ABSTRACT
The ‘‘Australians and the Past’’ survey of historical consciousness in the late 1990s
showed that the vast majority of Australians gained their principal historical under-
standing from some form of entertainment across their lifetime. One of the most common
activities*for 84.2 per cent of respondents*was watching historical movies or documentaries on television. The ‘‘media’’, including newspapers and radio programs,
was recorded as a source for history, and the survey suggested that newspaper articles
and scrapbooks were collected by people who were researching history (Hamilton and
Ashton, 2003, pp. 11, 13, 1516, 26). As Kevin Williams (2008, p. 12) notes in relation to Britain, there was a vogue for all
things historical in the 1840s and 1850s, a period during which the academic teaching of
the subject was relatively unimportant. In Australia, historical features have been
appearing in the Australian press since at least the 1850s. Journalists have written local
histories, state histories and biographies, as Prue Torney-Parlicki (1999) showed in an
important piece on the Australian journalist as historian. In the nineteenth century,
Australian journalists formed the largest occupational group who wrote history (see also
Dickenson, 2010). Journalists, often as foreign and war correspondents,1 have authored
contemporaneous histories, ranging from William Coote and George Sutherland in the
nineteenth century (Cryle, 1990; Morrison, 1969; Sutherland 1880; Sutherland and
Sutherland, 1877) to M. H. Ellis (1949), Alan Reid (1971, 1976) and Paul Kelly (1994,
2009) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Several, including Betty Osborn in
Victoria (Lemon, 2008), Clem Lack in Queensland (Kerr, 2000), Ivor Birtwistle in Western
Australia (Porter, 1993), and Frank Bladen (Fletcher, 2005), Arthur Jose (Lamont, 1983) and
George Mackaness (Mitchell and Rutledge, 1986) with the Royal Australian Historical
Society, played key roles in the establishment and leadership of historical societies.
