Latest news with #HomeTruths
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 Examiner
13-06-2025
- Health
- Irish Examiner
Gareth O'Callaghan: Ageism is the last permitted prejudice - that's why nursing home scandals continue
It's been a frightening fortnight for our elderly folk since the airing of Inside Ireland's Nursing Homes by RTÉ Investigates, which discovered a litany of disturbing practices and dire conditions at two specific nursing homes – The Residence in Portlaoise and Beneavin Manor in north Dublin. As the architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said: 'The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.' I didn't feel that sentiment in the horrors I watched that evening on RTÉ, mixed with a sense of déjà vu. In the days that followed, from the anger and distress I heard on both radio and television, and the jaded self-serving platitudes of high-ranking politicians, it was starting to sound as though residential abuse of the elderly had never happened here before. And then – as usual – it all went silent. Perhaps that's because people have shorter memories these days; if the subject matter doesn't impact their lives, they move on unaffected. Critical stories have become little more than morbid curiosities in recent times. Maybe it's because a critical story relevant to everyone becomes inconsequential faster, reaching its 'best-by-date' because scrolling through hundreds of different topics everyday has left us emotionally numb to the plight of the most vulnerable – namely our elders. I found myself shouting at the radio as I listened to one man blaming covid for the shocking treatment of elderly individuals in these homes. 'This all started during lockdown,' he said. It didn't. Leas Cross closed in 2005 several weeks after a damning RTÉ Primetime Investigates – Home Truths programme revealed that 105 residents died there between 2002 and 2004, many from grave neglect, dehydration, and malnutrition. File photo Garrett White / Collins Ireland has a catalogue of residential abuse that dates back to the days of the asylums for the mentally ill; and with each shocking revelation over the years comes the same clichéd reactions from the politicians. Perhaps the most publicised was Leas Cross, near Swords in Dublin, which closed in 2005, several weeks after a damning RTÉ Primetime Investigates – Home Truths programme revealed Dickensian living conditions. 105 residents died at the nursing home between 2002 and 2004 – many of the deaths resulted from grave neglect, dehydration, and malnutrition. In response to the scandal, the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) was established in May 2007, charged with setting and monitoring standards at private nursing homes to ensure there would never be a repeat of Leas Cross, with the power to seek a District Court Order that could close or suspend the running of these homes if continued operation posed a risk to a resident. Mary Harney, minister for health at the time, said: 'An independent organisation with teeth is now being created.' In the years that followed, it became clear the teeth weren't doing much biting. Six members of staff had criminal charges brought against them after revelations of residents with intellectual disabilities being abused by workers at Áras Attracta. File photo: Shay Fennelly Roll on seven years to December 2014 when RTÉ Investigates – Inside Bungalow 3 was broadcast, featuring harrowing undercover footage of residents with intellectual disabilities being abused by workers at the Áras Attracta facility in Swinford, Co Mayo. Again there was national uproar. A garda investigation later led to criminal charges being taken against six members of staff. As far back as 40 years ago, residents at the 'plush' Rostrevor House nursing home, which opened its doors in 1984 in Dublin's upmarket Rathgar to mostly wealthy elderly locals, were complaining of ill-treatment at the hands of some staff, including allegations of sexual abuse. It would take decades for the home to be shut down. One of the many abuse cases at Rostrevor to be later read out in court was of a female resident, aged 101, who had been forced to sleep every night for a year in a Buxton chair – the same type of tilting chair so heavily criticised after the Leas Cross scandal. Judge Victor Blake, in making the final order of closure of Rostrevor House at Dublin District Court in June 2011, told the court that elderly people had to be protected in their hour of need. Hiqa cited 'an alarming history of falls, injuries and incidents' at the home in their report. These cases are just a short refresher in how many elderly parents have been treated – at their own or their families' expense – in residential homes that guaranteed that old aphorism of 'tender loving care' down through the years. I watched with a mix of horror and déjà vu on RTÉ the revelations about The Residence Nursing Home in Portlaoise. File