Alison is a leading researcher in Australian Indigenous history in the twentieth century, with a focus on rights discourses, race, settler colonialism, humanitarianism and human rights. She has a BA (Hons class 1) and Diploma of Museum Studies from the University of Sydney and a PhD from UNSW. Her monograph, Just Relations. The Story of Mary Bennett's Crusade For Aboriginal Rights was published by UWA Publishing in 2015. It was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's History prize in Australian History in 2016. Her second monograph, Breaking the Silence. Aboriginal Defenders and the Settler State, 1905-1939 was published by Melbourn University Publishing in 2019. She is the co-editor of Rethinking the Racial Moment. Essays on the Colonial Encounter (Cambridge Scholars, 2012). She regularly contributes to The Conversation on matters relating to Indigenous history, governance and policy. Prior to becoming an academic she was a curator at the Justice and Police Museum in Sydney with the then NSW Historic Houses Trust which is now Museums of History NSW.

She is a CI on an ARCDP (200100714) Policy for Self-Determination: The Case Study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and is currently writing a history of the organisation.

She is the lead editor, with Christopher J. Lee, of the Routledge Handbook on Antiracism in Global Historical Perspective, (April, 2026): https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-on-Antiracism-in-Global-Historical-Perspective/Holland-Lee/p/book/9781032788531

She is on the editorial board of Black Histories: Dialogues, https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rbhi20

My key research interests are in the broad fields of twentieth century Australian and Indigenous history. I have a special interest in histories of humanitarianism and human rights with a focus on Indigenous rights and policy, race, citizenship, feminism and colonialism.

MHIS1002 - Revolutions, Nationalism and Exploitation in the Modern World, 1789-2001

MHIS2001 - Betweeen Hope and Despair. A History of Human Rights

MHIS3000 - Making History

I am happy to supervise students in the following areas:

• The historical, conceptual and intellectual underpinnings of race/racial thinking in nineteenth and twentieth century Australia;
• Human rights, including social movements, events and people;
• Nineteenth and twentieth century humanitarianism in England and Australia with a focus on Indigenous politics;
• Indigenous political history, including movements, activists, intellectual approaches in twentieth century Australia and comparatively with other settler societies;
• Histories of Indigenous policy and governance;
• Australian historiographies.