Ceremonial Lives of the Nation
Webinar/Online
Ceremony is an important and public aspect of our social and political lives. This panel discussion will explore the history and contemporary significance of ceremony in three distinct arenas of Australia’s national life: citizenship, the honours system, and the swearing-in of new judges.…
Roundtable: Linking the Legacies of British Slave-ownership to Australian colonisation
Webinar/Online
Team discussion incorporating Australian team with UK partners, including Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Alan Lester. This talk is part of the Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery project, being undertaken in collaboration with the National Centre of Biography. * The talk will…
Exhibiting Slavery
Webinar/Online
Representations — and silences — relating to slavery in exhibition spaces have changed significantly over time. One of the earliest examples was the 1851 Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace. Three ‘fugitive’ enslaved African people fled the United States to London and displayed their formerly…
National Biographies and Transnational Lives
Webinar/Online
National Biographies and Transnational Lives: legacies of British slavery across the empire Britain’s involvement in the slave trade and slavery affected the lives and fortunes of many nineteenth-century immigrants to the Australian colonies. Some transferred capital directly from plantation…
Echoes of slavery in the colonisation of Western Australia’s north
Webinar/Online
As Western Australia agitated for self-government in the 1880s, its colonists were caught in a dilemma. They needed to show the Colonial Office, which had threatened to retain management of the north, that the colony effectively controlled the furthest reaches of its vast land mass and that it was…
James Stirling, first governor of Western Australia and imperial investor
Webinar/Online
Admiral James Stirling arrived on Noongar land in 1829 to proclaim it the British colony of Western Australia. Officially, he represented the British government. Unofficially, he represented the commercial interests of his family, a collection of British naval officers, East India Company…
Pastoralism, Aboriginal labour and the shift towards convict transportation in Western Australia
Webinar/Online
By the end of the 1830s, the bloody conquest of the Avon valley east of Perth was largely complete. A years-long campaign of state sanctioned violence against the Ballardong Noongar, which reached a climax in 1837, firmly established settler sovereignty over a fertile and well-watered region that…