History

Barely noticed

Item: Fathering
Author: Frank Bongiorno

A new account of Australian families

by Frank Bongiorno •

September 2025, no. 479

Fathering: An Australian history by Alistair Thomson, John Murphy, Kate Murphy, and Jonny Bell, with Jill Barnard

Melbourne University Press, $39.99 pb, 432 pp

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History

Barely noticed

A new account of Australian families

by Frank Bongiorno •

September 2025, no. 479

We have had histories of Australian motherhood for decades. Fathers feature – sometimes as villains – in some of our best loved fiction: D’Arcy Niland’s The Shiralee (1955), George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964), and Don Charlwood’s All the Green Year (1965) spring to mind. Rounded portraits of fathers have figured in memoir and autobiography. Examples by Germaine Greer, Manning Clark, Raimond Gaita, and Biff Ward stand out. But not so in works of history, where there is a strange silence.

Frank Bongiorno

Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University and is President of the Australian Historical Association. His recent publications include Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia (La Trobe University Press, 2022) and The Eighties: The decade that transformed Australia (Black Inc., 2015) and he is co-editor, with Benjamin T. Jones and John Uhr, of Elections Matter: Ten federal elections that shaped Australia (Monash University Publishing, 2018). The second and updated edition of A Little History of the Australian Labor Party, written with Nick Dyrenfurth, is published by UNSW Press on 1 May 2024.