RAHS Latest News
Jessie Street (1889-1970)
Written by Elizabeth Heffernan, RAHS Intern To celebrate Women’s History Month in 2021, the Royal Australian Historical Society will continue our work from previous years to highlight Australian women that have contributed to our history in various and meaningful ways. You can browse the women featured on our webpage, Women’s History Month. Feminist, activist, and diplomat Lady Jessie Street was an instrumental figure in Australian and world politics during the twentieth century. Today the...
Exciting New World: Australia in the 1930s
Written by Elizabeth Heffernan, RAHS Volunteer On Saturday 6 November 2021, the RAHS held a special online event, exploring the Exciting New World: Australia in the 1920s and 1930s. This is the second in a series of two blog posts about the interwar decades, providing an overview of the broad spectrum of changes that occurred across Australian politics, society, and culture during that time. Read the first instalment here If the 1920s was a decade defined by change, the 1930s was one of...
Essie Coffey (1941-1998)
Written by Elizabeth Heffernan, RAHS Volunteer To celebrate Women’s History Month in 2021, the Royal Australian Historical Society will continue our work from previous years to highlight Australian women that have contributed to our history in various and meaningful ways. You can browse the women featured on our webpage, Women’s History Month. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this webpage contains the images and names of people who have passed away. Affectionately...
Ruby Payne-Scott (1912-1981)
Written by Elizabeth Heffernan, RAHS Volunteer To celebrate Women’s History Month in 2021, the Royal Australian Historical Society will continue our work from previous years to highlight Australian women that have contributed to our history in various and meaningful ways. You can browse the women featured on our webpage, Women’s History Month. Ruby Payne-Scott was Australia’s first woman radio astronomer. Though relatively unknown during her lifetime, due to both the obscurity of her work and...
Judy Cassab (1920-2015)
Written by Elizabeth Heffernan, RAHS Volunteer To celebrate Women’s History Month in 2021, the Royal Australian Historical Society will continue our work from previous years to highlight Australian women that have contributed to our history in various and meaningful ways. You can browse the women featured on our webpage, Women’s History Month. A two-time Archibald Prize winner with such high-profile portrait subjects as Joan Sutherland, Princess Alexandra, and Queen Sikrit of Thailand, Judy...
Faith Bandler (1918-2015)
Written by Elizabeth Heffernan, RAHS Volunteer To celebrate Women’s History Month in 2021, the Royal Australian Historical Society will continue our work from previous years to highlight Australian women that have contributed to our history in various and meaningful ways. You can browse the women featured on our webpage, Women’s History Month. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this webpage contains the names of people who have passed away. “My belief is in people,”...
Dawn O’Donnell (1927-2007)
Written by Elizabeth Heffernan, RAHS Volunteer To celebrate Women’s History Month in 2021, the Royal Australian Historical Society will continue our work from previous years to highlight Australian women that have contributed to our history in various and meaningful ways. You can browse the women featured on our webpage, Women’s History Month. “Convent girl turned ice skater [who] became the godmother of Sydney’s Golden Mile”. [1] So begins the hour-long documentary on Dawn...
Outside Off – My Brother Jack
Written by Maximilian Reid, RAHS Volunteer‘ ‘Our Don Bradman’ Australian stories flow with cricket. Perhaps none more so than Donald Bradman, whose bronze statues, street names and ubiquitous average of 99.94 are full throated in their praise. This edition of Outside Off is not. In keeping with past editions, we seek to illustrate Australian society through cricket afforded by cricket’s unique moral dimensions. One of the most complex moral dimensions of cricket and one mirrored in today’s is...
‘This is the ABC’
Written by RAHS volunteer Elizabeth Heffernan On Friday, 1 July 1932, after the 8pm bells of Sydney’s General Post Office, Conrad Charlton announced to the country: “This is the Australian Broadcasting Commission.” [1] It was the ABC’s first wireless radio broadcast after the Australian Broadcasting Commission Act 1932 was passed on 17 May. The transmission is estimated to have reached 6% of the country’s population at the time—almost 400 000 people from as far away as Perth. [2] The leaders...
Outside Off – Riot of 1879
Riot, Bets and Class Cricket is now the prevailing amusement of the day. Let no man henceforth set up for a sporting character whose name is not enrolled among the ‘gentlemen cricketers’ of Sydney”[1] The Sydney Gazette, on the formation of a new cricket club, 1832. Victorian gentility, civility, and sobriety. If there is ever an image to be conjured of early colonial cricket, it seems to be this one. [2] However, early colonial cricket in Sydney was coarse. Inter-colonial rivalry, gambling,...
Anzac Day 1918: Different, but not forgotten
Written by Elizabeth Heffernan, RAHS volunteer The twice-a-day Amiens train rattles into Villers-Bretonneux station, dead autumn leaves swept to the sides of the platform and rusted overpass looming above the tracks. The small, French village is silent, cobbled streets empty in the early morning gloom. Google Maps points the way past the houses and into the fields beyond; the path laid out before us is slippery with mud and wet cut grass. Fresh rain promises. It is three kilometres from the...
Mary Jane Cain (1844-1929)
Written by Elizabeth Heffernan, RAHS Volunteer To celebrate Women’s History Month in 2022, the Royal Australian Historical Society will continue our work from previous years to highlight Australian women that have contributed to our history in various and meaningful ways. You can browse the women featured on our webpage, Women’s History Month. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this webpage contains the names of people who have passed away. Affectionately known as...
RAHS Weekly News Round-Up