picture: Collins Photos Let's quickly remind ourselves there are many excellent facilities, whose owners and staff were appalled by what they watched on RTÉ just over a week ago. But there are also homes that, for many of their residents, are nothing less than a living hell. How many television investigations does it take to show us that there's something both wrong and evil with the system of governance in many of these places that has gone unchecked and remains unchanged for decades? Ageism - the last permitted bias Ageism is a stubborn prejudice – a topic very few people want to discuss. It's one of the last socially acceptable discriminations. In 2021, the World Health Organisation (WHO) released the results of a survey which found that one in every two people – half the population – were either moderately or highly ageist. Ask anyone about global warming, or immigration, or the effects of smartphones on pre-schoolers, and they'll have an opinion and a solution. Ask them about ageism and watch their eyes glaze over because of the widespread stigma associated with it. From a very young age, we have secretly feared becoming old. It's so engrained in our culture that we don't even notice it – but we should; because one day each one of us will be old, and a target for ageism; the last permitted bias. It's endemic in society. So why would it not exist in nursing homes that care for elderly people? Prejudice and discrimination are two key dimensions associated with ageism, so it begs the question why are people who exhibit these traits allowed anywhere near fragile ageing patients? If nursing home workers such as those in the recent investigation display negative assumptions about their patients' value as vulnerable human beings, or their capacity or level of understanding, then why are they working there? Why aren't staff subjected to a psychometric test at the job interview stage that could be specifically designed to measure behavioural patterns and personality traits to see if they hold any bias against ageing patients? And what about the language barrier? If workers in Irish nursing homes can't make themselves understood to an elderly patient, or can't understand what the patient is asking for, then what hope is there for a healthy happy environment? It's anticipated that 135,000 people aged 65 and over will potentially be in need of nursing home care by 2031. That's less than six years from now. According to Hiqa, as of 2023, there was a total of 32,314 nursing home beds in Ireland. It's painfully obvious that as our population gets older, successive governments – including the current one – have continued to ignore a ticking time bomb. As geriatrician Professor David Robinson said on the recent RTÉ Investigates exposé: 'This is going to shorten people's lives, and their lives will be more miserable.' So who will mind us when we get too old to mind ourselves; and, more important, how will we be treated? Will the changes to nursing home regulations that took effect at the end of March make any difference? Most important, how will the new governance measures tackle ageist prejudices and abuse from staff? In the aftermath of Leas Cross 20 years ago, Mary Harney said: 'I can't guarantee this won't happen again, but I can guarantee that it would be picked up on quickly.' She got it badly wrong on the latter. Nothing has really changed, so it will happen again. Read More Allowing nursing home residents to live with dignity is very least we can deliver
Hamilton Spectator
26-05-2025
- General
- Hamilton Spectator
My apartment had been my affordable refuge during divorce. Then my landlord sent me the email all tenants dread
Real estate is emotional. Why? Because a home is more than walls and a roof, it's a canvas and container for our lives, our families, our communities. As part of an ongoing series, we've asked local writers to share their stories on real estate and housing. Want to write for the Star's Home Truths series? Email hometruths@ . 'I would like to present a proposal for your consideration,' the email from my building manager began. Here we go , I thought. After years of worrying about it, I was being asked to move out of my affordable rental. The email went on to say that a plan to renovate the roof would cause a significant amount of dust and disturbance to me in my top-floor unit. The property manager offered to move me from my one-bedroom apartment in Humewood—Cedarvale into a studio in another building a short distance away in Briar Hill—Belgravia. The rent would be reduced from the market rate — though still above my current rent — and I was offered a $15,000 incentive that I could take either in the form of a lump sum or a monthly rent reduction for one year on top of the reduced rate. While there was nothing in the email that indicated they planned to force me from the unit, it felt like the writing was on the wall. I'd already successfully ignored a similar email