SHAPS Digest (November 2022)

Nat Cutter (Teaching Associate, History) published an essay entitled ‘Morocco Leather and Material Understandings of the Maghreb in Early Modern Britain‘, on the history of a little-examined luxury item exported to Britain from the Maghreb: ‘Morocco leather’, or ‘Barbary skins’.

Mark Edele (Hansen Chair in History) reviewed two new books on the origins of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Sami Puri’s Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine and Anna Aruntunyan’s Hybrid Warriors, for Insidestory.org.au.

Holly Jones-Amin (Grimwade Conservation Services) discussed the award-winning Loong Conservation Project on 3RRR Uncommon Sense. The project involved the conservation of Loong 龍, the oldest intact imperial processional dragon in the world, owned by the Bendigo Chinese Association and on permanent display at the Golden Dragon Museum, Bendigo 金龍博物館.

Marilyn Lake (Professorial Fellow, History) was interviewed for the History Hub podcast series A History of Xenophobia, hosted by Irial Glyn at Trinity College, Dublin. The episode is titled ‘Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality’.

Libby Melzer (Grimwade Conservation Services) was interviewed by ABC Shepparton about the work her team is doing to help people restore precious items damaged by the floods in northern Victoria.

Anh Nguyen Austen (PhD in History, 2019; now ACU) was featured on ABC Conversations podcast.

Lauren Pikó (PhD in History, 2017), British historian and disability scholar, was interviewed for the La Trobe University podcast Archive Fever, in a discussion on what it means to look at archives and research through a disability lens.

John S. Wilkins discussed evolutionary biology and philosophy on the India-based forum Tattva Deep.

Academic Publications

Dvir Abramovich (Program in Jewish Culture and Society), ‘Israel’s Shakespeare – The Literary Canvass of S.Y Agnon’, Mentalities Journal 

The essay examines the vast literary corpus of f Shmuel Yosef Agnon, the 1966 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first granted to a Hebrew writer. The essay examines his seminal short stories and novels that raised Hebrew literature to a global plane, blending authentic Jewish heritage with European sources to present instructive tales that posit a moral and legal conundrum reflective of the modern condition.

Ángel Alcalde (History), ‘Language, Space, and Mobility in European History Writing‘, in ‘Why Europe, Which Europe? A Debate on Contemporary European History as a Field of Research’, Hypotheses

To understand European history today we need to engage with critical issues of spatiality, language, and mobility in historians’ professional practice. New scales and spaces of analysis, English as a ‘vehicular’ language, and crossing intellectual and geographical borders have become key practices to advance historical knowledge. We can consider the internationalisation of European historiography as a result of the ‘interconnectedness of human history’. The converse, however, is also true: Professional internationalisation has pushed historians towards a transnational and global view of modern European history. In the last 20 years, I experienced this transformation through my formative, professional trajectory as an historian and in the specific fields of expertise which have been my foci. In this paper, I reflect on writing European history from various vantage points: places and contexts, from the local to the global, where I conducted my work on twentieth-century Spain and the history of fascism.

A Russian-language edition (Individuum) of the book by Rustam Alexander (PhD in History, 2018) (@rusxander), Red Closet: The Hidden History of Gay Oppression in the USSR (forthcoming with Manchester University Press, in May 2023) is now available for pre-order.

Fiona Fidler (HPS/School of BioSciences) and Bonnie Wintle (HPS/School of BioSciences) et al., ‘A Toolkit for Open and Pluralistic Conservation Science’, Conservation Letters. A Journal of the Society for Conservation Biology

Conservation science practitioners seek to preempt irreversible impacts on species, ecosystems, and social–ecological systems, requiring efficient and timely action even when data and understanding are unavailable, incomplete, dated, or biased. These challenges are exacerbated by the scientific community’s capacity to consistently distinguish between reliable and unreliable evidence, including the recognition of questionable research practices (QRPs, or ‘questionable practices’), which may threaten the credibility of research, including harming trust in well-designed and reliable scientific research. In this paper, we propose a ‘toolkit’ for open and pluralistic conservation science, highlighting common questionable practices and sources of bias and indicating where remedies for these problems may be found. The toolkit provides an accessible resource for anyone conducting, reviewing, or using conservation research, to identify sources of false claims or misleading evidence that arise unintentionally, or through misunderstandings or carelessness in the application of scientific methods and analyses. We aim to influence editorial and review practices and hopefully to remedy problems before they are published or deployed in policy or conservation practice.

