Martin Kerby

• PhD The Australian National University
• Professor (Associate) at University of Southern Queensland

This paper explores the contested content of the Australian history curriculum to understand the curriculum’s national(ist?) purpose and investigate if national histories can be taught in a way which combats the anti-democratic forces at play in our culture. This question will be explored through analysis of the three topics in the Australian Curri...

Frank Uhr and Debra O’Halloran’s Multuggerah and the Sacred Mountain (2019) is one of the few children’s picture books that explore the Australian Frontier Wars. In terms of message, the author and illustrator subsume First Nations’ resistance into the nation’s broader celebration of its participation in foreign wars. In terms of medium, they use t...

The Battle of Meewah (One Tree Hill) was fought just outside the city of Toowoomba in September 1843. The battle constituted the first major setback to European settlement in Queensland, though it slowed rather than halted the dispossession of First Nations’ people. It offers an invaluable insight into the ‘Aboriginal way of war’ and challenges the...

Prior to the 1970s Indigenous issues were largely absent from Australian history classrooms. Schools largely taught British and European history, an approach grounded in a hagiographic treatment of European settlement and the nation’s experience of foreign wars. The wave of non-British post-Second World War migration and an increased focus on Austr...

This article explores current historical thinking regarding the ‘small wars’ fought on the frontiers of European empires during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing on a variety of examples ranging from South Africa to Bolivia and Australia to the Congo, the authors identify three major themes - the expansionist aims of imperial...

British and Australian children's books about the Great War remain a steadfastly conservative example of popular culture, particularly when exploring war time nursing. The marginalized place of females in children's literature, the failure of the official histories to adequately acknowledge the unique experience of the nurses, and the popular focus...

As they are usually chosen by adults, children’s picture books offer important insights into contemporary attitudes and values. They subsequently drive the social and academic development of young children, thereby playing a key role in their ethical socialisation and education. This article will explore the role of children’s literature in this pr...

This paper analyses the Australian children’s picture books The Gender Fairy, by Jo Hirst and Libby Wirt, and Introducing Teddy: A Gentle Story About Gender and Friendship, by Jess Walton and Dougal MacPherson. Both are examples of a rare engagement by Australian children’s authors and illustrators; indeed, Hirst has the distinction of being the fi...

Although the Great War made extraordinarily complex demands on the nations involved, it is the landscape of the battlefield which has continued to dominate contemporary perceptions of the conflict. Australian and English children’s picture book authors and illustrators have adopted a similar focus, particularly regarding the Western Front. It is th...

Australian children's picturebook authors and illustrators who choose armed conflict as their subject matter inevitably grapple with the paradox that, while war is a central component of national identity, the experience of Indigenous peoples remains, at best, underrepresented. This article uses the ideational, interpersonal, and textual meta-funct...

Despite primarily catering to a U.S. audience for whom religion exerts a greater influence than anywhere else in the Western world, children’s picture books dealing with the first landing on the moon in 1969 are reticent to conceptualise it in religious terms. Significantly, this is the same approach that NASA adopted when seeking to communicate th...

This article explores how artist-researchers navigate the “uncertain” space between theory and practice in a new Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA) program in an Australian regional university. The trickster is deployed as a metaphorical device to provide insights into how the first DCA’s candidates, their supervisors, and the university’s leadership ma...

The English journalist and author Philip Gibbs established many of the mythological conventions of the Titanic sinking – the luxury of a ship believed to be unsinkable; insufficient lifeboats; women and children first; the band playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’; the failure of a nearby ship to respond to distress signals; and the heroism of the doo...

This article explores how war memorials engage with the contested nature of public sculpture and commemoration across historical, political, aesthetic and social contexts. It opens with an analysis of the Australian commemorative landscape and the proliferation of Great War Memorials constructed after 1918 and their ‘war imagining’ that positioned...

The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Holocaust Memorial is situated on the western side of Green Park in Darlinghurst, in Sydney, Australia. Darlinghurst is considered the heart of Sydney's gay and lesbian population, having been the site of demonstrations, public meetings, Gay Fair Days, and the starting point for the AIDS Memorial Candlelight Rally. It is...