from the property manager a couple of years prior. With a second proposal now looming, and my rent well below market rate, I believed I had to play ball. Saying no felt like kicking the problem into a future where maybe there wouldn't be a deal and where I'd have to compete for a home in Toronto's expensive rental market. It wouldn't be until I was installed in my new apartment that I would start feeling a deep sense of loss and sadness. Tenants don't have to move unless they receive an eviction order from the Landlord and Tenant Board, but standing up for tenant rights requires time, health and money. Last August, I didn't have an abundance of any of those things. With very little time to make the decision, what I did have was anxiety. I didn't want to move but weighing the choices wasn't straightforward. If I did, I'd have a renovated unit with new appliances, but I would be paying a lot more for a smaller space. At the time, I was paying $1,049 for my one-bedroom unit, whereas comparable listings were going for about $1,300 more on average. If I went to the open market, that $15,000 incentive would be eaten up in less than a year. In the studio they were offering, I'd give up my bedroom but gain a balcony. I'd never missed having one, but I imagined that a future me might enjoy reading outside. But my old apartment was where I mended my heart after a divorce, where I reimagined who I was and what I could be, where I decided to return to school at age 40, where I completed the work of two degrees, and where I survived a pandemic. Indeed, uprooting my life at someone else's behest was much like my divorce, except back then the act of moving made me feel powerful whereas now I felt powerless. In the end, there were two factors about the new location that tipped the scales toward accepting the landlord's proposal. The new unit overlooked a quiet residential street, which would bring me an unfathomable amount of serenity compared to the screeching buses on Bathurst and racket from the 24-hour gas station I lived above. And importantly, the new building had an elevator. This would mean that my mother, who hadn't been able to climb the stairs to my current unit for years, would once again be able to visit me. So, I took the deal. I thought it would keep me safe. A neighbour in my old building used to joke with me that our rent-controlled walk-up would have to burn down around us before we considered moving. That's because for many years we had an individual landlord who, content with the extra income the building generated, never raised our rent. But great deals on rent come with a catch. Over the 17 years I lived there, the once well-maintained building began to fall into disrepair. That changed when the building was sold to a corporate landlord. Soon, the new landlord began making welcomed safety and cosmetic improvements to the property. As tenants moved out, their apartments were renovated and rents for those units subsequently increased. Eventually, only a handful of us 'OGs' remained. Then, one month from the day the proposal landed in my inbox, I was unpacking in my new home. In late October, I found Statistics Canada's Canadian Housing Survey in my new mailbox. The questionnaire, which collected data until March 31, sought insights from Canadians on housing topics such as affordability, needs, satisfaction, aspirations and discrimination. It also included a section on what it called 'forced moves.' These are defined as situations where 'you were made to feel there was no other option but to move.' This was the validation I needed to start making peace with my decision. Still, months later, my cheeks blaze with shame that I didn't put up more of a fight. I'm still close enough to my old neighbourhood to visit my favourite haunts, but when I do, I remember that I'm just a visitor passing through and a lump balls up in my throat. I'll never know my new neighbourhood or any other one as intimately as the five-kilometre radius around St. Clair West and Bathurst, having walked and rewalked every nook and back alley during pandemic lockdowns when all I could do as a single person was walk and walk and walk. I don't regret my decision — I feel strongly that staying would have simply postponed a similar outcome — but it's been hard to recover from the trauma and exhaustion of packing up in panic-mode. Meanwhile, I've learned that some of my new neighbours describe themselves as 'OGs' in this building, just like I used to at my old place. Soon after I moved into my new unit, I arrived home from work and found a piece of Bristol board posted at the elevator along with some cheerful balloons. Everyone was invited to write a message to a neighbour celebrating her 85 th birthday. The residents in my old building tended to be youngish single people and couples due to the one-bedroom units and the nature of it being a walk-up, which excluded older people. My new home feels more like a community