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Two years ago, I wrote of my initial impressions upon arriving on the shores of New South Wales, Australia. Little has changed. The jet lag after international travel certainly doesn’t get any easier. I was reminded of this fact during the OIEAHC “Warfare and Society in Colonial North American and the Caribbean” conference in Knoxville, Tennessee, last year when I had an incredible urge to lie down and sleep behind the podium after delivering a paper about two days after arriving. Nor does the travel itself get any easier. I was reminded of that fact as I sat on the runway in Dakar, Senegal, laptop battery dead, in the middle of a marathon sixty-hour journey the wrong way around the world after the conference from Washington, D.C., to Sydney via Johannesburg (don’t ask why).

But I have at least picked up some of the local lingo. I now know that when an Australian asks “how you going,” it is not because he or she is expecting you to leave. But when someone says you haven’t got a Buckley’s, it means you might as well be on your way. And they also really do use the word “crook” for feeling ill. I learned this after I laughed out loud when a student used it as an excuse for not handing in an assignment. He wasn’t amused. Nor was I when I finally did experience the mind-numbing sting of a “bluey” (a type of jellyfish). I felt right crook.

Still, I was cheered recently while snorkeling at the local beach when I saw close-up the kind of stingray that killed Steve Irwin—and that finally brought Australia, apparently, to the attention of the rest of the world. Cheered enough that I again agreed to write something for Uncommon Sense at the request of Sally Mason. What follows, then, is an update on early Americanists and their activities in the antipodes since my last column, with a more in-depth look at the place I’ve gotten to know best—Sydney. If it’s a bit idiosyncratic and a little partial, forgive the spruik—it’s been a long arvo.

In my last column, I spoke of the healthy number of American and Atlantic historians already happily situated in Sydney, particularly at the University of Sydney. I’m pleased to report that this number has been augmented by the arrival of several others, as well as an almost-certain new arrangement that will bring Rhys Isaac up from Melbourne on a more regular basis. Considering those already at Sydney, the university and city really are becoming a southern hemisphere center for American and even Atlantic history.

In the past year, Cassandra Pybus took up a new position as Australian Research Council (ARC) Professorial Fellow in History at the University of Sydney, just in time to see her latest and lauded book, Epic Journeys of Freedom (Boston, 2006), released in paperback. It was a pleasure to welcome her to Sydney. During March 2007 she was a visiting fellow at the Rockefeller Library in Colonial Williamsburg, where she researched the life of an enslaved woman named Mary Perth. In early April, she was in York, England, at the Conference on Abolitions, 1807–2007.

Meanwhile, Emma Christopher, author of the recently published book Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807 (New York, 2006), has just moved from Monash University to take a position at Sydney as an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow. We look forward to having her teach a new Honors seminar this semester on transnational history, which will draw on her new work on convicts sent to West Africa in the mid-1780s and also on the links between Sierra Leone and Australia. We are also looking forward to the publication this year by the University of California Press of Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, which Emma coedited with Cassandra and Marcus Rediker. The book explores the labor and migration systems of the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans and draws upon a successful conference held in Fremantle, Western Australia, in July 2005.

Early American history at Sydney will also be enriched by a more regular series of visits from the ever-active Rhys Isaac. Rhys has continued as an emeritus professor at LaTrobe University, Melbourne, Australia, and as Visiting Distinguished Professor at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, while also being Research Associate at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Rhys will also have to fit in visits with his regular international globetrotting. During the last year or two, he has given the keynote address at the inaugural Draper Early American Conference at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, in October 2005 and been at the University of Texas, Austin, in September 2006 to discuss Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom (Oxford, 2004) as the inaugural participant in the university’s Early Modern Atlantic History “Meet the Author” series. In October he spoke to northern Virginia history teachers at a special venue organized by George Mason University. In June 2007 he participated in a panel on the Jamestown settlement at the joint OIEAHC–Society of Early Americanists meeting in Williamsburg, and he will take part in another panel to mark the twenty-fifth birthday of The Transformation of Virginia at the SHA’s November 2007 meeting in Richmond. But Rhys has also been busy in Australia: in July 2006 he gave a special public lecture at Port Arthur Historic Site, a former prison in Tasmania, reviewing Colonial Williamsburg’s programs that represent slavery to the visiting public. The same month, also in Tasmania, he delivered a stimulating and discussion-provoking plenary address to the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association (ANZASA) entitled “African American Presence and the New Nations,” in which he reflected on the American Revolution and the reinvention of the British Empire as standard-bearer for liberty through outlawing of the slave trade.

