Afternoon Light

25 April is eternally associated with the Gallipoli landings, but there is another ferocious battle fought by Australian troops on that date which deserves to be better remembered. That battle is the Battle of Kapyong, waged in the so-called ‘forgotten war’, the Korean War. Between 23-25 April 1951, with exceptional valour, fewer than 1,200 Australian and Canadian infantrymen, supported by New Zealand artillery and 15 American Sherman tanks, held the line against a Chinese Division of over 6,000, significantly thwarting the formidable Chinese August offensive and helping to save Seoul. Hear the incredible story from David W. Cameron, author of Let the Bastards Come reveals: The Battle for Kapyong Korea.

David W. Cameron is a Canberra-based author who has written numerous books on Australian military and convict history, as well as human and primate evolution, including over sixty internationally peer-reviewed papers for various journals and book chapters. He received First Class Honours in Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Sydney and later went on to complete his PhD in palaeoanthropology at the Australian National University. He is a former Australian Research Council (ARC) Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Australian National University (School of Archaeology) and an ARC QEII Fellow at the University of Sydney (Department of Anatomy and Histology). He has participated and led several international fieldwork teams in Australia, the Middle East (Turkey, Jordan, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates), Europe (Hungary) and Asia (Japan, Vietnam and India) and has participated in many conferences and museum studies throughout the world.

When World War Two revealed that Australia needed to ‘populate or perish’, Menzies and the Labor Government were in lock step agreement about the need to broaden the sources of Australian immigration beyond the British Isles. But the political leadership faced a far harder task in bringing the nation, which had long been indoctrinated in the dogma of White Australia, along with them. That they succeeded is one of the greatest political and logistical miracles in our history, and one which has forever changed Australia. Joining us on the Afternoon Light Podcast is Peter Brune, author of Suffering, Redemption and Triumph: The First Wave of Post-War Australian Immigrants 1945-66.

Want to learn more? Read how Menzies was able to raise homeownership rates while our population boomed past 10 million.

Peter Brune is one of Australia's leading military historians. He is author of the bestselling and highly acclaimed A Bastard of a Place: The Australians in Papua, as well as Those Ragged Bloody Heroes: From the Kokoda Trail to Gona Beach 1942, The Spell Broken: Exploding the Myth of Japanese Invincibility and We Band of Brothers: A Biography of Ralph Honner, Soldier and Statesman and is co-author with Neil McDonald of 200 Shots: Damien Parer and George Silk and The Australians at War in New Guinea.

Sir Henry Parkes has been dubbed the ‘Father of Federation’, but how much do you know about him? Fleeing poverty in England to seek opportunity in Australia, he found immense political success, that went hand in hand with repeated financial failure. The ‘Grand Old Man’ of New South Wales politics, he was tremendously charismatic and became notorious for marrying much younger women, who fathered him a total of 17 children. However, such indiscretions can be forgiven of a man who helped found not just our nation, but also our system of universal primary education. Joining us to discuss Parkes’s remarkable story is biographer Stephen Dando-Collins.

Stephen Dando-Collins is the award-winning author of 45 books, including histories, biographies and even children’s novels. The majority of his works deal with military history ranging from Greek and Roman times to American 19th century history and World War I and World War II. His book Sir Henry Parkes: The Australian Colossus was published ahead of the 200th anniversary of Parkes’s birth in 2015.

Many people assume that before the advent of multiculturalism Australia had little in the way of food culture. But while things certainly weren’t as diverse, in their own way they were interesting, unique and constantly evolving. In the ‘working man’s paradise’ people prided themselves on being able to eat meat three times a day, while our recent penchant for TV cooking competitions is arguably just an outgrowth of trying to win ‘best scone’ at the local agricultural show. The heart of Australia’s evolving food culture from the 1930s was the Australian Women’s Weekly, which per capita was the most read such publication in the world. By 1944 it was already teaching Australians how to make ‘Mock Chicken Chow Mein’, in which the chicken was rabbit and soy sauce could be substituted for Worcestershire. Joining us to discuss Australia’s fascinating culinary history is food historian Dr Lauren Samuelsson.

Dr Lauren Samuelsson is a food historian who did her PhD thesis researching the way that the Australian Women's Weekly influenced Australian food culture from the 1930s through to the 1980s. She has had articles published in History Australia, Australian Historical Studies, and The Conversation. She received the Ken Inglis Postgraduate Prize (2018) and received a high commendation in the 2020 Jill Roe Prize.

When Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975 under the pretext of intervening in an existing civil war, Australia publicly defended their actions. But the terrible reality was that Australia’s leaders and diplomats knew the truth; that Indonesia had instigated the conflict for their own advantage, and moreover the Australians had been actively complicit in the turn of events which soon escalated into major atrocities. Both sides of politics must share the blame for one of the most shameful episodes in the history of our handling of foreign affairs. Joining us on the Afternoon Light Podcast is Dr Peter Job, who has spent many years exhaustively researching A Narrative of Denial.

Dr Peter Job is the author of A Narrative of Denial: Australia and the Indonesian violation of East Timor. He was involved in the East Timor support movement during the Indonesian occupation, including working on the radio link to Fretilin in 1978. He has a PhD in International and Political Studies from the University of New South Wales in Canberra.

When the Soviet satellite Sputnik entered Earth’s orbit in October 1957 it caused panic throughout much of the West. This ‘beeping bauble’ was seen as an existential threat, that exposed democracies as being too preoccupied with consumer luxuries over scientific endeavour. In response, both Eisenhower and Menzies resolved calmly but resolutely to fix their nation’s systems of science education, to first compete with the Russians and then prepare for the future. Our guest Professor Jennifer Clark tells the untold story behind Menzies’s 1964 advent of Commonwealth funding for secondary schools, which was about more that the headline sectarian issue of ‘state aid’.

Want to learn more? Read about how the Menzies Government helped America win the space race.

Professor Jennifer Clark is a Professor of History at the University of Adelaide. Holding a PhD from the University of Sydney, she was a Harkness Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and, most recently, a Redmond Barry Fellow to State Library of Victoria. She was until recently Head of the School of Humanities, University of Adelaide.

Did you know that Australia was home to the first labour national government in the world? As the first Labor PM and first Federal leader of the ALP, Chris Watson is seldom remembered as more than the answer to a trivia question. Yet this should not be the case, as he has a remarkable story that reveals the Labor perspective on the emergence of our enduring party system. Hear how a humble boy born in odd circumstances off the coast of Chile ended up rising to the highest position in our nation. Joining us this week on the Afternoon Light Podcast is Watson’s biographer Ross McMullin. 

Want to learn more? Listen to the other side of the story from Watson’s contemporary & Liberal Prime Minister Joseph Cook.

Ross McMullin is an award-winning historian, biographer, and storyteller. His biographies include Pompey Elliott, which won multiple awards, and Will Dyson: Australia’s radical genius, and he also assembled Elliott’s extraordinary letters in Pompey Elliott at War: in his own words. His political histories comprise The Light on the Hill and So Monstrous a Travesty: Chris Watson and the world’s first national labour government. His book Farewell, Dear People: biographies of Australia’s lost generation was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. 

Was federation a mistake? While many can find flaws in the workings of our federal system, few have had the gall to question the triumphal tone of our founding narrative. That was until the recent publication of the provocative and iconoclastic book Their Fiery Cross of Union: A Retelling of the Creation of the Australian Federation, 1889-1914. In this week’s Afternoon Light podcast, we are joined by its author William Coleman, who argues that we should be wary of automatically revering our political inheritance. 

Want to learn more? Read the papers from the 2019 ‘Demytholigising Australia’s Federation Episode’ Conference, published in Agenda.

William Coleman is a Reader in the School of Economics at ANU. He is widely published in the History of Economic Thought and contemporary economic controversies. He was the convenor of the ‘Demythologising Federation’ Conference held at Fremantle in 2019, and is the author of Their Fiery Cross Of Union: A Retelling of the Creation of the Australian Federation, 1889-1914. 

Distilling the essence of Australia’s political history is an incredibly complex task. To understand the full picture, you certainly cannot begin in 1901, nor can you focus on events purely at the Commonwealth level. One of Australia’s leading historians has recently attempted the great feat of writing a single volume political history of our nation, and the story he tells will help you gain a greater insight into your own country. Joining us on the Afternoon Light podcast is Professor Frank Bongiorno, author of Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia.

Want to hear more from Frank? Watch him give a paper at our first annual conference in 2021.

Frank Bongiorno is professor of history at the Australian National University and president of the Australian Historical Association. One of Australia’s most respected historians, he is the author of several award-winning histories, including The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia and The Sex Lives of Australians.

Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country is one of the most iconic books ever written on Australia. While many people miss the ironic nature of the title, the work helped to establish the stereotype of the 1950s and early 60s as a dull and suffocating period in which nothing much happened in our nation. But who was Horne, and what caused him to have such cynicism about the state of his country? Joining us to unpack Horne's fascinating story is biographer Ryan Cropp.

Dr Ryan Cropp, writer and historian, is a Research Fellow at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Donald Horne: A Life in the Luck Country. His writing has appeared in Australian Book Review, Overland and Inside Story.