No. 2

The second issue of ANU Historical Journal II was only possible due to the generous support of scholars both at The Australian National University, and at universities all over the world. First and foremost, the journal is indebted to the generous funding initially provided by professors Rae Frances and Michael Wesley in 2017,... Read more

In the six months leading up to the finalisation of this issue of ANU Historical Journal II (ANUHJ II), people the world over have had to grapple with uncertainty to an extent not experienced for decades. Australians have found themselves engulfed by world-altering natural disasters,... Read more

In February 1894, the Australian doctor George Ernest Morrison left the treaty port of Shanghai on a journey to Rangoon in British Burma. His route took him up the Yangtze River by boat, across the western Chinese provinces of Szechwan and Yunnan by a combination of foot, horse and sedan chair,... Read more

The transmission of moral messages in Golden Age Dutch art is a core claim of the ‘iconographic’ faction of scholars of Dutch realist art. Jeroen Dekker writes: 17th century Dutch genre painting played a major role in the promotion of the pursuit of family and educational virtues. Packing moralistic messages in fine paintings was considered as a very effective moralistic communication policy in a culture in which sending such moralising messages was very popular.... Read more

Australia in the 1920s was gripped by the power of the modern, which simultaneously exhilarated and alarmed the nation. Sydney Ure Smith’s high-end women’s magazine the Home reflected these complex and contradictory reactions to modernity. Instead of taking Ure Smith at his word when he wrote that the Home sought to promote a style and taste that would be ‘mostly good and always modern’,... Read more