Idling in Green Places
Workshop
Idling in Green Places: Or Pinning Down a Naturalist Alec Chisholm (1890-1977) was a self-educated polymath of a kind that has since vanished from Australia’s public life. Renowned first for his lushly Romantic writings on nature, he went on to win accolades that made him a household name in the…
ADB Volume 19 Book Launch
Book launch
Volume 19 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography contains 680 concise biographies of individuals who died between 1991 and 1995. The first of two volumes for the 1990s, it presents a colourful montage of late twentieth-century Australian life, containing the biographies of significant and…
‘I am not a Kanaka or a N____’
Webinar/Online
‘I am not a Kanaka or a N____’: slave pasts and kidnapped men in the Pacific Albert Messiah, alias Arthur Fredrick Augustus Plantagenet Messiah, is an enigma, yet somebody that history records enough about to beg many questions and reveal some answers about slavery and associated questions of…
(Western) Australian Legacies of British Slavery
Webinar/Online
The celebration of British abolition has overshadowed memories of the country’s long prior history as the world’s leading slave-trading nation. In August 1833 British Parliament abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape. In place of slavery the negotiated settlement…
'Now is the psychological moment'–Earle Page and the imagining of Australia
Lecture
Earle Page (1880–1961) was Australia’s 11th Prime Minister and served for only 19 days after the death of Joseph Lyons. He was also a surgeon, Country Party leader and treasurer. Over decades, he made determined efforts to seize ‘the psychological moment’ and pursue his vision of a decentralised…
Sharing Pacific Lives in Australia
Workshop
The Australian Dictionary of Biography’s Oceania Working Party is holding its first workshop for 2021 on 'Sharing Pacific Lives in Australia'. The three-hour session will begin with a keynote from Tolaiartist Lisa Hilli who will outline her critical and creative work in telling the stories of…
In Pursuit of the Red Witch: Revising the Mythologies of Katharine Susannah Prichard
Webinar/Online
Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883-1969) wrote thirteen novels chronicling communities and industries around Australia, including the landmarks Working Bullocks (1926) and Coonardoo (1929). In writing the first biography of Prichard since her son’s account in 1975, part of the biographer’s task is…