Tamara Lewit (Honorary, Classics & Archaeology), ‘Children in the Roman Farming Economy: Evidence, Problems and Possibilities’, in Dimitri Van Limbergen, Adeline Hoffelinck and Devi Taelman (eds), Reframing the Roman Economy: New Perspectives on Habitual Economic Practices (Palgrave Macmillan)

Children’s roles within Roman farming have been little explored, despite a flood of recent work on many aspects of childhood in Roman society. Children were an important economic cohort, however, and would have made up a large group within the potential labour force of any farm. Close examination of textual and visual sources suggests that children played specific economic roles. Further, ethnographic studies on children’s farm work in the Mediterranean and beyond in more recent times reveal considerable correspondence with ancient practices. The allocation of certain categories of tasks to children appears highly consistent across time and geographic location. By combining these groups of evidence, we can consider the extent to which children’s labour would have contributed to the Roman farming economy. Children’s work should not be seen as insignificant or marginal: rather, it played an essential part, as in later times, within the economics of farm work.

Iain McIntyre (PhD in History, 2018), Paul Buhle and Graphic History Collective (eds), Mr. Block: The Subversive Comics and Writings of Ernest Riebe

Before the Golden Age of comic books, there was Mr. Block: a bumbling, boss-loving, anti-union blockhead, brought to life over a hundred years ago by subversive cartoonist Ernest Riebe.

A dedicated labour activist and member of the Industrial Workers of the World, Riebe dreamed up his iconic, union-hating anti-hero to satirise conservative workers’ faith in the capitalist system that exploits them.

This wickedly funny anthology of Riebe’s writings and comics is a treasure trove of radical twentieth-century art and an essential addition to the bookshelves of comics lovers, historians, and labour activists alike.

Andonis Piperoglou and Zora Simic, ‘Their Own Perceptions: Non-Anglo Migrants and Aboriginal Australia’, Australian Historical Studies. The editors’ Introduction to the issue is available open access. 

In this themed issue, we present work that considers a diverse range of non-Anglo migrant attitudes towards Australia’s first peoples, and that thus contributes to historical critiques and analyses of native/settler structuralist approaches to settler colonialism. To consider migrant perspectives from the premise of (post)colonising dynamics is to converge stories of mobility and cultural interaction with narratives of settlement and the long history of Indigenous resistance to it. As the authors in this themed issue highlight, studying non-Anglo perspectives and attitudes towards Aboriginal Australia can act as an empirical entry point into the multifarious ways that non-English-speaking peoples formed, articulated and presented their own perceptions about colonisation to Australia. Via overt and public channels, or through more subtle and obscure processes, we are invited to see how suffering, hardship, and tragedy, as well as intersections, relationships and entanglements, were shared between non-Anglo migrants and Indigenous lives. Studying the multiple ways that non-Anglo migrants thought, saw, wrote about and, at times, embraced the diversity of Aboriginal Australia opens a particularly fertile space through which to better understand the uneven and nuanced effects of colonialism and how it was interpreted and translated through culturally specific eyes.

The Italian, Greek, Chinese, and Serbian perspectives presented in this issue show how non-Anglo migrants who arrived at different times across the long history of colonisation to Australia understood Aboriginal people through their own meaning making, mobilities, and heritages. These changing perspectives reflect the differing origins and orientations through which they tried to understand and make sense of how colonialism affected their own and Aboriginal lives. From reworking tribal teachings shared in Dja Dja Wurrung country to theatrical stages in nineteenth-century Rome, and from documenting and distributing Aboriginal calls for land rights to film screenings in Cannes and Beijing, the non-Anglo migrants explored in this issue aimed to make sense of their own status as settlers and/or as outsiders, in the process perceiving Aboriginal Australia through their own understandings of colonialism and Australian nation building agendas.

