James Keating

Boots on the ground Dunedin grew rapidly during the early 1860s. This watercolour was painted at this time by Walter Scarlett Hatton and shows substantial buildings...

Read an extract from Charlotte Macdonald's new book, 'Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and across the British Empire', in the ODT!

Pick up a copy of 'Garrison World' today from your local bookshop or through the BWB website.

www.odt.co.nz/lifestyle/maga...

Pregnant Women’s Sexuality in Early Modern England This book provides the first history of pregnant women’s sexuality in England from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries.

It is exciting to announce that my first book has just been published with Palgrave!

Pregnant Women’s Sexuality explores ideas and practices about pregnant women’s sex in early modern England and European medicine ✨

link.springer.com/book/10.1007...
#history #histofsex

“The character of *the reader* is a strange and curious one. While being entirely individual and with his or her own reactions, the reader is so intimately linked with the writer that the truth is that the reader *is* the writer.”

— Clarice Lispector (Feb. 1968)

Definitely interested, even from my slightly incompatible timezone!

Helen Garner says State Library of Victoria turned into ‘party central’, with planned job cuts to ‘bring disgrace’ on Melbourne Acclaimed author ‘sick’ about 171-year-old institution’s proposed restructure as hundreds of writers sign open letter in protest

"Now they’re hacking away at the actual librarians? Shame on them. They bring disgrace on the name of our city.”

Great stuff from Judy Brett.

Sign the Petition Save the State Library of Victoria!

Melbourne's State Library of Victoria – the third most popular library in the world! – is being threatened with cuts to staff and facilities. Add your name to the petition to save jobs and resources www.change.org/p/save-the-s...

I am heavily invested in handwriting & historical documents. Historians need to weigh carefully whether time spent transcribing documents is “wasted,” or whether it actually helps thought processes & skills. This is not to say these tools should not be used.

Just consider the cost of “time saved.”

this Mushroom Diaries book is honestly make me think a little differently of three writers i have always really appreciated

I’m delighted to share that my first journal article has been published in the special issue 'Labour Archives and Methodologies' of Labour History.

Honoured to have this piece included alongside such distinguished work: doi.org/10.3828/labo...

Please read this & help save the State Library of Victoria, entering its 'now fully trashed' era. I didn't go to uni - for me the Library was higher education in later life, research for my job, a revelation about what ordinary people could have access to. It changed my life. Not just a building.

Proposed cuts at State Library of Victoria go against its mission – and will hurt the disadvantaged

The State Library of Victoria’s ‘major’ proposed cuts include slashing the number of reference librarians and free computers for public access. Some staff are shocked.

I'm against pardoning turkeys because it implies that we are eating them as a punishment for their crimes instead of our own

State Library proposes major cuts to staff and services The library plans halve the number of reference librarians it employs and reduce the number of computers available for public use in a move that has outraged staff.

#Victorians! Our State Library is being trashed by a series of executives with no experience or understanding of public collections. Many hired as 'temps' without full process, who then caused scandals & exodus of specialist & librarian staff: a full wreck looms. www.theage.com.au/national/vic...

Useful thing for Aussie people juggling jobs: the Fair Work Ombudsman has an app called Record My Hours which doesn't store your data (unlike all the other freelancer type apps/programs out there) and lets you track actual hours worked in a way that is lowkey and doesn't add too much cognitive load.

I really enjoyed it … put in mind of an account I read of a debate between what we might call cosmopolitan and critical provincial approaches to Helen Garner at a recent conference.

Catriona Menzies-Pike on ‘critical provincialism’: ‘I’d advocate for a set of reading practices that stay close to the contours of place and culture, that let themselves be informed by topography and history’. Yes!

Very excited to see my article on ghosts in early modern London published with Urban History! And it's open access! cambridge.org/core/journal...

This text is taken from the Jan-June 2026 UNSW Press catalogue (too much to fit in this box) - https://unsw.press/catalogues/

Happy to share my new book 'Quiet Protest: A New History of Activism during the Vietnam War', which will be published by UNSW Press on 1 April 2026.

Congratulations to Mary Blight (Curtin), runner up of the 2025 Ken Inglis Prize for the best paper presented by a postgrad at the AHA conference. Read the judges’ citation below.
Thanks to all who submitted entries, to our two judges, and to Taylor & Francis for their ongoing support of this prize.

Congratulations to Zoe Smith (ANU), winner of the 2025 Ken Inglis Prize for the best paper presented by a postgrad at the annual AHA conference @austhistassoc.bsky.social Thanks to Taylor & Francis @tandfonline.bsky.social for supporting the prize. Read the judges’ citation below

Know anyone who would want to come work with me? 1 year position for someone with a HASS background (don’t need to be a programmer), working on a tool to search historical documents like colonial Hansard. unimelb.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/UoM_Ex...

Check out @racheljcollett.bsky.social's fantastic article on the Women's Liberation Movement in Merseyside, and radical regionalism, in the latest issue of Tribune - out today!

Brancepeth (est. 1856, Wainuioru)

A name to conjure with in NZ library history. The late Lydia Wevers wrote a wonderful book about the sheep station library, now preserved at Victoria University of Wellington.

Richly illustrated and deeply researched, Charlotte Macdonald's 'Garrison World' reveals how empire shaped lives in 19th-century Aotearoa and beyond.

Out now in bookshops and on the BWB website.

www.bwb.co.nz/books/garrison...

#NZHistory #GarrisonWorld

Nice to see this forum on Ian Tyrrell's work in AJAH.

It was a privilege to offer thoughts about an approach to the past that has shaped my own and to learn from other fantastic scholars' responses to Ian's writing on women, temperance, and transnational activism: www.jstor.org/stable/48844....

In an interview with David Goodman and Clare Corbould elsewhere in this special issue Ian claims that he was a poor academic mentor ... I respectfully disagree!

Nice to see this forum on Ian Tyrrell's work in AJAH.

It was a privilege to offer thoughts about an approach to the past that has shaped my own and to learn from other fantastic scholars' responses to Ian's writing on women, temperance, and transnational activism: www.jstor.org/stable/48844....

Garrison World: historian Charlotte Macdonald The story of the Redcoats, as they were known, has been told in a new book Garrison World by Victoria University history professor Charlotte Macdonald.

Historian Charlotte Macdonald joins Kathryn Ryan on RNZ Nine to Noon to discuss her major new history, 'Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and across the British Empire'.

Listen here: www.rnz.co.nz/national/progr...

📘 Pick up your copy at a local bookshop today!

And delighted now to share this new research article by Charlotte Legg and me that explores settler colonial identities, shared affinities, racial politics and transimperial forms of whiteness in New Caledonia and Australia in the early 20th century. Open access: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....