australian History, a masterful account of the telling of the country's national story, and a professor at UTS, which does not have a history department. The breadth of curriculum has narrowed. The University of Queensland no longer offers courses in American or Middle Eastern history. And this at a time when the need for historical elucidation has rarely been greater. Caps on international student numbers brought in by the Albanese government have created a cash crunch, which has been especially damaging to the humanities. No one can point to a history department at an Australian university that is presently expanding. Morale within the history profession is at a low ebb, if not rock bottom. 'Far too many of my colleagues are working themselves into a frazzle,' says Crotty, who is even more pessimistic now than he was at the AHA conference last July. 'To be perfectly blunt, it's a shithouse situation,' he told me. 'And it's getting worse.' Before traversing more of this barren terrain, I should declare an interest. After failing spectacularly as an architectural student in the 1980s, I found refuge in my university's history department. There, to the surprise of both me and my tutors, I became something of a born-again academic. Rather than mix it with medievalists or trace the ancestral bloodlines of Britain's royal houses, I gravitated towards the modern, and focused as much as I could on the United States. A final-year undergraduate thesis, peering through a critical lens at the myth of John F. Kennedy's Camelot, became the launchpad for a doctorate in history. Part of the reason I became a journalist after completing my PhD was to report history in real-time. More seriously than most did I embrace the cliché of foreign correspondentland: that we get to occupy a front-row seat of history. If, as the legendary American journalist H.L. Mencken once suggested, reporting was the 'life of kings', that front-row seat was its throne. Loading The present, it seemed to me, only made sense if you understood the historical forces shaping it. American writer William Faulkner's oft-quoted maxim became a go-to: 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' Then I woke up to the fact that Faulkner was everyone's go-to, so I parroted others instead. The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl once dryly noted that history is an argument without end, a thought tailor-made for modern-day history wars. 'History's what people are trying to hide from you, not what they're trying to show you,' was the British novelist Hilary Mantel's near-perfect take. As a history boy myself, it pains me to see the discipline fall on hard times. Also, I struggle to recall a moment in my lifetime when the need for historians to help make sense of the mad tumble of world events has been greater. With Gaza, Ukraine, the tensions between Pakistan and India, which came close to exploding earlier this year, and the conflict between Israel and Iran, historical context is everything. US President Donald Trump's actions in bombing Iran, and his reluctance to draw the US into a forever war with the Tehran regime, is obviously influenced by America's misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq and, before that, Vietnam. To make sense of Vladimir Putin's imperial ambitions, it's necessary to understand his sense of the Tsarist empire's lost greatness. The same is true of Xi Jinping. His belief that China historically has been belittled by Western powers is key to understanding his modern-day mindset. At the very moment, of course, that the US could be seeking guidance from its scholars, the Trump administration has launched an assault on its academic powerhouses. Harvard University, the president's prime target, boasts one of the world's premier history faculties. What's galling is that the decline of Australian academic history comes at a time when popular history has rarely been more popular. With 12 million downloads a month, The Rest Is History, presented by British historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland, has become one of the world's most-liked podcasts. Their live shows play to packed houses, including here in Australia. Presidential biographers, such as Robert A. Caro – whose tomes on Lyndon Baines Johnson are as eagerly awaited among US history buffs as new Harry Potter titles used to be among children – have become literary celebrities. Here in Australia, much of the shelf-space in bookstores is taken up by military history books on Gallipoli, Kokoda, Long Tan and Villers-Bretonneux. More than 1300 military history books have been written by Australian authors since the mid-1970s. In 2023, sales of historical and mythological fiction were up 17 per cent, according to Nielsen BookScan Australia. Then there is the fascination with family history, underscored by the success of shows such as the SBS's Who Do You Think You Are? and websites such as On the internet, genealogical search engines are almost up there with online shopping and porn. This modern-day malaise in Australian academia is a far cry from the golden age of Australian history in the 1970s and '80s. Back then, scholars such as Geoffrey Blainey, the author of The Tyranny of Distance, and Manning Clark, who penned a six-volume history of Australia, were national figures and almost household names. In 1980, Clark was even named Australian of the Year, an accolade which later that decade went to comedian Paul Hogan and crooner John Farnham. As a result of the 'new nationalism' of the Whitlam years, fresh fields of study, such as convict, Aboriginal, welfare and religious history, had taken root. A sisterhood of feminist historians, including Anne Summers, Jill Roe and Ann Curthoys, became part of this historical renaissance, as Frank Bongiorno noted in his address in Adelaide last year. 