Human Rights in Twentieth-Century Australia

Human rights in Australia have a contested and controversial history, the nature of which informs popular debates to this day.

Jon Piccini (Author)

9781108460279, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 August 2021

219 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.1 cm, 0.332 kg

'Jon Piccini's excellent history of human rights in twentieth century Australia joins a growing number of 'national human rights histories' that seek to show how domestic political and civil movements engaged with the emergent global discourse of human rights … This book, which draws on a wide range of Australian newspapers, manuscript collections, archives, and publications from a wide range of civil liberties, human rights, indigenous rights, and sectarian organizations, should appeal to historians of modern Australian politics and foreign policy, indigenous transnationalism, and human rights more generally.' Brad Simpson, Journal of Contemporary History

This groundbreaking study understands the 'long history' of human rights in Australia from the moment of their supposed invention in the 1940s to official incorporation into the Australian government bureaucracy in the 1980s. To do so, a wide cast of individuals, institutions and publics from across the political spectrum are surveyed, who translated global ideas into local settings and made meaning of a foreign discourse to suit local concerns and predilections. These individuals created new organisations to spread the message of human rights or found older institutions amenable to their newfound concerns, adopting rights language with a mixture of enthusiasm and opportunism. Governments, on the other hand, engaged with or ignored human rights as its shifting meanings, international currency and domestic reception ebbed and flowed. Finally, individuals understood and (re)translated human rights ideas throughout this period: writing letters, books or poems and sympathising in new, global ways.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: bereft of words
1. Inventing rights
2. Cold War rights
3. Experimental rights
4. Who's rights? 5. Implementing rights
Epilogue: cascade or trickle?

Subject Areas: Human rights [JPVH], Australasian & Pacific history [HBJM], History [HB]