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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider the ways Port Arthur Historic Site and the Cascades Female Factory educate visitors using the often contentious and confronting histories of convictism in Australia. Design/methodology/approach The research was conducted between 2012 and 2015, and included analysis of exhibitions and education programs at the two sites, as well as interviews with core staff, and archival research. Analysis employed a methodological framework drawing on Margaret Wetherell’s (2012) notion of “affective practice”, as well as understandings of historical thinking in education developed by theorists and educators. Findings The two sites take differing approaches to educating visitors about the “uncomfortable” histories related to their heritage. Ultimately, this paper argues that the Cascades presents a greater ease with communicating the confronting aspects of the site’s history, while Port Arthur’s interpretive strategies are often focussed on countering widespread assumptions about the “darkness” and cruelty characteristic of the penal system in Australia. Overall, the analysis finds considerable potential in the “use” of confronting and contested history in teaching aimed at developing historical thought and empathy. Originality/value The research addresses an issue that is of central concern in heritage education at present – interpretations of confronting and contentious histories – and employs an innovative set of conceptual strategies and tools to gather insights of use to practitioners in heritage and education.

PurposeThe archives gathered in this collection engage in the current COVID-19 moment. They do so in order to attempt to understand it, to think and feel with others and to create a collectivity that, beyond the slogan “we are in this together”, seriously contemplates the implications of what it means to be given an opportunity to alter the course of history, to begin to learn to live and educate otherwise.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is collectively written by twelve academics in March 2020, a few weeks into the first closing down of common spaces in 2020, Victoria, Australia. Writing through and against “social isolation”, the twelve quarantine archives in this paper are all at once questions, methods, data, analysis, implications and limitations of these pandemic times and their afterlives.FindingsThese quarantine archives reveal a profound sense of dislocation, relatability and concern. Several of the findings in this piece succeed at failing to explain in generalising terms these un-new upending times and, in the process, raise more questions and propose un-named methodologies.Originality/valueIf there is anything this paper could claim as original, it would be its present ability to respond to the current times as a historical moment of intensity. At times when “isolation”, “self” and “contained” are the common terms of reference, the “collective”, “connected” and “socially engaged” nature of this paper defies those very terms. Finally, the socially transformative desire archived in each of the pieces is a form of future history-making that resists the straight order with which history is often written and made.