H Forsyth
Biographic Data
| ID | 35505 |
|---|---|
| NAME | H Forsyth |
| GIVEN NAMES | H |
| FAMILY NAME | Forsyth |
| SIGNATURE | FORSYTH H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian Catholic University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1656-3807 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Historians Respond to … the Yoorrook Justice Commission
Historians respond to … The Crisis in Higher Education
Australian higher education is facing challenges unlike those that have come before. Two decades and more of exponential domestic and international enrolment growth have been disrupted by COVID-19
Introduction
Cheap labour
In this special issue we focus on the ways women’s ‘cheap labour’ – cheap in the sense that Raj Patel and Jason Moore describe capitalist exploitation of ‘cheap things’ – offered capitalist economi
Frontiers of human capital? women and the professions in the Angloworld
For Social Betterment
Introduction
Managerial Capitalism and White-Collar Professions
This article considers the interdependence of managerial capitalism with the historical constitution of professional work in Australia. Using data on the composition of the boards of Australia’s largest companies between 1910 and 2018, we show a deep connection between the managerial class and the top layers of professional hierarchies. Professionals in Australia forged a managerial-capitalist elite within large corporations, relying on a combina…
Engineers and Social Engineering
Professions like engineering were a vehicle for social mobility in Australia early in the twentieth century. By the late twentieth century, despite considerable expansions in higher education, it was much harder for young people to enter a trade and then to use their skills and experience to move into professional engineering. The shift in occupation structure in the early twentieth century, when professions – including engineering – grew rapidly…
The dice are loaded’
This article responds to debate over casualisation within the Australian Historical Association (AHA) and within the history profession in Australia more generally. It is argued that competing interests increasingly govern relations between salaried and casual academics. The article seeks to historicise these competing interests within the discipline in the history of Australian universities since the late 1980s. The authors draw on Marx’s descri…
Reconsidering Women's Role in the Professionalisation of the Economy
Scholarly histories of the professions have generally ignored the role of women in most professional work. This article uses data from the Australian Census to analyse patterns as the professions grew to occupy a significant portion of the labour force. The article discusses the strengths and limitations of the Census, especially for women. It finds a relatively high proportion of women professionals as a percentage of the female labour force thr…
No End of a Lesson
No End of a Lesson: Australia's Unified National System of Higher Education . By Stuart Macintyre, André Brett, Gwilym Croucher (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2017), pp.xii + 332. AU$49.99 (pb)
The logic of survival
Wilcannia is a small town in outback New South Wales. Settled in the mid-nineteenth century, this was a jewel of colonisation known as the ‘Queen of the Desert’. On the Darling River, it was the third largest shipping port in NSW. Large, monumental sandstone buildings are littered through the town, many crumbling, for Wilcannia has now been mostly abandoned by settler society. The town’s present population of around 600 people are mostly Barkindj…
Class, Professional Work, and the History of Capitalism in Broken Hill, c. 1880–1910
This article traces the history of the professions against their emergence in the Australian outback town of Broken Hill, where the structures of late nineteenth-century capitalism and class conflict are particularly obvious. It demonstrates the ways that capitalism fueled the professions: it needed and helped produce them, ensuring the interests of the professionals were aligned, structurally at least, with capital. But the professionals were dr…
Seeking a New Materialism in Australian History
Labour and economics are traditional strengths of Australian history, though in recent decades cultural history has instead dominated historical practice. This article discusses the relationship between the economic and cultural in Australian history, utilising our own research as case studies that explore reasons to combine the structural and discursive. Inspired by settler colonial studies and other developments internationally, we propose a ne…
Disinterested Scholars or Interested Parties? The Public’s Investment in Self-interested Universities
Expanding higher education
The history of universities in the twentieth century is, at least from the perspective of growth, a massive success. Australian higher education is no exception. Prior to the Second World War, Australia had six universities and approximately 10,500 students. Now there are in excess of one million students attending 39 institutions. In each phase of student expansion, governments have sought to make universities accessible to new segments of the c…
The Russel Ward case
