As one of three historians currently developing a national history of domestic violence from 1788 to the present, the question of the ‘scale of history’ is a loaded one. Domestic violence occurs in the most intimate of contexts, yet is also recognised as a cross-cultural, transhistorical phenomenon, as old as patriarchy itself – even if the ‘problem’ was only named as such in the mid-1970s. To propose a national history is therefore to reckon with all of the above within a national frame that begins with the foundational violence of settler colonialism.

 In this paper, and the ones that follow, we ponder the ‘scale’ of domestic violence as a topic of historical inquiry by tracing the development of historiography since the early 1970s. I begin with the early texts which emerged as part of transnational second wave feminism. In Australia, these included early works by historians Judith Allen and Kay Saunders. Elsewhere, it was activists who disseminated the first books on the topic in which bold yet (to contemporary eyes) crude historical explanations were advanced. Via the theme of ‘scale’, I ask: what can we learn from these early historical treatments of domestic violence?