Hello, I am pleased to be able to register to the Trace site. I was invited to register after emailing Professor Paul Yachnin at McGill University about an opportunity to set-up an Australian TRaCE project to link up with the methodology and comparative data sharing from the Canadian TRaCE Project.

I am involved with the Professional Historians Australia Inc. and the Professional Historians Association (Queensland) Inc. where a fair number of Ph.D. history graduates (including a number who have done post-doc work with a university) have found a career; that is, those who have a private history consultancy and those who are employed by (usually) a governmental unit to do some kind of professional history (in many cases, heritage).

Myself and a number of colleagues are concerned that we need to trace our history higher degree holders locally and across the country (Australia). For 25 years, we have been faced with a niche market where the potential contractors/clients did not understand professional history, and worse, had no idea of its existence. We have been battling to educate the public that history really is not memoir, and nor is it the hobby of oral, family and land/property histories. We do, in fact, have oral historians, genealogists, biographers, and native title researchers among our professional ranks, but their work can not be mistaken for the musings of retirees. The history we do is the disciplinary training we undertook in our higher degree. From this description, you will see our interest in more than Ph.D. holders. Our memberships also includes honours students, Graduate Diploma holders in the field of history or related fields, and Master of Arts in history or related field. Our preference is for those who have obtained or working towards a Research Higher Degree in the history discipline, but what we require is the demonstration of the discipline standards in the practice of history.

Nevertheless, it is the Ph.D. holders among our ranks who are expected to demonstrated leadership in the professional history market. I have a Ph.D. in history from the University of Queensland (1995). I also undertook afterwards a graduate diploma in philosophy at the University of Melbourne to re-skill and greatly improve my work in the areas of intellectual history, the history of religion and unbelief or skepticism, and educationalist history. All of these areas are part of what I do as a professional historian in the market, outside of academia. I and my fellow PHA members are also doing more Queensland and local history than the very few academic historians left in our Queensland universities.

There is also another motivation for me to get involved in a possible Australian TRaCE project. When I finished my history Ph.D. in 1995 I was sidelined into higher education research. I was employed as the speechwriter and researcher for three Vice-Chancellors at the University of Melbourne, and started as a Research Assistant for the Vice Chancellor at Griffith University in 1998. The experience had put me a good position to understand what has been happening to Ph.D. graduates as humanities researchers in the quarter century. At the University of Melbourne, the academic staff in the world-renowned Department of Philosophy was halved. At the University of Queensland, an academic staff, including sessionals, was reduced from around 30-40 to about three or four appointments for history.

In 2011, when I started back into professional history, I began a small project on research higher degrees in the discipline of history from Queensland universities 1960 to 2009. It was evidence of a ‘humanities crisis’ if the decline in the number of theses being produced and the diversity of topic covered matters.

I am currently researching the history discipline at the University of Queensland, which goes back to undergraduate teaching in 1911, and its first higher degree candidates in the 1960s. I am trying to also get a handle on public historiography in the state. The history of our history discipline, on one level, has been a battle between academic historians, who generally were sidelined, and amateur historians who had the political hold on conservative local history societies. With that background, labour historians, gender historians, frontier conflict historians, have built a reputation in Queensland from the 1970s, through into the 1980s, and a reputation broadly across the discipline for Australia. Since the early 1990s things have gone a bit crazy. Oral history, family history, and property history has been boasted by an amateur market. There are a number of professional historians who are happy to work in these fields but it is very frustrating for social historians, and social historians across most political, ideological, or philosophical views. The trend in oral history, family history, and property history is solipsistic. The point here is that its very difficult for Ph.D. holders who are committed to social history in the midst of the self-obsessed push that exist in the areas of market demand.

That would give you a good background to our need to explore an Australian TRaCE project. So, I am ready to learn how it has been done in Canada, and how it can be organised in Australia.

Kind regards, and thanks for listening, Neville.