'Interest in Australian history burgeoned,' said Bongiorno that night. 'History, it seemed, was a prince among the disciplines.' Paradoxically, it was a historical commemoration, the Bicentenary in 1988, that brought to an end these halcyon days. Arguments over whether January 26, 1788, marked a moment of settlement or invasion ignited the history wars, and the profession entered a different, darker era. 'The phase of discovery and freshness was followed by a period of controversy and subordination of history to ideological warfare,' Bongiorno tells me. 'History operated almost as a kind of banner.' In 1993, Geoffrey Blainey coined the term the 'black armband' view of history, as a rejoinder to the work in the 1970s and '80s of historians such as Henry Reynolds, who told the Australia story from more of an Indigenous viewpoint. When prime minister, John Howard, as part of his pushback against Paul Keating's rethinking of Australian national identity, took up the 'black armband' slogan. Early this century, the cultural conflict escalated when the right-wing historian Keith Windschuttle published his 2002 book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Boosted by cheerleaders in the Murdoch press, Windschuttle's work became a broadside against left-wing humanities departments accused of teaching young Australians to feel guilty about their country's past. Some academics felt bruised, and became reluctant to raise their heads above the parapet. 'Historians were punished,' says UTS' Pietsch, 'and a lot of historians were bruised by that. Historians have retreated.' 'There has been a sustained political attack on the humanities.' Michelle Arrow, a history professor at Macquarie University 'I don't think anybody wants to be the subject of a media scandal, so there was probably a retreat,' reflects Michelle Arrow. But she also points to how the history wars sparked new areas of research. At the University of Newcastle, Professor Lyndall Ryan produced a digital map documenting more than 150 Aboriginal massacres that occurred from 1780 to 1930, which has greatly increased our understanding of the brutality meted out by settlers during the Frontier Wars. The profession incurred other collateral damage. The reform brought in at the fag end of the Howard years, making the compulsory teaching of Australian history a condition of the federal-state funding agreement, had a dampening effect on higher education. 'Since they made history compulsory, elective history went down,' says Anna Clark, the granddaughter of Manning Clark. 'Maybe it was a case of, 'I've done that, I don't need to do it again.' ' The Job-Ready Graduates Package brought in by the Morrison government, which prioritised science subjects by making them cheaper for students than humanities degrees, was another hammer blow. From 2020 to 2021, when the scheme came into effect, the cost of history degrees jumped 117 per cent. 'There has been a sustained political attack on the humanities,' says Arrow, 'which is trying to reduce the number of students studying history at university.' The Albanese government has not repealed those changes. 'The Labor government has been too gutless to reverse it,' says Crotty. 'There are no votes in it. It would open up a front of criticism. Cultural warriors can attack them by saying this is a 'woke agenda'. I don't think the Labor government is brave enough to take them on.' Where the Albanese government has been more active is in shoring up institutions vital for the craft of history, such as the National Archive, National Library and National Museum of Australia in Canberra. At the same time historians were coming under political fire, the discipline was evolving. History was more hyphenated and siloed, leading to what Bongiorno calls 'the decline of the generalist'. This 'undermined collective identity and solidarity'. Historians became more cut off and cloistered. Nor were they incentivised to take a more active role in public debate. Quite the opposite. Career advancement is based on publishing peer-reviewed work in academic journals, most of which are behind paywalls and inaccessible to the public. Getting published by a prestigious university press, such as Cambridge or Oxford, is another yardstick of scholarly achievement. Yet academic titles often retail for more than $150. Upon these kinds of metrics university rankings are based. 