Program Overview

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Unit Overview

The unit HIST218 - Oral History: Australian Women's Voices explores the ways in which women's historians have worked to record, recover, and interpret silenced or forgotten voices, histories of everyday experience, and gendered national narratives.

Unit Rationale, Description, and Aim

Historians often refer to 'silences' in history and seek ways to retrieve its missing 'voices'. This unit provides students with opportunities to do "hands-on" history, investigating the changing experiences and perspectives of Australian Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in Australia from the colonial frontier through to modern times in a variety of cultural and ethnic contexts. The aim of this unit is to develop students' understanding of history through women's experiences and women's voices.

Learning Outcomes

To successfully complete this unit, students will be able to:

1. Discuss theoretical and factual knowledge of the social, cultural, political, and economic history of women in Australia and an awareness of the debates surrounding this.
2. Communicate clearly in written and/or oral form, in a style appropriate to a specified audience.
3. Locate, use, and appropriately reference a variety of textual, oral, media, and material resources relating to the history of women in Australian history to develop an evidence-based historical narrative or argument.
4. Apply critical reading skills to their understanding of women in Australian history and the methods such as oral history that historians have used to research it.

Unit Content

Topics will include:

• Learning to listen: finding women's voices in Australian History
• Indigenous and non-Indigenous women's experience
• Women's voices: written sources (letters, diaries, images, and digital newspaper databases)
• 19th-century case studies may include: Women and work, the vote and 'First Wave' feminism, maternity and childbearing, or other topics.
• 20th-century case studies may include: gendered policy: divorce, sex education, and contraception, 'the marriage bar', women and war, shattered Anzacs, family violence, adoption, equal pay, the 'nuclear family', feminisms of the 1950s and 1960s; voices of migrants and refugee women, or other topics.
• Women's History: Rethinking Domesticity
• 'Second Wave' feminism: the personal is political
• Contemporary issues and debates
• Gender, Transgender, and diverse voices in history
• Recording women's voices: oral history, ownership, and ethical applied history

Assessment Strategy and Rationale

The assessment program for this unit is designed to enable students to demonstrate the development of their historical skills and their knowledge of the history of women in Australian history throughout the course of the semester.

Assessments

1. Hurdle Task: When oral history interviews are required, students must complete the oral history interview training and ethics training, then conduct an oral history interview and submit the required ethics forms and sound file by a specified date.
2. Assessment Task 1: Investigative Task: This assignment requires students to find and analyze women's voices in primary sources, historic newspapers, or other media.
3. Assessment Task 2: Student-Led Learning Task: This assignment requires students to work collaboratively to research a topic in Australian women's history and to present their findings to their peers and/or lecturer in an appropriate written/oral format.
4. Assessment Task 3: Research Project: This assignment builds on the oral history interview conducted by the student with an Australian woman (or historian in women's history or oral history) and requires students to incorporate information, themes, and analysis developed across the semester.

Learning and Teaching Strategy and Rationale

This unit provides hands-on learning (including collaborative learning) through face-to-face classes containing activities that will help students gain a deep understanding of the history of Australian Women's History and the skills fundamental to the study of history.

Representative Texts and References

• Bellanta, M., and Alana Piper. "'Looking Flash: Disreputable Women's Dress and 'Modernity', " History Workshop Journal , 78:1 (2014), 58-81.
• Chesser, L. Parting With My Sex: Cross Dressing, Inversion and Sexuality in Australian Cultural Life, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2008.
• Feathersone, L, 'The one single primary cause': Divorce, the Family and Heterosexual Pleasure in Postwar Australia', Journal of Australian Studies , 37: 3 (2013), 349-363.
• Forsyth, H. 'Reconsidering women's role in the professionalisation of the economy: evidence from the Australian census ' Australian Economic History Review , (2018).
• Grimshaw, P., Lake, M., McGrath, A., and Quartly, M. Creating a Nation. Perth: API network, 2006 (2nd edn).
• Lake, M. Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999.
• Nelson, E., Smith, S., and Grimshaw, P. (eds) Letters from Aboriginal Women in Victoria,. Melbourne: History Department, University of Melbourne, 2002.
• Nelson, E. Homefront Hostilities: The First World War and Domestic Violence, North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing 2014.
• Quartly, Marian, Swain, Shurlee, and Cuthbert Denise, The Market in Babies: Stories of Australian Adoption, Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2013.
• Warne, E. Agitate, Educate, Organise, Legislate: Australian Protestant Women's Social Activism in Post-Suffrage Australia, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2017.

Locations

• Melbourne

Credit Points

10

Year

2026