Editorial

Rebecca Abbott, ‘Do Guns Preclude Credibility?: Considering the Black Panthers as a Legitimate Civil Rights Organisation’
Second Year Undergraduate
Monash University
By 1966 equality under the law had been achieved by the black Civil Rights movement, and yet that meant little in city ghettoes where dual issues of poverty and racism continued to fester. Race riots had tripled over the past two years, giving the appearance that there existed some issues which the non-violent Civil Rights groups could not fix. The Black Panther Party emerged during this period of heightened discontent, combining socialist and black pride philosophies in their attempt to protect and improve African American communities. Despite being frequently associated with their violent altercations with police and FBI, their official policy was that violence should only be used in self-defence. The success of their ‘survival programs’ designed to feed, clothe and educate poor African Americans is also often overlooked. This article argues for the legitimacy of the Black Panthers as a credible and significant Civil Rights organisation. Though the Panthers undoubtedly caused and provoked violence, this does not diminish the achievements of their socialist programs, their willingness to work with other marginalised groups, or their contribution to black pride felt by African Americans.

Stephanie Bryant, ‘America’s Amazons: Women Soldiers of the American Civil War’
Third Year Undergraduate
Monash University
During the American Civil War, hundreds of women disguised as men enlisted into the Union and Confederate armies to fight for their chosen cause. Until recently, historians have mostly ignored the presence of these women. This article discusses some of the women soldiers’ motivations to partake so directly in the war effort.

Anthony Clark, ‘Were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan Inseparable Political Allies?’
Third Year Undergraduate
Macquarie University
The historical consensus relating to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan is that the two were “ideological soul-mates” who collaborated extremely closely to wage the Cold War. This article demonstrates their fundamental disagreements with regard to: government response to the AIDS epidemic; abortion; divorce; the Falklands War; the US invasion of Grenada; the appropriate response to state sponsored terrorism; arms control; the Strategic Defence Initiative; and the domestic economic consequences of their foreign policy. This article will show Thatcher and Reagan were not inseparable political allies. Thatcher’s generally liberal social agenda was incompatible with Reagan’s social conservatism. Both leaders’ foreign policy prioritised national interest over the Anglo-American alliance.

Sarah Gregory, ‘To Pass, To Last, To Cast Aside: The Testimonies of Two Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando Survivors: The Gabbai Brothers’
Honours
Macquarie University
This article compares two former Sonderkommando testimonies created in both public and academic mediums. These former Sonderkommando members are the Gabbai brothers, Ya’akov and Dario. The article draws on Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s argument that the Sonderkommando dwelt within a “grey zone” of moral ambiguity and complexity. Yet rather than taking Levi’s position that readers should suspend judgement of these men because of their “grey zone”, this article maintains that audiences can and should make informed judgements of these functionaries based on a critical and careful examination of their individual testimonies and actions through a narrative inquiry. Doing so will ensure that readers do not universalise the actions of this and other prisoner groups. To compare these brothers testimonies, this article analyses their influences, motivations and the methods they employed to emotionally, and psychologically, cope with their camp and post-war experiences as expressed in their testimonies.

Rohan Lloyd, ‘Hippies vs. Hairies: The Early Australian Counter-Culture in Kuranda North Queensland’
Honours
James Cook University
In the early 1970s the small North Queensland town of Kuranda was invaded by a horde of transient drop-outs, bohemians and alternative life-stylers. Kuranda became the unlikely site of Australia’s first major regional hippy out-post and quickly gained recognition as the hippy capital of Australia. The hippy invasion of Kuranda aroused anxiety from the local media, the local council, police and public. Simultaneously divisions within the Kuranda hippy community arose and these internal divisions, along with increased pressures from the police, council and the media, contributed to Kuranda’s diminished relevancy in the Australian counter-culture. This article examines the reactions to the Kuranda hippy invasion from the mainstream media, the local council, the police, and the public. It also places the Kuranda hippy invasion into the broader context of the Australian counter-culture as a pre-ideological counter-culture.

Henry Reese, ‘“Bastard Science” and the “War on the Butcher’s Knife”: The Marginal Presence of Vegetarianism in Victorian Animal Welfare Rhetoric’
Honours
University of Queensland
The development of western vegetarianism as a ‘modern’ phenomenon in the nineteenth century is commonly held to have been largely marginal to Victorian morality. This article argues, on the contrary, that an awareness of the claims of the Vegetarian Society pervaded late nineteenth-century discourse relating to animal welfare, even while the actual adoption of a vegetarian diet was seen to lie well beyond the purview of acceptable Victorian cultural practice. Two case studies are used in elaborating a ‘covert’ engagement with pro-vegetarian rhetoric in late nineteenth-century Britain. Firstly, it is demonstrated that the rhetoric of the polarising ‘Great Vivisection Debate’ of the late 1870s encompassed a serious discussion of the ethics of dietetic reform. Secondly, the bestselling yet seldom-deconstructed 1877 animal welfare novel Black Beauty is shown to similarly engage with the ethics of meat consumption in Victorian society. These appearances suggest a wider cultural diffusion of vegetarianism than has been previously thought, even while the movement itself remained marginal.

Michael Warren, ‘Life in Death: The Self, Dying and Biography’
Honours
University of Sydney
How has the meaning of death been shaped by the push of modernity? What insights to the self are offered by death? In considering how biography has handled these questions, this article explores the complexities assocaited with the represention of a biographical subject’s death. With reference to the deaths of Frederich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Manning Clark as represented by their respective biographers, it will be shown that death provides a vivid lens into the nature of the self.

Jan Richardson, ‘Invisible Stories: The Presence of Female Convicts Queensland Following the Closure of the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement in 1842’
Graduate Diploma
University of New England
In the fifteen years between 1824 and 1839 just over two thousand recidivist convicts, including 150 females, were sent to the far northern reaches of the colony of New South Wales to serve secondary sentences at the Moreton Bay penal settlement. However, after a vigorous and heated debate in the 1830s over the perceived evils of convictism, the decision was made to wind down and eventually close the penal station. When the district was officially opened to free settlement on 10 February 1842, Hannah Rigby was the only female convict to have remained at Moreton Bay after completing her sentence of secondary punishment. As such, she is the sole female convict of the post-1842 era who has been given any real attention and she is often referred to as the ‘only’ female convict present in Queensland during the free settlement era. Records show, however, that over two thousand convicts, both emancipists and those with Tickets-of-Leave, migrated to the region from 1842 onwards and that about five per cent of the total were female. The New South Wales census for 1846 recorded the presence of thirty female convicts and ex-convicts in the Moreton Bay and Darling Downs districts but by 1851 there were 107 female transportees. Apart from Hannah Rigby, only two other female convicts, neither of whom were sent to Moreton Bay as recidivists prior to 1842, rate minor mentions in the secondary literature. The lives of the other 104 female convicts and ex-convicts who were living in Moreton Bay in 1851 have been overlooked and omitted from the literature. This article, therefore, aims to identify some of these one hundred convict and emancipist women and, for the first time, tell their ‘invisible st