'Australian academics have done what the profession has asked them to do,' says Pietsch, 'which is often to produce articles read by only a handful of people. They have become detached from a local audience. Re-engaging with that audience is not rewarded by the status system. There are no promotion structures that reward that. In that context, they've lost the habit and the muscles to do it. It's not the individual academic's fault. We're doing what's asked of us.' Bongiorno agrees. As he noted while addressing his colleagues last year: 'We have also overwhelmingly become the captives of a university culture driven by the quest for international student fees and the related phenomenon of global rankings that privileged the so-called international journal or academic press – almost invariably British or American – over every other means of scholarly communication.' Certainly, there is a lot of blame to go around. But are historians authors of their own grief? Are there other explanations for why academic historians struggle to connect with the public when podcasts such as The Rest Is History achieve this so effortlessly? The podcast's co-host Dominic Sandbrook, who has a doctorate in US history from Cambridge University, has some thoughts on this topic. 'People are bored with history being told in a hand-wringing, pious, judgmental and moralistic way,' he told the UK's Daily Telegraph last year. 'They want it brought to life by people who are genuine enthusiasts and love the past.' Writing in The Daily Mail in 2021, at a time when statues were being toppled and figures such as Winston Churchill were coming under assault for their racism and colonialism, he spoke of the motivation behind his successful Adventures In Time children's history books as a 'personal crusade to convert Britain's young readers to the joys of the past, free from political dogma or ideological prejudice'. Has political dogma among academics proved off-putting here? 'In Australia, we've had this perception that there are only two ways of telling the national story,' says Arrow, 'a hand-wringing way and a celebratory way. It misses the shades of grey.' Bongiorno thinks historians should avoid delivering moral lessons. 'I don't think we produce histories to induce guilt in our audiences,' he tells me, 'but I probably accept that strand is still there … 'Let's find the worst things they did and said in the past and set them out in our histories' is clearly not a very satisfactory or useful way of doing history. But my sense is that most of us would avoid that kind of approach, and we do try to provide a rounded sense of the past.' Loading In a polarised world, where binary narratives increasingly predominate, nuance often gets lost amid all the noise. And though the fashion on the left, especially in the US, has been for cancellation, historians should be in the contextualisation business. Here, I am not arguing in favour of a wishy-washy both-siderism, or squeamishness in the telling of historical truths. As a scholar of the struggle for black equality, my firm sense, rooted in empiricism, is that critical-race theory in the US is, at its core, a statement of the obvious: the simple and incontestable proposition that racial discrimination was implanted in legal and social institutions, mainly slavery, from America's founding. Manifestly, that theory applies here in Australia, too. Yet much of history does not lend itself to such declaratory findings, and there's much to be said for adopting a both/and approach to the past, embracing complexities and contradictions, rather than a binary either/or. Not romanticism or retribution, but historical realism. At a time when degree courses are increasingly being assessed on their economic worth rather than intrinsic value, historians also need to mount a stouter defence of the kind of graduates they are moulding. 'History teaches communication skills, research skills, synthesised thinking, how to evaluate when you're reading real information and not stuff produced by bots,' says Anna Clark. 'I don't know many historians who do not have good jobs. It's hard to persuade them of that at the beginning. It's not a tangible pathway. But they're really transportable skills.' Loading As part of this professional protectionism, it is also worth stressing how humanities departments have proven, over the generations, to be among the most productive engines of social mobility. History departments have long been the gateway into academia for kids who became the first in their families to attend universities, partly because the entrance requirements are not as exacting as in the sciences. In the 1960s especially, the humanities attracted many female students determined to get degrees and launch careers. At this crucial history juncture, which is as much a watershed in global affairs as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the fall of Berlin in 1945, historians should be front and centre. 'If historians have a kind of domain, it's the domain of citizenship,' says Pietsch. 'That is why the discipline rose to prominence in the late 19th century. It is what sustained it throughout the 20th century. And if the profession is to survive, it has to have a rapprochement with that concept … It's a question of democracy. History is central to the democratic future of our country.' She's right, and perhaps that should serve as something of a mission statement for the profession. After all, nobody should want to see the end of history, especially at a time when it is coming at us so thick and fast.
