That's wonderful news Kylie! They are so lucky to have you.

Historian take in advance of Butler's Press Club tomorrow: the current Labor rhetoric about the "original vision" of the NDIS doesn't line up with the copious historical evidence of what that actually was. It's being misrepresented deliberately. You don't need to swallow it.

I have been loaning out my copy of this fervently, glad that I can now trust people to get their own copies to annotate ✒️

The whiplash of people suddenly stopping caring was distinctly painful. People complied with rules for years but suddenly gave up on reducing transmission, masks, testing, etc. I sometimes think it'd have been easier if there hasn't been an illusion that Melb folk cared about disabled people.

Back in the day when I was teaching, it got a lot of use! So crucial for PhD time management.

My decisions are never less smart than when they involve SmartyGrants

I said I wouldn't do this again, and yet

No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech This book is the first to outline the history of the tactic of ‘no platforming’ at British universities since the 1970s, looking at more than four decades of student protest against racist and fascist...

Just thought I'd mention again that I once wrote this book about the history of 'no platforming' and free speech debates at UK universities.

www.routledge.com/No-Platform-...

Distilled essence of damp paper bag

the Australian Future Fund is invested heavily in Palantir, because this setter-colonial nation state sees a future in fascist warmongering, surveillance of everyone everywhere all the time, carceral extractivism, and ofc racism.

It would lead to a massive increase in the frequency of people saying "it depends" and "it's actually more complicated than that", the two main biomarkers for historian presence

Right pals, I need to get some bookings into @aat-transcribes.bsky.social sharpish or we won’t be here by the end of the summer.

We need just 3-5 projects with 10+ hours of qualitative data requiring transcription, or 5+ hours for captioning, to turn around our fortunes.

Let’s go!

#AcademicSky

Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia This collection brings together experts from Australia and beyond to examine the persistent settler-colonial patterns of denial, ignorance and antipathy.

Last year I went to a great symposium where we talked about the failure of the Voice referendum here in Australia. Some of us at the conference put together our thoughts in this volume, edited by Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin and Julia Hurst. Great to see it out! link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

I'll probably never get to finish the article I half wrote for the 50th anniversary of this article, but I still think about Eustace being a grump very often

"HISTORY AS A SOCIAL SYSTEM* Part of my life was spent in ecclesiastical institutions. Offices and duties in such institutions tended to be distributed less with an eye to talent than with an eye to the good of one's soul. One year I was appointed Magister Equi, Master of the Horse. The horse's name was Eustace. He was an enormous brute, with great rolling haunches and huge belly inflatable at any given point to frustrate tight girths. In my innocence I thought that all horses knew some sort of farmland patois like 'whoa', 'giddup'. Eustace knew only violence. He had come to the seminary from timber haulers in the mountains and he was trained to give of himself instantly and totally, which was good for logs, but bad for mowers and ploughs. One of the tasks of the Master of the Horse was to plough the orchard. My image of ploughing had come mainly from the Dutch Masters. I saw it as a serene meditative occupation, tripping on occasional larks, lunching at the angelus. I discovered that ploughs are heavy. They require two hands just to hold them upright. Where, I asked, did the reins go? They went round one's neck. With Eustace streaming into the middle distance of the orchard, one had a poor choice. Pursue him at break-neck pace with the plough, or be dragged by the neck without the plough. It was then that my first scepticism about scripture began. It is sometimes more difficult to take one's hands off the plough than to keep them on. I have an image of the disciplines as ploughmen of lonely furrows, hauled along by forces over which they have little control. They need some courage to stay, but more courage to take their hands away."

Real ones know that intellectual disciplinarity is akin to that time that Greg tried to convince a horse named Eustace to pull a plough

[Excerpt below from: Dening, G. 1973. “History as a Social System.” Historical Studies 15 (61): 673–85. doi.org/10.1080/1031... ]

Must be all the Catholicism in the air, culturally speaking, but I keep bringing up Greg Dening in meetings that are in extremely *not* that disciplinary context*

*Unfortunately he's really useful for thinking about disciplinarity, which means I bring him up everywhere

god grant me the audacity of a Catholic convert sincerely telling the Pope he’s wrong about theology

Heat and Disability Symposium [online] Heat is a disability justice issue. Join Sweltering Cities and expert advocates for a vital conversation on a cooler & more just future.

This is going to be really exciting: UTS and Sweltering Cities' online symposium on Heat & Disability, for solution- focused discussion of climate and disability justice events.humanitix.com/heat-and-dis...

Nothing lifts my spirit more than truly unexpected but exciting research leads, especially when there's a cluster of them after a long break

(atrocious typos notwithstanding)

This is links to my Canberra angle -- Australian culture is haunted by the fact that all its cities are by nature "inauthentic", so singling one planned city out for derision lets other cities off the hook, and pastoral rurality also becomes a lesser evil in the settler repressed shame hierarchy

My antihistamine intake used to be directly tied to how much time I spent at PROV

in that we are contagious and ideally should be quarantined

historians: “archive fever”

other humanists *rolling eyes*: “historian flu”

Always felt like the corporate setting from the start of the movie had Sydney energy, but maybe that's me projecting my limited experience of working in Sydney

We’re back! Everything is still terrible!

This completely rules Simon, it juggles rigor, poetics, layers of critical engagement while keeping a sense of fun, in a way that's so impressive. What an absolute treat of a read, this must have been immensely exciting to research.

If you want to read the best opening paragraph of an academic article I've ever seen, here's your chance -- but the rest of the article is also an unmitigated banger, so keep going after that first bit:

This is extremely exciting Simon, congratulations!

It's hard to do this easily in the current tech landscape, but the Visible app only stores data on your device unless you opt in to clinical trials, is customisable for various conditions but is built for ME/CFS and LC needs -- has been invaluable for me in many ways over the past few years.