Danielle Scrimshaw (BA Hons (History), 2019), She and Her Pretty Friend: The Hidden History of Australian Women who Love Women

A joyous look at the history of lesbian and bisexual women in Australia – from colonisation to convict times, through suffrage and liberation to today

Throughout history, women’s relationships have been downgraded and diminished. Instead of lovers, they are documented as particularly close friends; the type that made out, worked, lived, and are buried together. Besties, if you will. She and Her Pretty Friend aims to dispel this myth. It is an exploration of women’s relationships through Australian history, each chapter centring on a specific person, couple, or time period.

With a focus on women such as Anne Drysdale, Lesbia Harford, and Cecilia John, She and Her Pretty Friend centres on stories of those who have remained obscured and less spoken of in the historical narrative. Throughout this retelling of Australian history, Scrimshaw explores how colonisation altered ideas of sexuality, how the suffrage movement in Australia created opportunities for queer women, and details her own part in creating queer history. Rather than continuing to deny a queer past, Scrimshaw encourages readers – and other historians – to open themselves to the idea that perhaps some people were more to each other than just ‘roommates’.

Gijs Tol (Classics & Archaeology) and Tymon de Haas, ‘Ephemeral Economies? Investigating Roman Wetland Exploitation in the Pontine Marshes (Lazio, Central Italy)’, in Dimitri Van Limbergen, Adeline Hoffelinck and Devi Taelman (eds), Reframing the Roman Economy: New Perspectives on Habitual Economic Practices (Palgrave Macmillan)

This paper discusses the economic exploitation of the Pontine Marshes (Pomptinae Paludes), a former wetland in the Lazio region of Italy. Although generally considered unsuited for large-scale habitation and agricultural exploitation until the co-called bonifica integrale under the Italian fascist regime in the 1930s, documentary and archaeological evidence suggest that before these large-scale reclamations local people had adopted a wide range of both ephemeral and more substantial strategies for the exploitation of the natural resources of the wetland. Using the results of more than a decade of fieldwork by the Pontine Region Project (PRP), in our contribution we mainly focus on the evidence for human exploitation of the wetland during Roman Republican times. The area saw a period of widespread agricultural exploitation during the mid-Republican period (late fourth-third centuries BC) linked to a major reclamation project. The Late Republican landscape (second-first centuries BC) witnessed a decline in settlement, probably linked to worsening drainage conditions. However, several sites developed into larger estates that appear to have capitalized on the economic potential of the wetland through fishing, dormouse breeding, pastoralism and pottery production. It thus appears that the marsh provided an important economic asset for Roman elites.

Stephen Wheatcroft (Professorial Fellow, History) contributed to a debate on the mortality of released Gulag prisoners and the scale of Soviet penal mortality, in the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.

The latest issue of Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions also came out this month. Sophia is edited by Purushottama Bilimoria (Principal Fellow, Philosophy).

Promotions & Awards

Congratulations to recently promoted SHAPS academic colleagues:

• Frederik Vervaet (Classics & Archaeology) (promoted to full Professor)
• Sara Wills (HPS/Associate Dean (Partnerships)) (promoted to full Professor)
• Petronella Nel (Grimwade) (promoted to Associate Professor)
• Gijs Tol (Classics & Archaeology) (promoted to Associate Professor)

Xavier Fowler‘s book Not Playing the Game: Sport and Australia’s Great War (Melbourne University Publishing, 2021) has been short-listed as a finalist for the 2022 Les Carlyon Literary Prize. The book arose out of Xavier’s 2018 PhD thesis.

