ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with some non-human animal protagonists and some definitions. The process basis of public history can indeed provide scope for the development of histories exploring animal–human relationships and the material on which this is founded. The term public history confusingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, has different emphases in different cultural contexts. While Britain routinely produces heritage workers, museum curators, local historians and community practitioners who create history and put it to work in the world, in north America and Australasia there are often professional historians who define themselves in this way. The Eureka Stockade was erected in 1854 on the goldfields of Ballarat some 115 kilometres northwest of Melbourne in Victoria. Animal studies scholars who grapple with the role of animals in the archive might well add an understanding of the too easily overlooked role of rats.
