From the Editors

This lively issue of History Australia reflects the diversity of current historical methods and preoccupations, and canvasses a wide range of issues, periods and places. The standard article section is bookended by accounts of two compelling figures: Punjabi-born Indian hawker Boota Mohamed Allam, who came to Australia in the 1890s, and philosopher Peter Singer, currently living between Melbourne and New York. Ian Simpson’s article describes both the substantial immigrant networks that enabled Allam to establish himself in business and put down roots in country New South Wales, and the delimited subject position of an Indian living much of his life under the shadow of White Australia. This biography is embedded in a broader history of Indian hawkers shaped by the material and social economies of Imperialism and modernity. Here, the global context makes sense and meaning of this previously private individual life. Gonzalo Villanueva, drawing on the National Library’s Peter Singer Archive, gives an account of this very public intellectual and his game-changing 1975 book Animal Liberation. A child of Austrian refugees, Singer has found intellectual communities in Melbourne, Oxford and beyond. In Villanueva’s account, Singer’s Oxford friends and colleagues shaped his ideas for Animal Liberation most profoundly and the transmission of these ideas across the broader English-speaking world turned him into a key figure in the international animal liberation movement.