War remembrance and sport have become increasingly entwined in Australia, with AFL and NRL Anzac Day fixtures attracting larger crowds than dawn services. National representative teams travel halfway around the world to visit battle sites etched in military folklore. To validate their integration into this culturally sacred occasion, promoters point to the special role of sport in the development of the Anzac legend, and with it, the birth of the nation. The air of sombre reflection that surrounds each Anzac Day is accompanied by a celebratory nationalism that sport and war supposedly embody. But what exactly is being remembered, and indeed forgotten, in these official commemorations and tributes?

In Not Playing the Game, Xavier Fowler reveals that the place of sport in the Great War was highly contested. Civilian patriots and public officials complained that spectator sport distracted young men from enlisting and wasted public finances better spent elsewhere. Sport’s defenders argued it was a necessary escape for a population weary of the pressures of war. These competing views often reflected differences of class, politics and ethnicity, and resulted in ferocious, sometimes violent, clashes. Not Playing the Game challenges the way our memories of the war are influenced by the fervour of sport, painting a picture not of triumph but immense turmoil and tragedy.

Grimwade Conservation Services‘s Loong Conservation Project has been named as the AICCM Outstanding Conservation Treatment of the Year.

Andy May (History) and Jonathan Kemp (Grimwade), together with Louise Shewan (Geology, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences) and an international, multi-institutional, interdisciplinary team have been awarded ARC Discovery Project funding for their project, Megalithic Connections: Imperilled Cultural Heritage in Laos and India.

The project aims to “document and explore the cultural connections between the geographically disparate megalithic cultures of Laos and India and create an enduring digital record of these threatened cultural assets. Integrating archaeological science and pioneering data capture technologies, the project will create globally significant new knowledge; advance heritage management processes including transferrable exploratory technologies; and help underpin economic, social and cultural benefit in these regions. With an increasing awareness of the need to conserve global cultural assets, Australia will take the lead in developing breakthrough technological solutions and new cross-country research and practitioner capability.”

Ronald T Ridley (Professor Emeritus, Classics & Archaeology) was made an ‘honorary citizen’ in the region of Labico, Italy, in honour of his scholarship.

Research Higher Degree Completions

The following PhD theses have successfully passed examination:

Giovanni Piccolo (PhD in Classics & Archaeology, 2022), ‘The Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium by Gaius Julius Solinus: A Roman Geography for a Changing World’

The Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium is a collection of wondrous facts from various areas of natural science presented within the geographical framework of a description of the known world. Little is known of its author Gaius Julius Solinus, possibly a grammaticus who lived between the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth century [CE]. Despite being today largely neglected within the field of Latin literature, the text played a significant role in the transmission of classical geographical and scientific knowledge to Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Since the publication of Theodor Mommsen’s critical edition of the text in the late nineteenth century, studies on Solinus’s work have largely focused on philological issues concerning the author’s sources and the authenticity of the second redaction of the text. Such approach stemmed from the general view that the text was a mere epitome of its main source, Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, and has not offered a comprehensive assessment as to why and for whom the Collectanea was written. This thesis aims to fill this gap in the research and to answer the question of what the ultimate purpose of this text was. Specifically, the following aspects of the issue are investigated: the cultural, social, and historical reasons that prompted Solinus’s reorganisation of Pliny’s knowledge; the world view that emerges from the prominent space reserved to Rome within the text; and the role of mirabilia, and, in particular, animal paradoxography, in providing the author with the epistemological support to the world order that his text upholds.

The methodology here adopted follows a text-based approach, by analysing those passages of the Collectanea in which Solinus’s tone, choice of words, and deviation from source material can be read as indicative of his authorial autonomy, and thus the reflection of a clear political project. This thesis concludes that a date of composition at the reign of Constantine I (or at least between the end of the third and the first few decades of the fourth century) is consistent with the author’s need to reaffirm the cultural primacy of the city of Rome, at a time in which it was losing its political relevance. It also suggests that the view of Nature that emerges from Solinus’ use of animal paradoxography (and mirabilia in general) is indicative of a ‘deterministic’ Weltanschauung, and is used as the moral justification of a providentially arranged world order with Rome at its centre. This thesis ultimately argues that Solinus’ Collectanea should be read independently from its sources, and that its importance lies in its being one of the most significant reflections of the cultural eclecticism of its time.

