Political historians traditionally privileged the political activities of men and masculine political institutions. This vision of political history was revised from the early 1970s, first by “women's history” and later due to the influence of the “gender turn”. The latter encompassed a recognition that conceptions of masculinity and femininity contribute to the shaping of political power. Both developments challenged but ultimately reinvigorated political history. However, as this article will argue, political history and feminist history remain to an extent quarantined from one another, despite the radical potential for feminist scholarship to change the way politics is conceived.

This paper brings historical perspectives to bear on the ambivalent and contradictory position of adoption in Australian public policy. It examines the divergent histories of Australian domestic and intercountry adoption (ICA) since the mid-1970s and the impact of these histories on adoption policy in Australia. It identifies tendencies in contemporary ICA to repeat elements of pre-reform era domestic adoption. In particular, it is argued that the resistance of ICA to the move to openness in local adoption has been an unacknowledged driver of ICA for many Australian families. We offer corrective readings of the rise of ICA in relation to domestic adoption and conclude by offering alternatives for adoption policy which better align the two kinds of adoption, focusing on the needs of children, as distinct from the desires of adults.

This article seeks to understand, in historical and international perspective, recent governmental initiatives that aim to reinstate adoption as a viable policy option for the care and placement of children in Australia, with reference to two recent reports of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Human and Family Services, Overseas Adoption in Australia: Report of the Inquiry into Adoption of Children from Overseas (2005), and The Winnable War on Drugs: The Impact of Illicit Drug Use on Families (2007) which raises adoption as a policy option for children of drug‐addicted parents. These reports appear to signal a discursive shift away from the anti‐adoption attitudes that have characterised the post‐1970s period in response to the Stolen Generations and other past adoption practices. It is argued that this change can be understood as having been pushed to the fore by the conservative family policy of the Howard era and further fostered by international trends in adoption policy.

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