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In 2009 Rachel was awarded a PhD in the field of Aboriginal and M??ori history in the early imperial period of Australia and New Zealand between 1769 and 1840, which she undertook at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Rachel’s Masters thesis, undertaken at ANU, analysed the construction of race by white Australians in postwar Australian history, looking at representations of Aboriginal people and immigrants.

In addition to her academic work, Rachel has experience as a researcher and policy officer, particularly in the field of public policy and Indigenous rights, where she was employed in the area of human rights and international activism at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and as a researcher in women’s, welfare and regional student issues at the National Union of Students. Rachel has also worked as a project officer on strategic learning and teaching projects at Victoria University in Melbourne.

Research

Rachel is currently in the initial stages of a new research project in the history of the Protectorate system in Port Phillip and New Zealand which operated in the 1840s. She holds the 2010 C.H. Currey Memorial Fellowship at the State Library of New South Wales to conduct research into the papers of William Thomas, one of the first Protectors of Aborigines in Victoria.

Publications

• 2010. "'These unoffending people': David Collins’s Account of the English Colony in New South Wales and indigenous history", in Ann Curthoys, John Docker and Frances Peters-Little (eds), Myth, memory and indigenous history, Aboriginal History Monograph Number 23, ANU e Press.
• 2008. "Violence and the Intimacy of Imperial Ethnography: The Endeavour in the Pacific" in Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne (eds), Moving Subjects: Mobility, Intimacy and Gender in a Global Age of Empire, University of Illinois Press.
• 2007. "'A remarkably tolerant nation'?: Constructions of benign whiteness in Australian political discourse", in Damien W. Riggs (ed), Taking up the Challenge: Critical Race and Whiteness Studies in a Postcolonising Nation, Crawford House Publishing.
• "'A remarkably tolerant nation'?: Constructions of benign whiteness in Australian Political Discourse", in the Borderlands e-journal, Volume 3, Number 2, 2004. Read the article
• 2007. "Humanity, Compassion and Prudent Control: Remembering Vietnamese Boat People", Australian Studies, Vol. 20.
• 2004. Review of JV D’Cruz and William Steele, "Australia's Ambivalence Towards Asia: Politics, Neo/Post-Colonialism and Fact/Fiction", in the New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, volume 6, number 1.