The gains, then, seem very clear. As historians we all belong and have obligations to an international interpretative historical community as well as to our own societies. Taking a transnational approach enables us to take fuller advantage of the insights of this world of international professional scholarship. We can trace connections between people, ideas, and political movements that are lost to vision when a firmly national framework is held in place. These possibilities seem to be especially important in the study of movements protesting against racial inequality and exploitation. John Maynard’s chapter, for example, demonstrates hitherto little-known links between Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association and Aboriginal political struggles in New South Wales in the early decades of the twentieth century. In our own recent research, we have both independently found that connections between Black civil rights movements in the United States and campaigns for Aboriginal rights in Australia are important to understanding the latter’s political dynamics. A transnational perspective offers insight into the interconnectedness of political movements and ideas.

In Marilyn’s research for her biographical study of Faith Bandler, one of the leading campaigners for the 1967 Referendum on Aboriginal citizenship, it became clear that Faith’s Pacific Islander family’s strong identification with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and with cultural heroes, such as the singer Paul Robeson encouraged her to take a stand against racial discrimination and segregation in Australia. Inspiration came from many quarters. In 1951 as a delegate to the Youth Cultural Congress in Berlin and a member of the Margaret Walker Dance Company, Faith performed the lead part in ‘The Dance of the Little Aboriginal Girl’, a ballet which (despite its name) was based on a Black American poem, ‘The Merry-Go Round’, written by Harlem Renaissance poet, Langston Hughes, to combat racial prejudice in the playgrounds of the South. When Faith first spoke at a public meeting in Sydney in the early 1950s, it was in protest at the gaoling in the United States of the left-wing writer and suspected Communist Howard Fast, whose novel Freedom Road, a tribute to the Black freedom ushered in by Radical Reconstruction after the Civil War, was based on W. E. B. Du Bois’ historical study, Black Reconstruction. Faith endorsed their ideal of Blacks and Whites living and working together and espoused it in subsequent life-long campaigns for Aboriginal rights in Australia, and in her work for the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, that culminated in the passage of the 1967 referendum.^[18]

Ann’s book on the Australian Freedom Ride of 1965, published in the same year, 2002, was initially conceived as a national, or even local, history project. Her aim was to explore a very specific political movement – its antecedents, multiple character, tensions, and effects. The Freedom Ride was a two week event in which university students, mainly non-Indigenous but with an Indigenous leader, Charles Perkins, travelled around country towns in New South Wales protesting against discrimination against Indigenous people. In the ensuing public debate, urban public knowledge of racial discrimination grew, some soul-searching went on in the country towns, racial segregation was challenged and in some cases ended, and alternative ideas of inclusion, equality, and full citizenship rights were much debated. Along with many other events and campaigns, the Freedom Ride contributed to the holding and passing of the referendum of 1967.

Freedom Ride was conceived around the time of the Bicentennial of the British colonisation of Australia, in 1988, that key moment when debate over Aboriginal history emerged as significant in national public discourse. It was researched in the 1990s as national public discourse dealt successively with a series of major issues concerning Indigenous people and Indigenous rights: the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Police Custody of 1991, the Mabo decision of 1992, Native Title legislation in 1993, the Wik decision of 1996, and the Stolen Generations report of 1997. It was written in 2001, in the contexts of the History Wars over frontier violence and the rapid growth of an anti-Aboriginal rights agenda within national politics and discourse.

But in the research and writing, the question of the international context of the Australian Freedom Ride was always an issue. In particular, Ann was aware, having been a participant, of the importance of the influence of the United States Civil Rights movement, and to a lesser extent of the context of worldwide adjustment to decolonisation in Africa and Asia. As she researched the book she delved further into the question of the influence of American developments, tracing the Australian students’ awareness of the United States Freedom Rides of 1961, of Martin Luther King’s ideas of non-violence, and so on. Research explored the Australian press coverage of the United States Civil Rights movement, and interviews with former Freedom Riders elicited further information. When asked what influenced their thinking on racial issues, a significant number mentioned African American influences – Paul Robeson’s visit to Australia in 1960 when they were teenagers, the press images of dogs and hoses being directed at children in Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in Washington, August 1963, and so forth.

But there was always a worry about stressing United States influence, about any suggestions that these movements were ‘mere imitations’, slavish copies of movements that originated elsewhere. There was also the fear of a radical nationalist response: in stressing United States influences you are demeaning what we did, you are reducing us to mere imitators of United States forms of activism. And indeed, if national political movements are understood purely in terms of overseas influences and connections, then it is true, one does lose the sense of the distinctiveness of the political movement in its particular Australian context. One reaches the point where one is asked, as Ann was recently by a visiting American historian, ‘where did the idea for the Tent Embassy come from? I can’t think of anything like that in the US’. Allied with this desire not to drown Australian history in an ocean of overseas influence was the aim to write Australian history as a story important in itself, and not merely as an epiphenomenon of events elsewhere. This desire has been important in Australian historiography since the 1970s, as historians reacted against earlier views of Australian history as purely a product of British history, the transplantation of British people in a distant and alien land.

In thinking about ways in which to conceptualise outside influences on national histories, we found an article by Sean Scalmer to be especially helpful. Entitled ‘Translating Contention: Culture, History, and the Circulation of Collective Action’,^[19] it treats the Freedom Ride as an example of the active connection, translation, and circulation between local movements and societies. He replaces the idea of imitation with the concepts of networks and circulation. Borrowing is never mere imitation, he suggests, as local movements select only those actions from elsewhere that fit their own normative standards and which have been made meaningful in local discursive and political frameworks. This is a useful way of emphasising the power of the local as well as the importance of the global. And it is also helpful in making sense of the circulation of technologies such as the literacy test, used by self-styled white men’s countries at the end of the nineteenth century as an instrument of racial exclusion, the subject of Marilyn’s chapter in this volume. As it moved between the United States, South Africa and Australia, the literacy test changed its form from the requirement to write one’s name, to fill out a form in English, to understanding the constitution, to writing out, at dictation, a passage of fifty words in a European language. The test changed as the people targeted for exclusion changed, from Blacks, to Italians, to Indians to Japanese.