Until recently, historians assumed that the 1956 ‘Ward case’, in which the historian Russel Ward was denied a lectureship at the New South Wales University of Technology (now the University of New South Wales), was an example of Cold War political repression in Australian universities. When this orthodoxy was challenged in the conservative journal Quadrant in 2004, the incident was brought to the edges of Australia’s ‘History Wars’. While it shed…
Books
John Fitzgerald reviews the book 'Australia's Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century', edited by David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, published by UWA Publishing, Perth, 2012
Making Night Hideous With their Noise’ New Year’s Eve in 1897
New Year’s Eve in Sydney is an iconic festival. It emerged with the modern city at the end of the nineteenth century. This paper uses newspaper reports to examine Sydney’s first truly urban celebration of New Year’s Eve in 1897. This one night brought together the elements of the city that the urban crowd considered worth celebrating: artificial lights, carefully measured time, commodity consumption and even the crowd itself, all things that at o…
The energy of the city
Small is big
This article traces some of the experiences and perceptions of the quality of wirelessness associated with those communication technologies whose defining (naming) characteristic is in their lack of wires. It is an essay that begins with and is written around an object that both embodied and emanated this quality of wirelessness—the 1939 AWA tower in Sydney's CBD. The tower functions as a reference point—a monument perhaps—in this essay, and some…
Seeking a New Materialism in Australian History
Labour and economics are traditional strengths of Australian history, though in recent decades cultural history has instead dominated historical practice. This article discusses the relationship between the economic and cultural in Australian history, utilising our own research as case studies that explore reasons to combine the structural and discursive. Inspired by settler colonial studies and other developments internationally, we propose a ne…
Managerial Capitalism and White-Collar Professions
This article considers the interdependence of managerial capitalism with the historical constitution of professional work in Australia. Using data on the composition of the boards of Australia’s largest companies between 1910 and 2018, we show a deep connection between the managerial class and the top layers of professional hierarchies. Professionals in Australia forged a managerial-capitalist elite within large corporations, relying on a combina…
The dice are loaded’
This article responds to debate over casualisation within the Australian Historical Association (AHA) and within the history profession in Australia more generally. It is argued that competing interests increasingly govern relations between salaried and casual academics. The article seeks to historicise these competing interests within the discipline in the history of Australian universities since the late 1980s. The authors draw on Marx’s descri…
Class, Professional Work, and the History of Capitalism in Broken Hill, c. 1880–1910
This article traces the history of the professions against their emergence in the Australian outback town of Broken Hill, where the structures of late nineteenth-century capitalism and class conflict are particularly obvious. It demonstrates the ways that capitalism fueled the professions: it needed and helped produce them, ensuring the interests of the professionals were aligned, structurally at least, with capital. But the professionals were dr…
Introduction
The energy of the city
Small is big
This article traces some of the experiences and perceptions of the quality of wirelessness associated with those communication technologies whose defining (naming) characteristic is in their lack of wires. It is an essay that begins with and is written around an object that both embodied and emanated this quality of wirelessness—the 1939 AWA tower in Sydney's CBD. The tower functions as a reference point—a monument perhaps—in this essay, and some…
The energy of the city
Making Night Hideous With their Noise’ New Year’s Eve in 1897
New Year’s Eve in Sydney is an iconic festival. It emerged with the modern city at the end of the nineteenth century. This paper uses newspaper reports to examine Sydney’s first truly urban celebration of New Year’s Eve in 1897. This one night brought together the elements of the city that the urban crowd considered worth celebrating: artificial lights, carefully measured time, commodity consumption and even the crowd itself, all things that at o…
Books
John Fitzgerald reviews the book 'Australia's Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century', edited by David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, published by UWA Publishing, Perth, 2012
The Russel Ward case
Until recently, historians assumed that the 1956 ‘Ward case’, in which the historian Russel Ward was denied a lectureship at the New South Wales University of Technology (now the University of New South Wales), was an example of Cold War political repression in Australian universities. When this orthodoxy was challenged in the conservative journal Quadrant in 2004, the incident was brought to the edges of Australia’s ‘History Wars’. While it shed…