because there is greater diversity in unit sizes and tenant ages. On the other hand, being forced to move from my one-bedroom to a studio feels like sliding backwards in life. I had to make many painful decisions about what came with me, including letting go of the piano I had taken childhood lessons on and a dining set that my father had refinished. But my formerly feral cat, who remains deeply distrustful of most humans, is thriving in a home where she can easily survey her entire domain. I try to take my cues from her, and in doing so I am learning that this can be a creative container to hold who I am now as I transition from university into a new career. Nevertheless, the circumstances here are all too familiar: a rent-controlled building and long-term tenants paying below-market rent. There are similar cases all over town and affordable rentals are disappearing. In November, the city passed a bylaw designed to prevent renovictions — evicting tenants in bad faith under the guise of renovations. Among other things, it will require landlords to pay for a $700 per unit renovation licence and prove that their intended renovation requires the tenant to vacate their home. Enforcement is set to begin on July 31. While the bylaw is well-intentioned, I worry about unintended consequences, should landlords race to beat the incoming regulation. Once enforcement begins on July 31, will landlords simply find new ways to get rent-controlled tenants out? For now, my housing feels secure, but the situation has revealed how vulnerable I am as a single tenant. It's left me wondering how long I can continue to live in a city that doesn't seem to love me back. Leslie Sinclair is a Toronto journalist who reports on culture, social justice and religion. In 2024, she won a National Magazine Award for her work exploring access to information in Canadian prisons. She is still unpacking in her new apartment.
Irish Examiner
29-04-2025
- General
- Irish Examiner
Cork Simon report shows near 'impossible' hopes of finding one or two-bedroom homes
Adults in emergency accommodation finding a one or two-bedroom houses would be like "finding dinosaur teeth", a new report from a Cork homeless service has claimed. Cork Simon Community's Home Truths paper, published toda, claims there is a "significant undersupply" of relevant housing for the largest household category in the country. The majority of adults in emergency accommodation in Cork and Kerry are single households, statistics from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) and the Department of Housing show. However, the report says that the majority of housing available is for three and four-bedroomed properties. Cork Simon says there are twice as many one and two person households in Cork City as there are one-and-two bedroom homes. It said there was "little sign" of the under-supply of one and two-bedroomed housing improving. Sophie Johnston of Cork Simon said that the issue was particularly affecting those on the social housing lists. "Over 60% of households on the social housing waiting list in Cork City are single households while over three-quarters of adults in homeless emergency accommodation here in the Southwest are single adults, most of whom need single unit housing to be able to leave homelessness," Ms Johnston said. "Not only do we need more housing, we especially need more one and two-bed housing.' Apartment units The report noted that apartment construction is a good indicator of future supply, with 80% of apartments in Cork City being one or two-bedroomed units. However, approved planning permissions for apartment units in Cork City fell by 61% in 2024, while less than one in four apartment units approved for planning in Cork City between 2018 and 2022 were completed by the end of 2024. Latest CSO data shows new apartment completions in Cork City were down 10% in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same period last year. Building commencement notices for apartment units also fell in Cork City in the first quarter of 2025 to their lowest quarterly number in five years. John Foskett, a Cork Simon project worker, said: 'Finding one- and two-beds is like finding dinosaur teeth. There's nothing available on Daft. It's nonexistent." He added that while service users were normally going with a view to renting through Housing Assistance Payment (HAP), they were not finding success. "If I find somewhere available and we mention HAP, they don't get a call back. "With the lack of one- and two-beds over the last 18 months, it's an impossible market for our lads to break into." Barry, a Cork Simon service user, shared his experience for Home Truths, describing it as 'little-to-nothing'. He said: "If there was a single, you'd see the amount of views on it. There's too many people looking for the one accommodation, [that] kind of thing.' Read More Cork Airport to welcome 62,500 passengers this May bank holiday weekend
