This article reviews histories of child sexual abuse in Australia. While it is national in its focus, the historical problems, methods, and approaches explored here resonate globally, especially in the Anglosphere. Given the transnational dimensions of sex and gender politics, child welfare and protection, and the development of common law, any local historiographic survey is best located within the international context. This article argues that defining and interpreting sex with children is a significant problem in the historical literature. The cleavage between constructions of innocence and paradigms of abuse remains prominent in contemporary scholarship although assimilating these schools of thought is neither feasible nor fruitful. The first part of this article explores the feminist rediscovery of child sexual abuse in the late twentieth century, considering the extent to which the problem had been earlier erased from the public domain. Paying particular attention to law and socio-legal histories, it investigates definitional problems around children and crime, and examines how the criminal justice system and media have been used to recover histories of abuse.

Courts martial were as ubiquitous in the experience of World War I as criminal courts in civil life, yet they remain largely neglected in the Australian war historiography. Their remarkable evidentiary record, transmitted from the field of battle into the custody of the Attorney-General, has been used to highlight wartime dimensions of individual character and collective discipline. In this article, we review the uses of the courts martial in those respects.We note the significance of Australian exceptionalism in this military domain, and consider the potential of an approach that treats the court martial as a legal event.Australians serving abroad in World War I as part of the British Imperial forces were in a privileged position. Frequently criticised for their indiscipline, Australian soldiers were immune from the death penalty, even where the sentence was awarded at court martial for offences under the Army Act, including mutiny, desertion and treating with the enemy. 1 Immunity followed from the Commonwealth government's insistence that Australian soldiers serving in the British Army would be subject to the Imperial Army Act, except when this was inconsistent with the Defence Act 1903. That legislation not only restricted the number of offences for which the death penalty might be applied, but made execution dependent on the approval of the Governor-General, effectively subjecting that decision to the advice of We would like to thank Lee Butterworth for research assistance; Tim Sherratt (University of Canberra) for his expertise and generosity in sharing the archive metadata that got us started; and

Family and local community historians have always made use of criminal justice records. Increasingly available as digital files, these documents are accessible to anyone with access to an internet-linked computer or even smartphone. In many cases, the fragmented nature of these records means their richness remains a potential rather than reality. The Prosecution Project1links these records as a large-scale Australian exercise in unlocking the criminal justice records of all the states. We seek to digitise and eventually make publicly accessible the records of the criminal courts, documenting not only the names of the accused but of magistrates, judges, lawyers, police and victims and other witnesses. The project is a significant collaboration between university researchers and a large and growing community of volunteers. This paper outlines what the project is doing, how we are doing it and illustrates its potential use for family and local historians interested in Australia's past.

Dropsy is a puff. It is not the first time he has done it. I can bring a witness who will swear that he got ten bob from a black fellow that stuffed him. I knew what he wanted when he went up the stairs so I followed him … there are plenty of others in Brisbane who do it besides us mob, so I am not the first.— Conversation between Albert McNamara and Police Constable Lipp, Brisbane, 1905

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