The enthusiasm for transnational history often expresses something of the character of the national histories against which it is rebelling. If the United States interest was prompted by an objection to United States exceptionalism and the British interest by a return to the vexed question of the imperial past, the Australian version has been influenced by a desire to break out of historiographical marginality and isolation.

It is perhaps significant that this collection is edited by two historians who have both worked in the fields of Australian feminist history and race relations history, each of which has been a prime site for the development of more transnational approaches. Feminist history has long been more internationalist in its approach than many other fields of history, as the common project of studying women’s history and developing gendered perspectives on the past generally has led feminist historians into international conversations even while structuring their own histories within fairly conventional national boundaries. The tri-annual Berkshire Conferences on Women’s History and the International Federation of Research into Women’s History have both been important sites for this international exchange. The practice of contributing national studies to multi-authored international collections of essays on a common theme, a kind of half-way house on the way to transnationalising history, is particularly evident in feminist historical scholarship.^[25] Race relations history has also been in the forefront of new developments in transnational history.

Despite their inherent cross-cultural and crossing-borders character, studies of race relations have too often, however, been narrowly and nationally focused, as Mary Dudziak has observed for the United States.^[26] There is a growing body of work which attempts to compare not only the race-based political movements discussed earlier, but also the transnational character of racial thinking and racial policies. Patrick Wolfe, for example, has explored racial thinking in Australia, the United States, and elsewhere, while Marilyn Lake is engaged in exploring the transnational dynamics of the formation of self-styled ‘white men’s countries’.^[27]

It isn’t only feminist and race relations historians who have sought to go beyond national boundaries. In the case of Australian historiography, Donald Denoon, with various collaborators, has long sought to place Australian history within Pacific regional history.^[28] Historians of convict transportation, exemplified in this volume by Emma Christopher, have begun to insist that their subjects cannot be understood within the narrow confines of an Australian historiography.^[29] David Goodman has compared the gold rush experience in Victoria and California and Kirsten McKenzie the history of scandal in Sydney and Cape Town.^[30] Ian Tyrrell has compared environmental reform movements in Australia and California while Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin have brought together environmental historians of a number of settler societies.^[31] This volume seeks to add significantly to this growing body of work, even as we recognise the continuing importance of engaging a local audience and joining local debates about Australian historical experience, values and traditions.