Supervisors: Professor Tim Parkin, Professor Frederik Vervaet

Fregmonto [James] Stokes (PhD in History, 2022), ‘The Hummingbird’s Atlas: Mapping Guaraní Resistance in the Atlantic Rainforest during the Emergence of Capitalism (1500–1768)’

This thesis maps the resistance of Guarani peoples to colonisation in the Atlantic Rainforest of South America during the emergence of capitalism, from 1500 to 1768. As such, it addresses a gap in the existing literature, where the resistance of stateless Indigenous groups has not been sufficiently acknowledged in both environmental histories of the Atlantic Rainforest and global histories of capitalism. The dissertation’s research method draws on archival sources, alongside interviews with contemporary Guarani writers, to make maps and other infographics visualising and analysing this history. In the sixteenth century, Guarani resistance strategies impeded the creation of a silver route through the inland Atlantic Rainforest. The failure of the Spanish to overcome this decentralised resistance network contrasts with the rapid Spanish defeat of the nearby Inca Empire.

Coupled with the subsequent Guarani struggle against the yerba mate commodity frontier in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these actions obstructed capital accumulation in Paraguay, hindering local deforestation and ensuring the survival of autonomous Guarani populations. Simultaneously, in the coastal Atlantic Rainforest, appropriated Guarani labour played an important role in the restoration of Portugal’s Atlantic Empire and the opening of the Brazilian gold commodity frontier. The subsequent flow of gold from Brazil to England assisted the development of British capitalism in the eighteenth century. Consequently, the thesis argues that this appropriation of Guarani labour and knowledge should be acknowledged as a contributing factor in the global emergence of capitalism. But this process did not end with a complete victory for the forces of capitalist integration, with Guarani peoples continuing this political struggle to the present day, ensuring that the teko, the Guarani way of life, endures.

Supervisors: Professor Sara Wills, Professor Sean Scalmer

Research Higher Degree Milestones

Paula Phillips, ‘The Settlement and Mortuary Assemblages from the Earliest Levels at Tell Fara South’ (PhD completion seminar, Classics & Archaeology)

This thesis re-examines the work of the British School of Archaeology at Tell Fara South, under the direction of Flinders Petrie and James Starkey (1927–1931). It reconstructs the assemblages from the earliest settlement levels and the associated cemeteries. Key results include a better understanding of the stratigraphic links between the settlement and the early cemeteries, the nature of the settlement as an important fortress, and the close relationship it shared with Tell el Ajjul. The re-examination dispels previous assumptions that the site was of minor significance and instead, highlights an important role Fara South, along with Tell el Ajjul, played in this corner of the Eastern Mediterranean during the Middle and Late Bronze Ages.

Elina Abou-Sleiman, ‘Remembering Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland: Memories of Repression and Dissent’ (MA confirmation seminar, History)

In Brisbane, contentious memories of radical politics lie dormant in the commemorations of established institutions. Meanwhile, a surviving radical tradition fights to sustain the past as a living struggle. Highlighting Queensland’s history during the Bjelke-Petersen era (1968-1987), this study explores historical memory in its relation to the production of hegemony and counter-hegemony under capitalism; to oppression and radical resistance. To do so, this study suggests an understanding of historical time as inseparable from material space, exploring how history survives in contested spaces, is obscured and yet lingers on. Foregrounding key sites such as the University of Queensland, Musgrave Park, and the street battlegrounds of political protests, this study pursues a radical critique of settled histories and popular memories.

Projects

Student Conservators @ Melbourne has released the second volume of its journal, Scroll.

SHAPS staff, fellows, students, alumni: if you have news items for the monthly SHAPS digest, please email us the details.

Feature image: Roslynne Bell addresses participants in the 2022 Melbourne Classics Quiz, part of the 2022 Being Human Festival. Photographer:  David Hannah