Life in Biography: Observations on writing about lives
Seminar
In the final Biography Workshop of 2024, historian and author Eileen Chanin will discuss the slipperiness of writing about lives: the challenges, frustrations, pleasures, and results. Eileen Chanin documents lives and writes and publishes widely. She is a senior Visiting Fellow of King’s…
'All my petty schemes': The Hong Kong diaries of Chaloner Alabaster, 1855-56
Seminar
Chaloner Alabaster (later, Sir) became a Student Interpreter in the China Consular Service in 1855, aged 16. The Consular Service was established under the Treaty of Nanjing after the British victory in the First Opium War in 1843. Student Interpreters were the lowest rung on the ladder, but…
Writing Lives with Bernadette Brennan
Workshop
A Canberra Writers Festival event sponsored by the National Centre of Biography. For a biography to sing it needs to be written with energy and passion. The biographer, driven by curiosity and the desire to understand what makes their subject tick, or in Helen Vendler’s words, ‘the inner dynamic…
A Secretive Century: Monte Punshon’s Australia
Seminar
Ethel May (Monte) Punshon’s 106-year life spanned crucial events in modern Australian history. Born in 1882, she witnessed Melbourne’s 1888 Centennial Exhibition, Federation, two great depressions and two world wars. She lived to see the demise of the White Australia policy and the social…
Asia-Pacific Lives exhibition
Exhibition
In collaboration with the School of Culture, History & Language (CHL), the National Centre of Biography presents the free exhibition Asia-Pacific Lives as part of CHL's annual flagship multicultural festival and showcase program, Immersia. Drawing on the many volumes…
Shanghai Demimondaine: From Sex Worker to Society Matron
Seminar
In this Biography Workshop Nick Hordern explores the hitherto unknown life of Australian woman Lorraine Murray (1910–2000). Arriving in Shanghai in 1933, Lorraine found herself in the sex industry. In 1936 she quit the industry, but struggled to find a new path, until the American author…
Tom Wills: The Insubordinate Life of an Australian Sporting Legend
Seminar
There are many versions of the origins of our Australian game of football, but all of them include T.W. Wills in some way. A champion cricketer, he had been exposed to the game of rugby when he was at Rugby School in England. In Melbourne in 1858, with several other men, he organised the first…