Professor Michelle Arrow
Affiliation: Monash University
Discipline: History, heritage and archaeology
Year elected: 2023
What initially drew you to your field of study?
I think I first became interested in history from observing the ways that my grandparents were profoundly shaped by their experiences during the Great Depression: they saved string and bits of brown paper and never threw anything away until they had tried repairing it first. To a child growing up in the consumerist 1980s, their experiences were worlds away from my own, but apart from a few stories about trapping rabbits and going on the road as a ‘swaggie’, I never got their full stories. Later as an undergraduate I read Janet McCalman’s Struggletown, about working class life in Richmond, Melbourne and I began to understand how that kind of poverty might have felt, and how it marked their lives. That desire to understand the past has driven my love of history ever since.
Tell us about a recent moment of motivation or inspiration?
One of the hats I wear is the co-managing editor of the long-running feminist history journal Lilith, which is run by a student collective. Meeting with this group of generous, funny and impassioned scholars each month to work on the journal is always inspiring.
What should your field of study be doing more of right now?
With right wing, populist and white nationalist political movements on the rise worldwide, we need more histories of Australian conservative and right-wing political and social movements. It’s a significant gap in Australian historiography compared to the US, for example.
What question or issue, in your field, keeps you awake at night?
The punitively high cost of studying history at university imposed by the failed Job-Ready Graduates policy.
Where is your ‘happy’ place?
This is an easy one: in the special collections reading room of the National library.