The History Department was also enriched by the more formal addition of Saliha Belmessous to its ranks, also as an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow, in 2005. Saliha, author of D’un préjugé culturel à un préjugé racial, is currently working on the social history of colonization in French America informed by intellectual history. In two recent pathbreaking articles, she has shown that an early discourse of French identity emerged in seventeenth-century France as a response to colonization and the encounter with Native American peoples and has challenged the historical orthodoxy that understands the emergence of race as the result of colonial exploitation.1

Saliha’s work invariably meshes well with that of her partner, Andrew Fitzmaurice, who is also a member of the Department of History at Sydney. They met at the 1997 Atlantic History Seminar at Harvard University, convened by Bernard Bailyn (a seminar in which, by some degree of coincidence, I also participated). Andrew’s work is well known to the early American community. His Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 (Cambridge, 2003) has attracted widespread attention and has helped earn him ARC funding for projects on state formation in the early modern Atlantic world and for a separate project, A History of Terra Nullius. Fitzmaurice’s work on state formation has led him to contribute to and collaborate in editing a volume of essays that will follow from a major international conference, “Shakespeare and Political Thought,” held July 12–14, 2006, at the Australian National University. Many of you will see more of Andrew’s work shortly, including “Moral Uncertainty in the Dispossession of Native Americans,” in The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624, ed. Peter C. Mancall (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007); “The Monarchical Republic in America,” in The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England, ed. John McDiarmid (Aldershot, Eng., 2007); and “The Commercial Ideology of Colonisation in Jacobean England: Robert Johnson, Giovanni Botero, and the Pursuit of Greatness,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 64, no. 4 (October 2007).

David Rollison, nearby at the University of Western Sydney, has also had a couple of busy years, publishing a piece on “Marxism,” in Writing Early Modern History, ed. Garthine Walker (Oxford, 2005), and an article, “Conceit and Capacities of the Vulgar Sort: The Social History of English as a Language of Politics,” Cultural and Social History 2, no. 2 (May 2005): 141–163. David also gave the opening address at an exciting conference, “Collective Memory and the Uses of the Past,” at the University of East Anglia in July 2006, as well as a paper, “Tom Paine and the Myth of Masaniello,” at a conference on “Rediscovering Radicalism in the British Isles and Ireland, c. 1550–c. 1700,” Goldsmiths College, University of London, in June 2006. It was, of course, a particular pleasure to be included with David in the April 2006 special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly on Class and Early America, to which he contributed a great piece entitled “The Specter of the Commonalty: Class Struggle and the Commonweal in England before the Atlantic World.” Looking back at that issue, I now notice that four of the five contributors were non-Americans. I’ll leave comment on that for a more formal venue.

Back at the University of Sydney, the indomitable Shane White continues to flirt with early American history too, even though he has been immersed in a huge project on the Harlem Renaissance for the past several years. We are hoping that a new Atlantic project might lure him back to our ranks, as will the award of a five-year ARC Professorial Fellowship for a project on “The Making of Black Manhattan.” There are some early signs—Shane published “Black Life in Freedom: Creating a Popular Culture,” in Slavery in New York, ed. Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris (New York, 2005). It is also a delight to note that Shane and Graham White’s (no relation!) recently published book, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Boston, 2005), won the prestigious Queensland Premier’s History Prize in 2005.

