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 changes which transformed the country from the 1960s to the 1980s, and she herself contributed to change in many quiet ways. She was a pioneer radio broadcaster, travelled to East Asia in the 1920s and studied Japanese language in the 1930s, before becoming a warden in a wartime internment camp for Japanese civilians. An early advocate for closer ties between Australia and Asia, she was appointed honorary ambassador for Brisbane’s EXPO 88. At the age of 103 she gained fame for speaking publicly about her lifelong love for women. This workshop presentation discusses the challenges of writing Monte Punshon’s biography, and considers the light that her long life sheds on Australia’s modern history.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor Emerita in the College of Asia and the Pacific. She has been a researcher at ANU since 1992, focusing mainly on East Asian history, and from 2013 to 2018 she held an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship. In 2013 she was awarded the Fukuoka Prize (Academic) for contributions to Asian studies. She is the author of 25 non-fiction books, including The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History; Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War; Japan’s Living Politics: Grassroots Action and the Crises of Democracy; and On the Frontiers of History: Rethinking East Asian Borders. She has also published two historical novels, The Searcher and The Lantern Boats.