Philip Payton - D.H. Lawrence and Cornwall: In Search of Utopia
Workshop
This talk is based on my forthcoming biographical study D.H. Lawrence and Cornwall: In Search of Utopia, to be published shortly by University of Exeter Press. The story is this: Increasingly disillusioned with English industrial-urban society, an alienation exacerbated by the outbreak of the…
Alison Bashford: Writing a Family History of Evolution
Workshop
An Intimate History of Evolution (Allen Lane, 2022) is a history of evolutionary ideas told through one family, the Huxleys. It is, at core, a double biography of Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s nineteenth century “bulldog” and his grandson, Julian Huxley. I will discuss how I consider them “one very…
Our stories: Biography Book Group - Our Mothers with Robbie Henderson & Louise Moran.
Seminar
Robbie Henderson has worked as a teacher, a biochemist, a political activist and a feminist activist in Australia and the United Kingdom culminating in her election as a member of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Legislative Assembly. She spent thirty years working in both government…
Parliamentary Library seminar: the art of writing political biographies
Seminar
With a history that goes back to Plutarch, the political biography is an enduring genre and a favourite for those interested in political leadership but also as a frame to understand the history and society of a particular time. In this seminar, we look inside the art of writing these biographies…
Monique Rooney - “Inky Comradeship:” Writing, Mutual Help and the Marriage of Ruth Park and D’Arcy Niland
Webinar/Online
**PLEASE NOTE: THE WORKSHOP IS BEGINNING HALF AN HOUR EARLIER (10.30am AND ENDING AT NOON) DUE TO ANU INDUSTRIAL ACTION** In a 1939 letter addressed to Australian writer D’Arcy Niland, New Zealand born author Ruth Park wrote that he was the only person that she had met who did not think women “…
Mélanie Méthot — Beyond the Scandals: Annie Holt and her Matrimonial Agency
Seminar
The press coverage Holt’s Matrimonial Agency received; its extensive publicity budget combined with the numerous personal advertisements they published in Australian newspapers made Holt’s a household name. Benefitting from a corpus of nearly 1000 articles dealing with the agency or its owners, I…
Convict Lives: Biography in a Digital Age Symposium
Symposium
Australia’s convicts are the subject of enduring fascination. Their lives, among the best documented of people of their class in history, have piqued the interest of academic, local and family historians alike for generations. How we research and understand these lives is undergoing a profound…