Over the course of the last four decades there has been a growing interest in the development and impact of counter memorials and counter monuments. While counter memorial and monument practices have been explored in Europe and the United States, relatively little research has been conducted in the Australian context. This systematic literature rev...

Australian war memorials have changed over time to reflect community sentiments and altered expectations for how a memorial should look and what it should commemorate. The monolith or cenotaph popular after the Great War has given way to other forms of contemporary memorialisation including civic, counter or anti-memorials or monuments. Contemporar...

Teaching Secondary History provides a comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of teaching History to years 7–12 in Australian schools. Engaging directly with the Australian Curriculum, this text introduces pre-service teachers to the discipline of History. It builds on students' historical knowledge, thinking and skills and offers pra...

Teaching Secondary History provides a comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of teaching History to years 7–12 in Australian schools. Engaging directly with the Australian Curriculum, this text introduces pre-service teachers to the discipline of History. It builds on students' historical knowledge, thinking and skills and offers pra...

Teaching Secondary History provides a comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of teaching History to years 7–12 in Australian schools. Engaging directly with the Australian Curriculum, this text introduces pre-service teachers to the discipline of History. It builds on students' historical knowledge, thinking and skills and offers pra...

This paper explores the role of the Senior Project Officer: The Arts for the Australian Curriculum Assessment Reporting Authority (ACARA) in facilitating the writing of the foundation Shape of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts (2011) paper for the national curriculum, with a particular focus on the discipline area of music. The collaboration betw...

This paper examines the personal and professional experiences of the five arts leaders who co-wrote the foundation document for Australia’s first national curriculum in the Arts. Their personal and professional backgrounds, which were explored during in depth interviews, drove the complex collaborative process that informed the first iteration of t...

This paper will explore the key findings identified in the five arts discipline-specific papers which comprise this special theme issue. Each of the participant researchers have situated Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music and Visual Arts within the context of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts and what they characterise as its social justice imperati...

St Joseph’s Nudgee College is an Irish Christian Brothers boys’ boarding school in Brisbane. It was established in 1891 to provide the children of Irish Catholics living in regional and remote Queensland and northern New South Wales with access to an education that would act as a vehicle for socio-economic advancement. The first decades of the coll...

Young children often look to their teachers for affection and acceptance, particularly if they are injured or upset. Yet, many male primary teachers experience substantial fear and uncertainty about making physical contact with their students. This study used 53 open ended survey responses and semi-structured interviews with five experienced male p...

During the catastrophic 2019 and 2020 bushfire season and the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020, Queensland’s Courier Mail regularly celebrated firefighters and health workers as national archetypes. By positioning them as the ‘new Anzacs’, the Courier Mail was able to communicate an understanding of the crises using a rhetoric that was famil...

For over half a century, the ‘imagining’ of the Great War in the UK has been framed by the existence of two Western Fronts, one literary and the other historical. The authors and illustrators of children’s picture books, whose work has traditionally reflected a society’s values and pre-occupations, have remained remarkably faithful to the literary...

Male teachers are a minority in both primary teacher training courses and in primary schools around the world. Education research has identified numerous gender-related challenges faced by male primary teachers during their initial teacher training and later when teaching in schools. Despite noting that many males leave teacher training because of...

Henry (Harry) Gullett, the press liaison for the Australian delegation at the Paris peace conference in 1919, was convinced that the valour and sacrifice of Australian soldiers had earned the nation the right to have its voice heard. In this, he was in complete agreement with the Australian prime minister Billy Hughes. Both were equally certain, ho...

In the years either side of Federation in 1901, Australia's Irish Catholics balanced two often contradictory impulses: their determination to retain their cultural and religious links with Ireland in the face of an often unsympathetic Protestant majority, and the desire to become 'good' Australians in order to make 'a go' of their lives in the new...