Shane’s polymorphic interests in particular help bring together the diverse interests of the other Americanists in the department in beneficial synergies. For example, Shane is working on the Harlem Project with Stephen Robertson, author of Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880–1960 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005), who has recently published a string of articles on sexual violence in New York (using legal records) and the use of online sources in teaching in places as diverse as Gender and History, the History Teacher, the Law and History Review, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and the Australasian Journal of American Studies. Stephen’s new project is on “Private Eyes and Ears: Covert Surveillance in American Life, 1865–1941.” I also hope to collaborate with Shane in the future not just on Atlantic history but also on a new project on “War and Memory in America” that Clare Corbould and I are currently investigating. Clare worked at the Gilder Lehrman Institute on a Senior Scholar Fellowship in 2005, has published on U.S. imperialism in the Australasian Journal of American Studies, has an article forthcoming in the Journal of Social History on “Streets, Sounds, and Identity in Interwar Harlem,” and is about to publish a book entitled Becoming African Americans, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, Mass., 2008). In the “War and Memory” endeavour, we also hope to recruit Frances Clarke, author of the forthcoming book Sentimental Bonds: Suffering, Sacrifice, and Benevolence in the Civil War North, who has also published widely on the Civil War, including in Civil War History, and whose work will shortly appear in the Journal of Social History.

Shane’s tireless promotion of American history more generally has also helped bring to Sydney the new United States Studies Center that will open its doors in January 2008. Funded to the tune of twenty-five million dollars from the government and as much if not more from corporate sponsorship, the Center is designed to bring together leading scholars, politicians, business leaders, and thinkers from across Australia and the U.S. to research, debate, and create new knowledge on American political, economic, social, and cultural issues. Though it is not yet clear what role the History Department and historians will play in the new Center, it will certainly bring new opportunities for international collaboration and networks.

A little further afield from Sydney, I’m happy to report that early Americanists are also thriving. For example, we were delighted to welcome Donna Merwick’s new book, The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (Philadelphia, 2006), a searing examination of the early Dutch experience in America that continues on from her prizewinning efforts in Possessing Albany, 1630–1710: The Dutch and English Experiences (Cambridge, 1990) and Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999). Donna’s new book was appropriately feted at the 2006 ANZASA Conference in Tasmania (see below).

While Donna is a veteran of ANZASA, recent arrival Tom Buchanan at the University of Adelaide, author of Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), gave a great paper at his first ANZASA Conference in Tasmania entitled “Black Autobiography in the Old South: The Making of the Confessions of Amos Warrick, Madison Henderson, James Seward, and Charles Brown.” Tom is currently editing an African American narrative for use as a teaching text, tentatively titled “A Different Kind of Freedom: The Stories of Madison Henderson, James Seward, Amos Warrick, and Charles Brown, African American Rascals on the Antebellum Mississippi.” He is also working on a fascinating history of emotions and American slavery.

At the same time, across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand, Steve Behrendt at Victoria University of Wellington is working on an online version of the slave trade CD-ROM database (Cambridge, 1999), due to be released in the summer of 2008. The project, funded by NEH, Harvard (DuBois Institute), and Emory and headed by David Eltis at Emory, will place 35,000 slaving voyages online and include an African names database, an images database, and K-12 educational materials. Steve is also working on a new edition of Calabar (Nigeria) merchant Antera Duke’s diary with David Northrup (Boston College) and A. J. H. Latham (Swansea University). Also in New Zealand, Peter S. Field, currently at the University of Canterbury on the South Island of New Zealand, enjoyed a year “off” and returned to the United States to take up a professorship at one of his old haunts at the City University of New York. He is currently finishing up a cowritten book on race and Romanticism in the writings of Jefferson and Emerson.

Another veteran of ANZASA and early American history, Peter Bastian at the Australian Catholic University, has been of late tempted away from American history. Perhaps taking seriously Bill Bryson’s musings about the lack of knowledge among Americans about Australian history and politics, Peter is working on a book about Andrew Fisher, an Australian Labor Prime Minister in the early twentieth century. That project, along with his steady editorship of the Australasian Journal of American Studies, has kept him busy, but he hopes to return to his long postponed project on John Dickinson sometime in 2008.

