Suchergebnisse

The privatized nature of employment as a domestic servant is often inimical to collective action. Yet in the early 1960s there was significant trade union interest in the working conditions of female domestic servants in Singapore and Malaya. Studies of female domestic service in Malaya (later Malaysia) and Singapore are dominated by work focusing on Chinese-born servants before the Second World War, and migrant maids associated with economic transformation from the late 1970s. If scholarship on pre-war domestic servants leans toward an emphasis on agency, then studies of maids from the 1980s tend toward experiences of abjection. What of the intervening period, during the Cold War, when rapid decolonization introduced new factors into the demography, structure, and regulation of domestic service in Malaysia and Singapore? Did this provide opportunity for greater autonomy, mimic older colonial relationships, or herald new protections for domestic servants in the modern postcolonial state? The considerable historical literature devoted to the relationship between imperial power, colonialism, and domestic service rarely extends to the persistence and dynamics of domestic service in the era of decolonization between the 1950s and the 1970s, although it does explore the increasing feminization of the occupation. This article explores a confluence of factors—the politics of anticolonialism, economic dependence, and apprehension about the privacy of the home—that cohered in a controversy in the 1960s known as the "amah strike," when female domestic servants in Singapore and Malaya threatened to walk off the job over a proposed change to their employment conditions.

Between 1964 and 1972, the National Service Act 1964 required Australian men turning twenty years old to register for national service. Unlike most scholarship on the national service scheme, which focuses on opposition to the scheme and its unpopularity, this article examines the reasons why most Australians supported the reintroduction of national service and why so many young men complied with its provisions. It argues that compulsory military service was seen as essential in the context of the Cold War, and as a way of ensuring that young men now coming of age were inducted into models of masculinity, citizenship and duty considered essential for a cohesive society. It was the scheme's break with accepted traditions of compulsory military service in Australia that is an overlooked, and important, element of the criticism it generated. In that sense, it was the legacy of earlier wars that fed into the contemporary response to national service.

This article examines the homecoming of Western women from Japanese internment camps at the end of the Second World War. It focuses on British women returning to the United Kingdom, but makes reference to women from other Allied nations such as the United States, Australia and the Netherlands. The paper argues that interned women posed contradictions to gendered understandings of wartime experience and that homecoming further exacerbated this ambiguity. Return from imprisonment exposed the dual meaning of home as the natural realm for women and a national space. Women internees had been away from both and were subjected to control by non‐white men; responses to their liberation reflected these tensions. Homecoming prompted questions about released women's femininity and sexual integrity, but they faced even more difficulty having their war experiences recognised as part of a national story about war.

This paper analyses the experiences of Australian civilian internees of the Japanese in the Second World War and the Australian government's responses to their desires for repatriation, compensation and rehabilitation. It argues that civilian internees stood in awkward relation to understandings about sacrifice in wartime and entitlements to compensation. The dominance of the citizen‐soldier in Australian narratives of war placed civilian internees in an ambiguous position. Civilian internees had not played a direct part in battle but did have direct contact with the military enemy. They had personally suffered privation at the hands of the enemy, but were not military personnel in service of their country. Civilian internees expose the tensions around citizenship and citizenship entitlement attendant upon the elevation of war service as the ultimate sacrifice for one's country.

"Is Trauma a transhistorical, transnational phenomenon? Gender and Trauma challenges the standard history that has led to our contemporary understanding of psychological trauma to answer this question, and to explore the impact of gender in the experience and understanding of emotional distress. Bringing together eleven case studies from all over the world, it draws on methods from history, gender and communication studies to consider how trauma has been understood over the 20th and 21st centuries. Encompassing histories from Australia, Britain, Indonesia, Italy, the Soviet Union, Timor Leste, the United States and Vietnam, these examples demonstrate how gender and trauma are inextricably linked, and how the term 'trauma' has evolved over time. With chapters on war, political repression, displacement, rape and childbirth, the cases showcased in this volume highlight two pivotal transformations across the 20th century. First, the transformation of the trauma sufferer from perpetrator to victim, and second, the increased understanding of psychological consequences of sexual assault and domestic violence. Together, these diverse stories yield a more nuanced picture of what trauma is, how we have understood it alongside gender in the past, and how this affects our understanding of it in the present"--

"Why have Asian states - colonial and independent - imprisoned people on a massive scale in detention camps? How have detainees experienced the long months and years of captivity? And what does the creation of camps and the segregation of people in them mean for society as a whole? This ambitious book surveys the systems of detention camps set up in Asia from the beginning of the 20th century in The Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Malaya, Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Timor, Korea and China"--

Australians in Papua New Guinea provides a history of the late Australian years in Papua New Guinea through the eyes of 13 Australians and four Papua New Guineans by presenting the experiences of Australians who went to work in Papua New Guinea (PNG) over several decades before the 1970s. This extraordinary book balances expatriates with indigenous Papua New Guineans, balances gender, and pioneers an innovative combination of written reminiscences and interviews that reveal the impact of Australian colonial policy on pre-indendence PNG. It follows medical practitioners Michael Alpers, Ken Clez