In this blog, authors Eli Branagh and Taylah Evans discuss their experience hosting ‘Thinking Beyond Liberal Narratives of Progress’, a one-day symposium held in response to the recently published Personal Politics: The Remaking of Gender, Sexuality, and Citizenship (2024).
In April 2025, we were delighted to host a one-day symposium called ‘Thinking Beyond Liberal Narratives of Progress’. We held this symposium in response to Leigh Boucher, Michelle Arrow, Barbara Baird, and Robert Reynolds’ recently published Personal Politics: The Remaking of Gender, Sexuality, and Citizenship (Monash University Publishing, 2024).
This book offers a refreshing political history of late-twentieth century Australia. The authors carefully trace the history of gender and sexuality politics in Australia, including campaigns for abortion law reform, domestic violence services, LGBTIQA+ awareness programs in high schools, and same-sex marriage equality. They resist uncritical narratives of linear progress in Australian political life. Rather, they engage a variety of methodological approaches that reveal what conventional narratives can obscure.
In many ways, reading Personal Politics was helping us make sense of our own political moment – one marked by a series of political failures that were eroding our faith in the inevitability of inclusion, equality, and justice. It has become painfully clear that history does not always ‘arc towards justice’, especially not in the midst of a climate and economic crisis, in the first year of another Trump administration, and in the wake of the failed 2023 Voice Referendum on whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples should have a representative body enshrined in the Australian Constitution. Stories of ever-increasing inclusion and the inevitability of equality also seem to be losing their capacity to mobilise people into political action.
As young historians, we wanted to read and write histories that offered alternative models of historical change and transformation. We wanted to read histories that help us think our way out of some of today’s political problems.
To continue the conversation that we felt reading Personal Politics had meaningfully advanced, we decided to organise a symposium. We invited proposals for short papers that challenged historical narratives of linear progress in Australian politics. We organised these papers according to their methodological intervention, rather than topic, in the hope that this would generate conversation about how historians across sub-disciplines might work with and around progress narratives.
The panels
The first panel of the day was organised around papers that collapsed easy and obscuring distinctions between politics of the ‘left’ and ‘right’. Clare Monagle presented a paper on the history of breastfeeding, speaking to the overlap in what we might typically imagine as ‘leftist’ feminist and ‘conservative’ religious configurations of ‘proper’ breastfeeding practice. Meanwhile, Libby Robin spoke about ‘conservative’ ‘conservationists’ and how they have historically narrated their politics as distinct from the ‘left’.
In his response to these papers, Robert Reynolds explained that the authors of Personal Politics were interested in how personal stories are mobilised in Australian politics today. Reynolds observed how Monagle and Robin’s papers shared a focus on personal stories: Monagle mobilised a powerful story about how becoming a mother ruptured her certainty about the politics of all things ‘motherhood’, while Robin drew out how conservative conservationists narrated their dispossession from leftist politics.
The second panel collected papers that disrupted historical narratives of progress. Taylah Evans spoke about the ‘men’s rights’ politics of the Queensland Police Union and their ‘Make DV a crime’ campaign. The Union was not simply reacting against feminist politics, Evans demonstrated, but instead rehearsing a cohesive ‘men’s rights’ politics of their own. Then, Tom Marshall-Davis discussed narratives of progress and decline in Prime Minister John Howard’s politics. Marshall-Davis complicated understandings of Howard as a neoliberal ideologue by demonstrating Howard’s relatively fatalist politics, in which he and his party could not use neoliberal policies to affect positive change but rather to slow the inevitable decline of the Australian nation. Kate Fullagar then turned to the Voice Referendum in a longer history of reconciliation. She asked what historians might make of the Voice outcome: was it a setback on a long road to reconciliation, or a marked defeat in the politics of reconciliation?
Personal Politics co-author Leigh Boucher responded to the panel. He explained that the book’s authors were interested in thinking about gender and sexuality as more than ‘last pitstops’ on the road towards total inclusion, equality, and justice. Rather, the authors were interested in the insights we gain when we think about gender, sexuality, and indeed, race, as key elements of liberal citizenship that activists have always been tarrying with. Evans, Marshall-Davis, and Fullagar each gave a history that demonstrated activists’ and political figures’ fundamental entanglement with questions of gender, sexuality, and race.
By this point in the day’s conversation, participants were itching to brainstorm ways around these narratives of progress. Our final panel was organised around thinking through alternative approaches to historical storytelling. This panel opened with Jordana Silverstein, who used oral history interviews to complicate what historians and NGOs tend to understand as an ‘endpoint’ for people experiencing statelessness. This endpoint is often conceived of as citizenship, though Silverstein demonstrated that this was not necessarily desired, final, or a total displacement of statelessness and its meanings or affects for the subject.
James Watson then spoke about how different a national history might look if we centred it around the category of ‘health’. He sketched an early framework towards a history of health in Australia, suggesting the possibilities and limitations of this approach. Eli Branagh spoke about what Australian histories of sexuality might look like if oriented by a gay liberationist historical sensibility. He identified one possible version of this sensibility in the 1970s community newspaper series ‘Out Australian Gay Heritage’, with its anachronistic claims of same sex attracted governors and lesbian bushrangers in colonial Australia. Alison Downham Moore responded, encouraging panel members to imagine the possibilities and wider audience of their work. She reminded us that historical interpretations do not appear in a scholarly vacuum. Rather, we make historical interpretations in a world that we can and want to speak to.
Looking back
We decided to organise a symposium because we wanted to dedicate a day to thinking our way around and beyond stubborn stories of inevitable progress and justice. This is an urgent task for historians, but one that also requires enough time to be done carefully and with curiosity. The conversations we had with colleagues on the panels and in the audience have been the source of much conversation since. We only hope that those who attended the symposium shared in the positive feelings that we have enjoyed – those generated by a day of encouraging, challenging, and fulfilling conversation with generous colleagues who care deeply about the world around them.
Eli Branagh (he/him) is a PhD candidate at Macquarie University. His research concerns the politics of how social movements are memorialised and remembered. His doctoral research is a history of LGBTQ+ community archives in Australia, Canada, and Britain.
Taylah Evans (she/they) is a PhD candidate at Macquarie University. Taylah’s current research is a cultural and feminist history of Australian policewomen. More broadly, Taylah is interested in relationship between gender and surveillance throughout the twentieth century. In 2024, Taylah won the Ken Inglis Postgraduate Prize for best paper presented by a postgraduate student at the Australian Historical Conference.
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