Peter’s Pacific drift and many of the projects mentioned here point to the very real opportunities that scholars in the antipodes have for doing truly transnational and multinational history. Sometimes, as in the case of Peter and Sydney’s own Richard Waterhouse, it is a matter of choice and intellectual interest. At other times, scholars working on American or Atlantic history cannot help but be dragged into wider and more current debates. Andrew Fitzmaurice, for example, has become enmeshed in Australian history while working on Atlantic history. Andrew’s next monograph, A History of Terra Nullius, is already having an impact on Australian political debate and it is not yet in press. It has been delayed by the so-called History Wars but will be in the hands of the Cambridge University Press “Ideas in Context” series editors by December 2007. It is also now under contract to be published in French translation as Une histoire de Terra Nullius, reflecting the degree of international interest generated by the project. Andrew has also published on the topic in the Australian Historical Review, his arguments have been cited by many prominent national journalists, and he has collaborated with Sydney colleague Dirk Moses on “Anti-Colonialism in Western Political Thought: The Colonial Origins of the Concept of Genocide,” in Genocide and Colonialism, ed. Moses (New York, 2007). Dirk, who is actually a historian of Nazi Germany, also recently dragooned me into coauthoring a piece on “Raphael Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas,” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (December 2005): 501–529.

Such collaborations are encouraged by the proliferation of conferences and symposia with transnational themes. A recent one-day symposium on transnational history, organised by Marilyn Lake and Anne Curthoys at the Humanities Research Center at the Australian National University in Canberra, has now resulted in an edited collection, Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra, 2005), in which papers, including some on new postcolonial and global histories, range across empires and nations. A similar gathering was held at the same place on the theme of “Transnational Lives/Biography across Boundaries” in July 2006. Organisers Penny Russell, Angela Woollacott, and Desley Deacon brought together an international group of participants that included keynote speakers Martha Hodes and Cassandra Pybus, along with participants from around Australia and the world (for details, see www.anu.edu.au/hrc/conferences/conference_archive/2006/Transnational_Lives.php). Plans are now also afoot for publication of an edited collection arising from that conference.

Other transnational events that featured early American participants over the past two years or so included an August 2006 “War and Memory in Modern Society” symposium sponsored by the Department of History and the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney; “Shakespeare and Political Thought” in July 2006; “Partisan Histories: Conflicted Pasts and Public Life,” a conference convened by Bain Attwood and Dipesh Chakrabarty that featured Laurence Brown, now at the University of Manchester, on “Agency, Identity and the Academy: Debating Slave Resistance in the Caribbean”; and, following the 2006 ANZASA Conference in Tasmania, a symposium on “Race, Empire and Captivity,” in Longford, Tasmania, organized by Cassandra Pybus and featuring speakers Peter Hulme, Linda Colley, Helen Tiffen, Marcus Rediker, Douglas Hamilton, David Cannadine, and Nigel Penn.

Another exciting if slightly less transnational venue for early Americanists is the ANZASA Conference, held every two years. The conference is the focus of a lively and collegial exchange between Americanists in history, literature, politics, film, and cultural studies and, like the British Association for American Studies, is designed to bring together older and younger scholars (especially postgraduate students) and local and international scholars. It is always sprinkled with enough early American content to keep things informative as well as interesting. Last year, the ANZASA Conference was held in Tasmania on July 9–12, 2006, and organized by Tom Dunning and Andrew Gregg. Special speakers included Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and the conference also very appropriately honored three extraordinarily distinguished long-term ANZASA members—Donna Merwick, Rhys Isaac, and Greg Dening—each of whom gave a challenging keynote address. Donna’s latest book, The Shame and the Sorrow, was launched at the conference dinner. There was, then, a feast of early American content (along with great Tassie food). There was also a good deal of music, including singing, guitar, and banjo, along with appropriately themed historical sessions.

