History

Ready to forget

Examining injustice in Australian history

by Frank Bongiorno •

January–February 2026, no. 483

Fault Lines: Australia’s unequal past edited by Seumas Spark and Christina Twomey

Monash University Publishing, $36.99 pb, 336 pp

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History

Ready to forget

Examining injustice in Australian history

by Frank Bongiorno •

January–February 2026, no. 483

Like many edited collections, Fault Lines bears the marks of its origins in a conference, one on ‘Injustice, Survival, Memory’ at the Australian National University in 2022. The editors, in their introduction, explain that the central idea was to use the histories of the Dunera and Queen Mary (ships that carried interned Europeans to Australia during World War II) ‘as a basis for an examination of the theme of injustice in Australian history’.

Frank Bongiorno

Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University and is Immediate Past 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.