This article explores the experience of three research teams operating across a variety of educational contexts. As members of these teams, the authors were privy to a range of opportunities and challenges that emphasised how political collaboration can be, even when the team formation is an outgrowth of previous personal and professional relations...

During the period between the outbreak of war in August 1914, and the first major engagement for Australian troops in April 1915 on Gallipoli, the Queensland press in Australia articulated a vision of the conflict framed by binary opposites. The most pervasive of these was the positioning of German militarism and lust for conquest as the antithesis...

Effective assessment design and subsequent assessment practices are essential for student success in the higher education sector. A plethora of research on assessment in higher education exists which tends to focus primarily on the student experience. This paper shares results from a 3 phased study that explored staff perceptions related to assessm...

Adolescence is a developmental phase during which young people experience profound physical, emotional and social changes. The diversity and complexity of these changes has increased exponentially over the last 20 years. The arts provide important opportunities to enhance the resilience of adolescents with the benefits of engagement including impro...

In early August 2018, the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery (TRAG) in Queensland opened a group exhibition titled Landscape and Memory: Frank Hurley and a Nation Imagined. The artworks created by the eight invited artists responded to official war photographer Frank Hurley’s iconic images taken on the Western Front and in the Middle East in 1917 and 1...

Compassion and empathy are attributes that are critical for productive and supportive classrooms. They are also important qualities for the world outside of the classroom. An effective way of encouraging compassionate and empathetic thinking and actions with students in schools is through the use of quality picture books. Many children’s books deal...

This article explores newspaper reports appearing in the Australian state of Queensland during the main Australian participation in the Third Battle of Ypres (31 July–10 November 1917). The manner in which the fighting at Ypres was mediated to Queenslanders through press reports offers an insight into the impact of war correspondence and censorship...

Over the past two decades children’s picture books dealing with the Australian experience during the First World War have sought to balance a number of thematic imperatives. The increasingly sentimentalised construct of the Australian soldier as a victim of trauma, the challenge of providing a moral lesson that reflects both modern ideological assu...

This handbook explores a diverse range of artistic and cultural responses to modern conflict, from Mons in the First World War to Kabul in the twenty-first century. With over thirty chapters from an international range of contributors, ranging from the UK to the US and Australia, and working across history, art, literature, and media, it offers a s...

Perhaps more than any other type of museum display, dioramas, particularly those in military museums, are expected to be all things to all people. To justify their role as an explanatory tool they must be 'accurate' representations of history, yet to survive in the modern museum environment they must also be artefacts or artworks in their own right...

The artists and authors who produce children's picture books dealing with the First World War, and Gallipoli in particular, find themselves burdened by the expectation that they will balance a respect for this foundation myth with a 'pity of war' approach more in line with modern attitudes to conflict. Whatever their personal ideology, to meet thes...

We examine in this article how the construction of a metaphor for collaborative practice can be used as a navigational tool to assist teachers in making meaningful connections between artists and teaching practices. We illustrate how collaborative practices, when enacted in both teaching and artmaking and conceived as a metaphorical construct can...

This article explores the development and implementation of a new Doctor of Creative Arts program in a regional university. The experiences of key leadership staff and Doctor of Creative Arts candidates enrolled in the foundation year of the program are contextualised within the current landscape of practice-based arts research in the higher educat...

This paper explores the AlféaRT project, a research network supported by a research initiative of the University of Lyon and the CNRS (French national science agency). AlféArt means Arts, langages, formation, éducation, apprentissages: recherche et transfert (Arts, language, training, education, learning: research and transfer) and has two related...

This chapter explores how an Australian day and boarding college for male students between the ages of 10 and 17 partnered with a regional university to explore the Centenary commemoration of WWI through an Australian Government Arts and Culture Public Fund grant. The respective institutions eschewed traditional commemorative options such as statue...

The newspaper articles written by the Australian Harry Gullett and his English counterpart Philip Gibbs during the opening months of the First World War provide important insights into the nature of war reporting, propaganda, censorship, and the relationship between the press and the military. Despite differences in background and temperament, thei...