Irish Daily Mirror
29-06-2025
- Politics
- Irish Daily Mirror
Natasha O'Brien says her attacker is victim of Ireland's justice system
Campaigner Natasha O'Brien has said her attacker is a victim of Ireland's justice system. In 2022, the Limerick native was viciously attacked by Cathal Crotty, who was then a member of the Irish Defence Forces. He was given a three-year suspended sentence in June 2024. An appeal was lodged the following month, and the sentence was overturned by the Court of Appeal in January this year, and he was sentenced to two years in jail. But Natasha admitted Crotty was also a victim. "It's not his fault that the system is broken. If that judge last year had insured justice, my attacker would always have received justice. 'Like I am the primary victim but Crotty is the secondary victim now of the justice system because there was a media manhunt against him. That could all have been prevented by that judge and nobody would know his name if the judge hadn't made that decision and made that mistake. 'He has now been impacted by all of this as well. People can make really really serious mistakes and there should be accountability and punishment, but that doesn't mean that their entire life should be destroyed.' In her RTE One documentary, Natasha, which aired last Wednesday, she told viewers that the night she was attacked, she had been defended a passer by on the street who was being subjected to homophobic comments by Crotty and his pals. And despite the horrific assault that happened to her, Natasha said she would defend the person again. 'I would do it again to be honest. I don't see the point in not caring about other people. It's our job as human beings to support other human beings and if we can't do that, why are we even here? We are living our lives and if we can't stand up for others then what is the point.' Natasha said she feels like her own 'personal fight for justice' is now over and she hopes to make more documentaries. 'It has been an emotional rollercoaster but I'm slowly starting to heal now and I'm finally on a new chapter and journey. 'I feel like my own personal fights for justice are now over so now it's trying to go onto bigger things and trying to use this case as a great example of what shouldn't happen again. 'I'm really passionate about trying to continue along to make sure this doesn't happen again for others. I wanted to bare my soul. I'm really happy with how it turned out. 'There is massive potential to do more and work on another project exploring restorative justice and going down that route and how do we really achieve a sense of justice for anyone in the system. I'd love to potentially explore that too.' The Irish Mirror's Crime Writers Michael O'Toole and Paul Healy are writing a new weekly newsletter called Crime Ireland. Click here to sign up and get it delivered to your inbox every week
Extra.ie
25-06-2025
- Extra.ie
Natasha O'Brien on backlash, broken systems, and speaking her truth
Natasha O'Brien has hit out at the judge who handed down a suspended sentence to her attacker, noting he got 'caught in the crossfire' as she campaigned for justice. The young woman was assaulted by former soldier Cathal Crotty on May 29, 2022 in Limerick city after she intervened when she heard him call someone a 'faggot.' In June 2023, Judge Tom O'Donnell imposed a fully suspended three-year term on Crotty and ordered him to pay €3,000 compensation to Natasha. Natasha O'Brien has hit out at the sentencing judge who handed down a suspended sentence to her attacker, noting he got 'caught in the crossfire' as she campaigned for justice. Pic: Ayesha Ahmad The now-retired Judge O'Donnell praised Crotty for his guilty plea, failing to acknowledge the then 20-year-old only admitted to the attack only when Gardaí confronted him with CCTV footage. Earlier this year, the Court of Appeal overturned the fully suspended sentence, imposing a sentence of three years in prison with the final 12 month suspended. Speaking to ahead of her RTÉ documentary NATASHA, the Limerick woman admitted she 'never expected' the sentence to be overturned and detailed the conflicting feelings to Crotty being jailed. 'I just remember not even knowing what was happening and having all these emotions,' she said, 'The judges were saying all these things that I only dreamed the sentencing judge last year would say. The now-retired Judge O'Donnell praised Crotty for his guilty plea, failing to acknowledge the then 20-year-old only admitted to the attack only when Gardaí confronted him with CCTV footage. Pic: Collins 'That judge that day did us both dirty. It wasn't just me impacted, he [Crotty] was impacted.' Natasha added: 'His actions, and what he did to me was completely wrong and I didn't deserve that. I deserved justice for that. 'He never deserved to be the poster of perpetrators or the poster of violence.' The Limerick woman clarified that her campaigning had never been about Crotty, but was about the unfair justice system she dealt with. Elsewhere, Natasha opened up on the negative comments she is subject to due to not presenting herself as 'this wounded little quiet damsel.' Pic: Ayesha Ahmad 'It was never focused on him but unfortunately he got caught up in it,' she said. Elsewhere, Natasha opened up on the negative comments she is subject to due to not presenting herself as 'this wounded little quiet damsel.' She explained how she had spoken to a journalist with local Limerick newspaper, Limerick Leader, not realising how big the story would become. 'I decided I have an opportunity here to not be invisible anymore and I've an opportunity here to do a lot of good and highlight a lot of problems that people don't have the energy to highlight,' she shared. 'I received so much backlash because apparently I'm not the perfect victim. Someone who is a victim of a crime isn't just a victim. They're a person. There is no one way to be a human being, just like there's no one way to being a victim.' Speaking to Natasha added that it was important to her to do the documentary to 'show there is a human behind the headlines.' 'Just because I can look confident doesn't mean I always feel confident,' she said, 'You cannot judge a book by its cover, just like you cannot judge a victim by a headline. 'Just because I was able to advocate for myself. The reality is not all victims who want to speak out get the platform.' NATASHA airs on RTÉ One at 9.35pm.