Disinterested Scholars or Interested Parties? The Public’s Investment in Self-interested Universities
Expanding higher education
The history of universities in the twentieth century is, at least from the perspective of growth, a massive success. Australian higher education is no exception. Prior to the Second World War, Australia had six universities and approximately 10,500 students. Now there are in excess of one million students attending 39 institutions. In each phase of student expansion, governments have sought to make universities accessible to new segments of the c…
Seeking a New Materialism in Australian History
Labour and economics are traditional strengths of Australian history, though in recent decades cultural history has instead dominated historical practice. This article discusses the relationship between the economic and cultural in Australian history, utilising our own research as case studies that explore reasons to combine the structural and discursive. Inspired by settler colonial studies and other developments internationally, we propose a ne…
No End of a Lesson
No End of a Lesson: Australia's Unified National System of Higher Education . By Stuart Macintyre, André Brett, Gwilym Croucher (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2017), pp.xii + 332. AU$49.99 (pb)
The logic of survival
Wilcannia is a small town in outback New South Wales. Settled in the mid-nineteenth century, this was a jewel of colonisation known as the ‘Queen of the Desert’. On the Darling River, it was the third largest shipping port in NSW. Large, monumental sandstone buildings are littered through the town, many crumbling, for Wilcannia has now been mostly abandoned by settler society. The town’s present population of around 600 people are mostly Barkindj…
Class, Professional Work, and the History of Capitalism in Broken Hill, c. 1880–1910
This article traces the history of the professions against their emergence in the Australian outback town of Broken Hill, where the structures of late nineteenth-century capitalism and class conflict are particularly obvious. It demonstrates the ways that capitalism fueled the professions: it needed and helped produce them, ensuring the interests of the professionals were aligned, structurally at least, with capital. But the professionals were dr…
Reconsidering Women's Role in the Professionalisation of the Economy
Scholarly histories of the professions have generally ignored the role of women in most professional work. This article uses data from the Australian Census to analyse patterns as the professions grew to occupy a significant portion of the labour force. The article discusses the strengths and limitations of the Census, especially for women. It finds a relatively high proportion of women professionals as a percentage of the female labour force thr…
The dice are loaded’
This article responds to debate over casualisation within the Australian Historical Association (AHA) and within the history profession in Australia more generally. It is argued that competing interests increasingly govern relations between salaried and casual academics. The article seeks to historicise these competing interests within the discipline in the history of Australian universities since the late 1980s. The authors draw on Marx’s descri…
Introduction
Managerial Capitalism and White-Collar Professions
This article considers the interdependence of managerial capitalism with the historical constitution of professional work in Australia. Using data on the composition of the boards of Australia’s largest companies between 1910 and 2018, we show a deep connection between the managerial class and the top layers of professional hierarchies. Professionals in Australia forged a managerial-capitalist elite within large corporations, relying on a combina…
Engineers and Social Engineering
Professions like engineering were a vehicle for social mobility in Australia early in the twentieth century. By the late twentieth century, despite considerable expansions in higher education, it was much harder for young people to enter a trade and then to use their skills and experience to move into professional engineering. The shift in occupation structure in the early twentieth century, when professions – including engineering – grew rapidly…
For Social Betterment
Introduction
Cheap labour
In this special issue we focus on the ways women’s ‘cheap labour’ – cheap in the sense that Raj Patel and Jason Moore describe capitalist exploitation of ‘cheap things’ – offered capitalist economi
Frontiers of human capital? women and the professions in the Angloworld
Historians Respond to … the Yoorrook Justice Commission
Historians respond to … The Crisis in Higher Education
Australian higher education is facing challenges unlike those that have come before. Two decades and more of exponential domestic and international enrolment growth have been disrupted by COVID-19
Sociology (17 works) · Political science (12 works) · Australian History and Society (11 works) · History (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · History (8 works) · Capitalism (5 works) · Economics (5 works) · Media studies (5 works)