Introduction

This is an exhibit from the students in the honours seminar HIST40030 History for Historians at the University of Melbourne in 2019. The task was to work with collections from the University of Melbourne Archives and the theme assigned was Australia and the Asia Pacific. Students were asked to think about why and in what circumstances Australians have cared about the region.This assessment task was for only 20% of their semester's assessment so it was designed as a small rather than large research project, but also as a project about communicating historical research to a broader audience in the online exhibit format using Omeka. The result you can see here is a rich diversity of projects but with perhaps two identifiable clusters – one about activists with a specific concern (nuclear testing, anti-Communism, women's welfare, and many others) and the other about travellers, whose apathy, ignorance and Orientalism but also curiosity and sense of adventure is documented in other exhibits.