A seminar with Professor Anna Clark

The beach figures in Indigenous archives: middens and rock art lacing Australia’s coastline reveal thousands of years of occupation and use, oral histories reach back to the beach’s earliest history, providing astonishing accounts of the inundation that marked the end of the last ice age. It was the site of the first Asian and European encounters with this continent and its First Peoples, and episodes of contact, cross-cultural exchange and violence are a vital moment of its history.

The beach has also been prominent in the changing fortunes of this continent’s settler-colonial history. It is a vast natural archive in its own right. In addition to its extensive human history, the stories of changing sands, tides, and storm surges; as well as beach worms, rock pools and nesting birds, all figure in the beach’s life story and form a vital piece of its history. The question of how to bring together the human/cultural and more-than-human history of ‘the beach’ forms the prompt for this interview, which explores environmental historical methods in Australian history.

Professor Anna Clark is an award-winning historian, author and public commentator. An internationally recognised scholar in Australian history, history education and the role of history in everyday life, Anna’s most recent books are The Catch: Australia’s Love Affair with Fishing (Penguin 2023) and Making Australian History (Penguin 2022). She is currently a Professor of History at the University of Technology Sydney.