Peter Monteath

• Flinders University

This is a biography of the communist anthropologist Frederick G. G. Rose (1915-1991) who undertook fieldwork on Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria (1939-41) and Angas Downs in Central Australia during the Cold War era. After appearing before the Royal Commission on Espionage 1954-55, he relocated to the GDR where he became Professor of Ethno...

After the Armistice of September 1943, a large proportion of Allied prisoners of war (POWs) in Italy were released from captivity. This article considers the relatively small number of those men who made their way into the Italian resistance as partisans, drawing in particular on examples of Australian POWs who were in work camps in Piedmont at the...

Roland Wenzel Carter (1892–1960), soldier and community leader, was a proud Ngarrindjeri man and dedicated leader who made a significant lifelong contribution to the Ngarrindjeri community in South Australia. He was born on 28 February 1892 at Goolwa, South Australia, eldest son of Ngarrindjeri parents Jeffrey Carter and his wife Rose, née Rankine....

Georg von Neumayer’s Anleitung zu wissenschaftlichen Beobachtungen auf Reisen (Guide to scientific observations on travels), published in three editions from 1875 to 1906, provided instructions to German travellers on the collection of scientific data, including anthropological data. This paper explores the origins of the Anleitung by looking to it...

While most histories of SOE tend to emphasize the importance of sabotage and subversion in meeting Churchill’s injunction to ‘set Europe ablaze’, this article argues for a wider understanding of the functions of SOE by focusing on its operations in Crete. With a particular emphasis on the role and influence of Tom Dunbabin, the article shows that S...

The German anthropologist Erhard Eylmann relied heavily on assistance provided by missionaries when he undertook fieldwork in Australia. During two periods at the Hermannsburg mission he developed a strained relationship with Carl Strehlow. In his major work Eylmann wrote a damning critique of missionaries. While there was a level of personal animo...

In their primary task of converting Indigenous Australians to Christianity, German missions active in various parts of Australia through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century recorded relatively few successes. On the other hand, their endeavours in observing and recording Aboriginal languages and cultures have left a rich – and yet frequent...

This article uses sources gathered in the course of Australian war-crimes proceedings to examine a massacre carried out in mid-1942 in the Ukrainian village of Israylovka. A distinctive feature of the events of that day was that the killing of more than a hundred members of the local Jewish population was followed immediately by the murder of Misch...

Erhard Eylmann (1860-1926) was a German scientist who devoted much of his working life to researching Australia, where he travelled extensively during the period 1896 to 1913. His primary field of expertise was anthropology, about which he wrote at great length in his major work Die Eingeborenen der Kolonie Südaustralien (The Aborigines of the Colo...

Among the vast network of POW camps established in Germany during the Second World War were two quite extraordinary camps known as holiday camps, Ferienlager. One of them was for Other Ranks and was located in Genshagen just outside Berlin; the other, for officers, was in Steinburg in Bavaria. This article investigates the origins and development o...

The German presence in nineteenth-century South Australia is associated primarily with the immigration of Prussian Lutherans escaping religious persecution in their homeland. Their settlement in the fledgling British colony aided its early, stuttering development; in the longer term it also fitted neatly South Australia's perception of itself as a...

Accounts of Australian prisoners of war in Japanese captivity typically focus on the centrality of the labour experience. In contrast, the literature of the POW experience in Europe largely avoids the topic of labour. Popular culture, too, offers an image of German captivity dominated by boredom and inactivity, with the exception of accounts of esc...

D. M. LEWIS, JOHN BOARDMAN, SIMON HORNBLOWER, and M. OSTWALD. The Cambridge Ancient History: Volume VI: The Fourth Century BC, 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xix, 1,077. $155.00 (US). Reviewed by Anthony J. Spalinger

Encountering Terra Australis traces the parallel lives and voyages of the explorers Flinders and Baudin, as they travelled to Australia and explored the coastline of mainland Australia and Tasmania. Unusually, the book takes its lead from the voyages of Baudin, rather than Flinders, providing a rather different interpretation from those presently c...

In Stalins Gefolgschaft. Moskau und die KPD 1928–1933. By HoppeBert. Munich: Oldenbourg. 2007. Pp. 395. Cloth €54.80. ISBN 978-3-486-58255-0. - Volume 42 Issue 3 - Peter Monteath

When history has taken an interest in the Australian POW experience in the Second World War, the focus has been largely on those in Japanese captivity, where suffering was immense and mortality rates high. Popular culture has reinforced the perception that those who fell into German hands had it easy, living fairly comfortable existences punctuated...

This article covers the development of relations between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Australia through the full course of the GDR's existence, but with an emphasis on events leading to mutual diplomatic recognition in December 1972. It argues that as minor powers within their respective Cold War blocs the GDR and Australia had very lim...

This paper examines the usefulness of oral history in dealing with the fate of the so-called Mischlinge in Nazi Germany; that is, people categorized by the authorities as being of “mixed race.” It argues that oral history provides an invaluable supplement to the written, official record. The latter is by its nature a view “from above” and from the...

This article examines the initiation and development of the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Fascism (Gedenkrag fur die Opfer dec Faschismus) in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and then the GDR. In doing so it is interested in the way in which the annual event, held on the second Sunday of September, was politicized, especially during the onset...

The River: Life on the Murray?Darling. South Australian Maritime Museum. December 2006?February 2007, then various venues including the Australian National Maritime Museum and concluding at the Australian National Archives February 2009. Curated by Michelle Linder & Bill Seager. Entry free with entry to museum. The Changing Face of Victoria. Dome G...