Public history in Australia is at a crossroads. While public history has generally become accepted as a sub-field, history is effectively no longer a core university discipline. There are around 850 professional historians in Australia of which around 60 per cent are academics. A more capacious understanding of the many roomed house of history may shore up history’s uncertain future.

No Longer the Only Professionals

In 1991 Australian Historical Studies – the premier journal for academic Australian history – published a special issue on a new field of history that had emerged in Australia in the 1980s and had lots of people talking. It was public history. But they weren’t all saying the same thing. Some historians welcomed the new history. In the introduction to the volume academic cultural historian John Rickard wrote that public history made traditional, archive-based historians rethink their practices. It raised ‘questions about the relationship between the history historians write for themselves … and the history they should write for others.’ And it served ‘to question our understanding of what constitutes the profession itself.’ Academics were no longer the only professionals. Government departments, local councils, museums and broadcasters like the ABC were employing historians to work in media, heritage, material culture and commissioned history.[1]

Issues and Tensions

Some academics were suspicious of the new field. For them it wasn’t proper history. Others were openly hostile. They were unwilling ‘to move out of the conventional archive, in which “the documents” were preserved, dutifully awaiting interpretation.’ And they refused to accept things such as photographs, art, film, artefacts and sites as serious historical sources. Rickard also mentioned that ‘many of the new sources had to be pursued and found, and their interpretation often required skills which had to be learnt.’ For not a few academics, public history was ‘intellectually a little dubious, and certainly more trouble than it is worth.’ But it had arrived. And it demonstrated that history had ‘a future, not only in the academy, but in the real world.’[2] The new professionals were slowly making headway into cultural areas and institutions that most academic historians had largely ignored for years.[3]

In many ways the Australian Historical Studies special issue encapsulated some of the issues and tensions that continue around public history practice. Blending theoretical concerns and ideas in the academy with historical practice is not easy. Some of the new professionals are also driven in part by concerns over social justice and history which became increasingly evident from the late twentieth century as public issues: trauma from the ‘stolen generations’ and institutional child abuse persist in the present as ‘unfinished business’.[4] Thrown into this mix are other professions. Architects, for example, often controll projects involving historical production. Film and television producers have modes of operating that imposed limits on historical representations.[5] Different levels of government regulate, for example, history’s marginal role in the heritage industry and paid historians to work in a range of cultural institutions, especially museums. And then there are a huge range of communities – from ethnic to location based – who have varying needs and budgets as well as understandings and expectations of history.[6]

Public History’s Visibility

Awareness of public history is growing, albeit it slowly, in Australia. It is being adopted in school curricula and textbooks. Government agencies, such as the City of Sydney Council – that employs a city historian, Lisa Murray, and has a history unit – have included it in cultural plans. Cultural institutions like libraries and museums are becoming more familiar with public history as graduates and postgraduates trained as public historians move into employment. The body of literature about the field in Australia has also been increasing at a modest rate, unlike Europe where here there has been a boom in courses and publications.[7]

Ironically, at the same time public history programs in Australian universities have largely ceased at the masters level, with the exception of coursework offered as part of the Masters of Research at Macquarie University. Tanya, with assistance from us, has set up the Australia and Aotearoa Public History Network at the Centre ‘for practitioners and enthusiasts across Australasia to share research and collaborate’.[8] They have also been replaced by training for more specific public history locations such as the Museums and Heritage MA course at the University of Sydney and the University of Queensland; a heritage studies MA at University of Western Australia; an advanced museums and heritage program at the Australian National University (ANU); an MS in urban and cultural heritage at the University of Melbourne in the School of Design; and a new masters of tourism, environmental and cultural heritage at the University of Tasmania (UTas). Kate Bagnall also runs a Graduate Diploma in Family History at UTas which contains several units of public history. Similarly, the graduate diploma at the University of New England in local, family and applied History has been enduring and popular with local communities and recently a separate unit on public history has been on offer.

Public History is still the focus of some centres at universities as part of their public engagement programs and to support existing courses. We established the Australian Centre for Public History (ACPH) at the University of Technology Sydney in 1999 which continues to operate in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The refereed journal Public History Review, which we edit, is hosted at the ACPH. The Centre for Western Australian History was established in 1985 and focuses on histories from a regional perspective. It produces the annual journal Studies in Western Australian history and now specialises in environmental and commissioned public history work. The Centre for Museums and Heritage at the Australian National University, run by Laurajane Smith and Alex Dellios, teaches into related courses and is home to the International Journal of Heritage Studies.

The diffusion of public history to the broader history curriculum in tertiary institutions has coincided with the indigenising of university courses across their spectrum of offerings. This usually involves subjects which address indigenous history-making, which almost invariably to date is not practised in universities. There are, however, a handful of heritage and history firms, including Waters Consultancy, GML and SHP, that engage collaboratively with Indigenous communities and their knowledges and research protocols.

Public History Comes of Age

Today public history in Australia has come of age. There are around 350 ‘new professionals’ working across the country mainly in capital cities and in the more populous states of Victoria and New South Wales. Many would call themselves public historians. Three quarters of them are women. This compares to just over 500 academics around forty-five per cent of whom are women. Professional Historians Associations are well established, self-confident and less concerned today with industrial matters such as fee schedules and ethics codes. Some run regular conferences. A significant number of public historians have doctorates. About one-third of the PHA NSW’s members hold a PhD which gives them greater authority in workplaces. There seems, however, a reluctance among some to adopt a ‘more generous definition of the historical profession’ which Raphael Samuel called for over a quarter of a century ago.[9] Doing so would only strengthen history’s place in Australia’s culture and economy.

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Further Reading

• Paul Ashton, Tanya Evans and Paula Hamilton (eds.), Making Histories, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020.
• Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton (eds.), The Australian History Industry, North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, forthcoming 2021.

Web Resources

• Centre for Applied History, Macquarie University: https://www.mq.edu.au/research/research-centres-groups-and-facilities/resilient-societies/centres/centre-for-applied-history (last accessed 29 August 2021).
• Australian Centre for Public History: https://www.uts.edu.au/research-and-teaching/our-research/australian-centre-public-history (last accessed 29 August 2021).

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[1] John Rickard, ‘Introduction’, Australian Historical Studies, vol 24, no 96, 1991, 1-2.
[2] ibid, 2-3.
[3] See Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, History at the Crossroads: Australians and the Past, Halstead Press, Sydney, 2010, chapter 11, ‘The New Professionals: Public History’, 121-133.
[4] Ashton and Hamilton, History at the Crossroads, 192-197.
[5] See, for example, Michelle Arrow, ‘”I want to be a television historian when I grow up!”: On Being a Rewind Historian’, Public History Review, vol 12, 2006, 80-91.
[6] See, for example, Community History Program, History and Communities: A Preliminary Survey, Community History Program, UNSW, Kensington, 2000.
[7] The German publisher de Gruyter started a major public history series in 2020. The first volume was Paul Ashton, Tanya Evans and Paula Hamilton (eds), Making Histories, Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2020.
[8] See www.phn.edu.au (last accessed 1 June 2021).
[9] Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, Verso, London and New York, 1994, 19.

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Image Credits

Australia War Memorial © The author.

Recommended Citation

Ashton, Paul, Paula Hamilton: Public History in the Land of Oz. In: Public History Weekly 9 (2021) 7, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2021-18705.

Editorial Responsibility

Tanya Evans | Heather Sharp