Suchergebnisse

The last foreign policy review was conducted in 1995 and there has been no thoroughgoing, decisive, public reconsideration of the significance of the terrorist attacks against the United States, the violent response in U.S. policy and action, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, tests and failures of the United Nations Security Council, and the transformed quality of relations along the Canada-U.S. border. Still less has there been any open, extensive, government-led reassessment of the obligations of continental defence or the new and future accommodations required to realign Canada's relations with the United States and the rest of the world. Policy initiatives have instead looked temporizing and partial.

Made available by the Northern Territory Library via the Publications (Legal Deposit) Act 2004 (NT). ; This work was published online on the authors blog. It has been reproduced with his permission.

Tom Stannage made a significant contribution to Australian local history and regularly returned to it throughout his career, frequently speaking and writing about the local past and collaborating with the community organisations that promoted it. In the context of Stannage's perspectives, the work of some other historians and the author's experiences, this article briefly reflects on the state of local history in Australia and the role of local historical societies. The focus is on New South Wales and the Northern Territory, the parts of Australia that the author knows best, but some attention is also given to the rest of the country. The article considers why the work of local historians and historical societies matters in understanding the bigger picture of Australian history. The various attempts to tell the stories of individual communities quite frequently by and for local residents themselves encourage speculation on their contributions to the broader process of historical inquiry. Local history is, as Stannnage strongly believed it ought to be, usually a democratic phenomenon and one that allows a diverse range of approaches. The historical societies that survive and develop do so because they are solidly based in their communities. Perhaps even more crucial, the data of the past that local historical societies have often unearthed and recorded help allow Australians to shape what Stannage so aptly described as a 'history for their own purposes of identity'.

While my book focuses on the story of white settlement in Central Australia, this can not be understood without almost constant awareness of the first inhabitants, the Aborigines. It is here that anthropological research is so vital in clarifying the differences between Aboriginal and European concepts of the land… ¶ In 1983 Tim Rowse concluded in his article 'Liberalising the Frontier' the Central Australia was part of Australia's least successful colonised political unit, the Northern Territory, and one that contains two very different civilisations based on land use and economic organisation. This book selectively examines certain aspects of those civilisations that are more fully assessed when material evidence is known and understood. It also examines how more recent arguments about the 'future of the past' in Central Australia can be most effectively viewed when elements which have not traditionally been a part of Australian historical scholarship are taken into account.