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When a new wave of women's history burst onto the Australian national scene in the 1970s, its angry tone, revolutionary critique, and national political focus reflected its close connections with the women's liberation movement. Subsequent research into the history of working women expressed the strength of labor history in Australia. The new concept of "gender relations" enabled feminist history to claim all historical processes and relationships, not just women's experience, as its proper subject. More recently feminist history has been at the forefront of the transnational turn in Australian history that has reinvigorated research into biography, empire, colonialism, migration, and the women's movement itself. Seemingly now far removed from its grassroots, the new transnational feminist history would yet seem to be appropriate in the face of one of the most urgent of contemporary political challenges: the need to address the inter-connectedness of the world, evident in the terrible plight of the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who risk and lose their lives in crossing national borders.
Angry Voices
"Tpropose that Australian women, women in the land of mateship, the L'Ocker,' keg culture, come pretty close to top rating as the 'Doormats of the Western World.'"1 So charged the historian Miriam Dixson in The Real Matilda, her excoriating study of "Woman and Identity in Australia" published in 1976. In the nation that had been the first in the world to extend full political rights to women, they now found themselves, decades later, demeaned, exploited, marginalized, and silenced. "In this proud democ- racy," thundered Dixson, "women figure as pygmies in the culture of the present and are almost obliterated from the annals of the past."2 The main objects of her wrath were the male construct of national identity and the Australian historians, mostly men, who had been complicit in its making.
When this new wave of women's history burst onto the national scene in the mid-1970s, its origins in the women's liberation movement were evi- dent. Angry in tone, unforgiving in attitude, and intent on revolutionary change, from the beginning it contained a critique of the discipline of his- tory itself. It also attracted a large audience, because it was lively, political, accessible, and engaged. It directly critiqued relations between men and women in contemporary...