In the end, such events give us more than enough opportunities to welcome any of you who might be thinking of an Australian venture. In the past year or two, we’ve had many visitors to these shores, including David Armitage, Edward Ayers, Sharon Block, William Chafe, Joyce Chaplin, Stephen Hahn, Martha Hodes, Stephanie McCurry, Kathy Peiss, Quentin Skinner, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Clarence Walker, to name but a few. Here at Sydney we recently enjoyed the company of Jane E. Schultz from Indiana University, author of Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America, who visited between February and August 2007. We also recently welcomed Professor Vincent Carretta from the University of Maryland. For his visit, Cassandra Pybus and Emma Christopher organized a one-day seminar in May 2007 on the “Promise and Problems of the Black Atlantic,” which kicked off with Carretta discussing his controversial biography, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens, Ga., 2005).

Finally, some of you might have already noticed that the Department of History at the University of Sydney is hosting the ANZASA Conference July 4–7, 2008. Proposals for panels and individual (twenty-minute) papers are now invited. For more details, see “Calls for Papers” (click here) of this newsletter. Though the conference welcomes proposals across the broad spectrum of American Studies topics, I would be particularly pleased to receive proposals from fellow early Americanists around the globe. There will be plenty of places for all.

Because early Americanists dominated the keynote sessions at the ANZASA Conference in 2006, speakers next year will be of a more contemporary kind. Still, many of you will know the work of confirmed keynote speakers George Chauncey and our own Ian Tyrrell. Chauncey (Yale University) is best known for his book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York, 1994), which won the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Prize for the best book in social history and Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for the best first book in history. Tyrrell (University of New South Wales) is best known for his studies of the history of women and temperance in the United States but has also written about environmental reform in California, tobacco, and the American historical profession. Special themed panels will also be convened around the general topic of empires to continue discussion of Ian’s new research on American cultural expansion and American empire.

Information on registration will be available shortly, but keep in mind that the conference will take place on the sublime grounds of the Women’s College, University of Sydney, where there is also catered accommodation for a limited number of conference delegates. You’ll also want to plan to stay well beyond the conference dates. I probably need not remind you that Sydney, the leading city in New South Wales and the largest in Australia, is gloriously situated on one of the most beautiful harbors in the world. It is a vibrant, dynamic, and cosmopolitan city with a population of some 4.4 million. It possesses a wealth of stunning natural and heritage sites, including the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, and extensive collections of early examples of Australian art and architecture, along with bush walks around the city and in the numerous nearby national parks, including the World Heritage–listed Blue Mountains. For those who might wish to stay beyond the period of the conference, Sydney is the perfect base from which many short excursions as well as national trips can be undertaken to Australia’s other major tourist attractions. Sydney’s winter climate is temperate; high temperatures in July average around 18 degrees Celsius, with lows of 9 to 12 degrees Celsius. As I’ve learned, this could mean anything between wearing a fleece and wearing shorts and a t-shirt, depending on the wind. But it does generally stay sunny through the winter. For more information about the city, see www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au.

Even if these dates don’t suit, do get in touch if you are thinking of a visit. If you would like to give a seminar paper at Sydney or any other university, keep in mind that semester dates generally run from the start of March to the end of May, and again from the end of July to the end of October. And stay tuned. The new United States Studies Center will undoubtedly bring new opportunities for visits, as will the augmentation of our ranks by energetic new scholars eager to organize new conferences and colloquia. Moreover, we are still hopeful that sometime in the near future, we’ll even host the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture’s annual conference. Though Ron Hoffman has now no doubt added stingrays to his list of objectionable creatures, I’m still hopeful I can get him out on a surfboard.

Michael A. McDonnell
University of Sydney

NB: With thanks to all the folks around Australia and New Zealand for suggestions, notices of events, and for sharing their knowledge of all things American down under. And special thanks to Clare Corbould for always being patient in sharing her knowledge of all things Australian.

Notes
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1 Saliha Belmessous, “Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy,” American Historical Review 110, no. 2 (April 2005): 322–349; Belmessous, “Etre français en Nouvelle-France: Identité française et identité coloniale aux dix-septième et dix-huitième siècles” (Being French in New France: French Identity and Colonial Identity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries), French Historical Studies 27, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 507–540; Belmessous, D’un préjugé culturel à un préjugé racial: la politique indigène de la France au Canada (Lille, France, 2000). The English translation of the book title is From Cultural Prejudice to Racial Prejudice: The Native Policy of France in Canada.