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In a wider history of domestic violence in Australia from 1850 to the present, divorce and family law have emerged as key sites for tracing what options were available for women and children fleeing violence, and what obstacles and repercussions they faced in doing so. In this article, we consider what constitutes the 'legal archive' in relation to the legibility of domestic violence across three different time periods – the colonial period, with its patchwork of divorce legislation, with a specific focus on Western Australia; the use of the ground of constructive desertion in the twentieth century until the Matrimonial Causes Act 1959 (Cth); and family law as operative from the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth) to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia, as governments urged citizens to limit their movements and socially isolate as a protective strategy, the home became a place layered with new meanings. Feminists have long challenged characterisations of the home as a sanctuary. Such characterisations and feminist claims against them took on new complexity and significance during the pandemic. This article investigates access to abortion care in South Australia under COVID-19 restrictions, as a case study of the contest over the safety of the home. It examines the pre-existing legislative requirements placed on those in need of abortion that, in the context of the pandemic and newly available access to telehealth medicine, both illuminated and increased the exceptional status of abortion as a form of healthcare and complicated the gendered meanings of safety and home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of World War Two 1.2 million people were officially labelled Displaced Persons (DPs). Stateless, or refusing to return home, the majority were resettled in other countries including Australia which, like most receiving nations, saw these refugees primarily as a labour force for post-war economic recovery and expansion. However, unlike other nations, DPs destined for Australia signed a work contract which committed them to two years of assigned labour after arrival. This paper considers two specific subsets of these DPs, the 'unsupported mothers' (single, widowed, and divorced mothers with young children) and female unaccompanied teenagers. It illuminates the intersections of gender and displacement on the labour status of female DPs in post-war Australia and traces the continuities of coerced labour in their experiences of war and migration. We argue that the early life of female DPs in Australia provides an example of a continuum of forced and coerced labour which had begun under the shadow of war in Nazi Germany and continued after migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution provides an overview of the work of three major international journals that specialise in gender history and women's history, with a particular interest in the publishing opportunities they [...]

Turning Points: Chapters in South Australian history Robert Foster and Paul Sendziuk (eds) 2012 Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 159pp, col. ill., port., 24cm, ISBN 9781743051191 (pbk) This volume of essays covers [...]

As Reeves pointed out in a recorded conversation with David Marr (Adelaide Writer's Festival Podcast, Episode 22), if Duncan had been a welder from the northern suburbs, fewer people would have cared. Tim Reeves plots the course of a watershed crime and its aftermath: The Death of Dr Duncan, by Tim Reeves, Adelaide, Wakefield Press, 2022, 246 pp., $AU32.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781743058930. That this injustice generated momentum for law reform that would eventually reach every state and territory places Duncan, as Reeves concludes, "on a pedestal that would not have been of his choosing" (188). [Extracted from the article]

This article historicises the meaning of miscarriage in twentieth century Australia. It identifies a number of crucial turning points in scientific interpretations of the causes and treatments of miscarriage that produced shifts in the communication of responsibility to women for their own pregnancy losses. It also describes the changes that a number of medical technologies, including pregnancy detection, foetal visualisation and assisted conception, have brought to bear on the pregnant and prepregnant body. These technologies proliferated a variety of forms of reproductive loss during a period in which women experienced enhanced prospects of conception, as well as foetal, infant and maternal survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]