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The Tumblr page was established with the primary purpose of building a short, succinct, but well researched digitally accessible resource for high school students studying local history. Campbelltown was selected as my case study on the basis of two main reasons, first and foremost Campbelltown is my home suburb so therefore it was a personal preference to research my local history. Secondly Campbelltown has an interesting and rather unique story to tell, one that is worth sharing.

Another underlying reason driving my research and ultimately the main project is my personal beliefs that local history is often neglected in schools or at the very least is undervalued. Therefore it was a personal goal of mine to share some of Campbelltown’s stories. But importantly I wanted to share that had wider significance than just Campbelltown – my primary intention was to illustrate that local history isn’t confined locally, but can have broader national or even international connections and links.

The blog entries are aimed primarily towards high school students – where possible connecting activities have been attached with the purpose of eliciting deeper thinking. One example is the Appin Massacre which requires students to think deeper about frontier violence in the collective Australian memory. The blog also includes important entries on the Campbelltown Airds Historical Society and excerpts from some oral histories of society members that I personally collected. The inclusion of these two entries was twofold; first and foremost I wanted to explicitly illustrate the purpose behind the establishment of such societies, but more importantly to express through the volunteers themselves the community value of such organisations.

— MITCHELL DAVIES