Kerby discusses the interwar years by investigating the work of famous author and journalist Sir Philip Gibbs. He reported on the Versailles peace treaty, the League of Nations, the impact of the war in Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Hungary, the USA, civil war in Ireland, famine in Russia, the French occupation of the Ruhr, the rise...

This chapter investigates the attempts by the British government to censor news reports and to curtail the movement of journalists during the early months of the First World War. It raises important questions about the nature of a free press and the danger of too close an alliance with government. Newspaper owners such as Northcliffe and their edit...

Given the continued wars in the Middle East, the role of the media generally and war correspondents specifically remains a contentious issue. Against the background of the centenary of the First World War, this chapter interrogates the experience of the official war correspondents chosen by the British government. They have been criticized for the...

This chapter covers the period from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 until the death of Sir Philip Gibbs in 1962. It discusses his support for Appeasement and his despair at the outbreak of another war. Gibbs worked as a correspondent in France before Dunkirk but then remained in England for the majority of the remainder of the conflict...

Kerby explores the impact on Sir Philip Gibbs wrought by a childhood which, in his words, was spent in ‘the England of Dickens’. Born in 1877, Gibbs’ family assumed both the outward signs of middle-class life, such as the idealization of family, cultural pursuits, and family entertainments, and the pervasive belief in the values of hard work, sexua...

Kerby provides an insight into ‘The New Journalism’ in Britain prior to the First World War by documenting the career of journalist Sir Philip Gibbs. Working first in the field of literary syndication, Gibbs entered Fleet Street in 1902 where he worked in turn for the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and the Daily Chronicle. As a journalist, he repor...

This conclusion offers a short assessment of the life of Sir Philip Gibbs and assesses his place in the history of war journalism. It offers a more nuanced understanding of the work of war correspondents and looks to place the book in the context of further scholarship regarding the role of the media, censorship, government/press relations, and the...

Sir Philip Gibbs was one of the most widely read English journalists of the first half of the twentieth century. This coverage of his writing offers a broad insight into British social and political developments, government and press relations, propaganda, and war reporting during the First World War.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the manner in which a Christian Brothers boarding school, founded in 1891 as an altruistic response to the socio/economic distress of Queensland’s Irish Catholics, undertakes the marketing of its educational product in a contemporary setting. St Joseph’s Nudgee College has displayed a remarkable capacity...

This chapter explores the formation of a school/university research team (SURT) which originated in personal and inevitably professional relationships. The members of SURT are drawn from various educational instiuttuions. Prior relationships among the members and an interest in forging and stenghtening school/university links have been the catalyst...

Although professional development in Australian schools is often part of the mandatory requirement for teachers to remain current with policies, practices and pedagogy, some teachers question the relevance of such programs. As Lieberman and McLaughlin (1992) note, many teachers are critical of conventional staff development ventures with workplace...

The aim of this research project is to examine the complex pressures on a school leadership team as it seeks to renew the built environment against the background of government funding, heritage concerns, architectural pressures and school and wider community expectations. These often competing demands are further complicated by the need for the sc...

St Joseph's Nudgee College, an Australian Catholic school for boys, has been operating since 1891 with a philosophy based on the Edmund Rice tradition. Recently there has been increased interest in the history of the college and the decision was made to establish a permanent museum and archives which could be actively used by the school community....

This thesis is a biographical study of Sir Philip Gibbs (1877-1962), one of the most famous and widely read English journalists of the first half of the twentieth century. Prior to the outbreak of World War One he reported on the great crises facing Britain domestically and the technological advances which came to symbolise the age. Industrial unre...

This chapter reports the findings of a pilot research project that investigated how senior visual arts students engage with and utilise technology in the creation of art works during their program of study. During the course of a year, six students from two schools were interviewed and their work was visually documented to ascertain whether technol...

The purpose of this paper was to investigate how a secondary boys' College has sought to create a cultural alliance between a spatial literacy which expresses an officially sanctioned version of the past and a contemporary curriculum that embraces a far broader understanding of this concept. This investigation of spatial literacy was contextualised...