Join us for a Research Roadshow of presentations that explore the History and Legacy of Violence.

Scholars from a wide range of disciplines and research specialties will combine forces to explore multiple ways of interpreting violence through its history and legacies. Public presentations will run from 9:30 AM to 12:00 PM, with a morning tea provided. A closed lunch workshop for network affiliates will follow from 12:15 to 1:30 PM.

For previous roadshows, please visit: 
https://www.thehistoryandlegaciesofviolence.com/research-roadshows

Schedule
9:15 to 9:30 – Welcome to Country (Paul House)
9:30 to 10:30 – Presentations and Discussion (Maria Nugent, Robert Cribb)
10:30 to 10:45 – Tea/coffee break
10:45 to 12:15 – Presentations and Discussion (Laura Dawes, Anna Olsen, Ruth Morgan)
12:15 to 1:30 – Closed lunch for affiliates

Session One: 9:30 to 10:30

Maria Nugent: Objects &/of violence

In March 2023 it was announced four spears taken by the Endeavour voyage from Gamay (Botany Bay) in 1770 will be returned unconditionally by Trinity College, Cambridge University (held there since 1771) to the La Perouse Aboriginal community. The four fishing spears were bound up in violence: taken in the immediate aftermath of a violent assault and out of fear they were weapons of war to be used in retaliation. Their return more than 250 years later is an act of restitution and repair, both for that violent encounter in 1770 and for the broader histories and structures of colonial violence for which it is so often seen as foundational. Using this example, as well as insights garnered from a current collaborative project with members of the La Perouse Aboriginal community on objects removed from the coastal Sydney region after 1788 and now held in British museums, the paper will consider museums’ and other cultural institutions’ confrontations and engagements with the legacies of violence (physical and epistemic) that their collections and institutional practices so often manifest.

Robert Cribb: Japanese War Crimes and the League Table of Barbarity

During the Sino-Japanese War (1937–­45) and the Pacific War (1941–45), Japanese military personnel committed many war crimes. Outside Japan, these war crimes are widely regarded as exceptional, perhaps even as exceeding those of Nazi Germany. This exceptionalism is perceived both statistically (referring to the deaths of Allied POWs and Chinese civilians) and in terms of cruelty. Close examination of the abundant record of Japanese war crimes prepared for post-war prosecution indicates, however, that many of the worst incidents were fictitious or have been exaggerated. We are left with a record of Japanese atrocity that is appalling but episodic and that corresponds rather closely with the dismal record of other combatants, including Western powers, in the global, colonial and civil wars of the 20^th century’s middle decades. The myth of Japanese exceptionalism is sustained by enduring racial indignation over the ill-treatment of Westerners and Chinese people by Japanese people whom they regarded as inferior. It is also sustained because placing wartime Japan at the head of what David Anderson has called a ‘league table of barbarity’ works to excuse everyone else.

Session Two: 10:45-12:15

Laura Dawes: “And along came DNA” – The history and legacies of the Applebee case and DNA evidence in Australian Courts

In 1989, serial offender Desmond Applebee was tried in the ACT Supreme Court on charges of unlawful assault and engaging in unconsensual sexual intercourse – rape. Applebee at first claimed he was miles away and unconscious in his car at the time of the rape. The prosecution led what was a first in Australian courts - DNA testing - to show that Applebee had been there and had sex with his victim. DNA made “I wasn’t there” no longer a tenable defence. The case provided a smooth ride to admissibility for this novel form of scientific evidence. This paper looks at how DNA evidence was explained to the court, the motivations for using it, and the challenges it presented – or ought to have presented - as an entree to examining the history and legacies of DNA evidence in Australia.

Anna Olsen: Naloxone availability in Australia: What is a life worth saving?

Naloxone (often referred to as Narcan®) reverses the respiratory depression caused by opioid overdose and has been used by medical professionals, especially in emergency medicine, for over 40 years. Advocates and researchers have argued that the drug should be made more readily available to non-medically trained people since at least the early 1990s. It was only in 

2012 that the first take-home naloxone program for people who use opioids was initiated in Canberra. Australia was late to take advantage of the life-saving possibilities afforded by take-home naloxone and is yet to show full support through a co-ordinated national approach. This presentation details the ‘story’ of take-home naloxone implementation in Australia and highlights how life (avoiding death) is embedded in policy through complex and seeming contradictory assemblages of governance. Moving this technology from the realm of medical specialists to the hands of people who inject drugs inflamed politics of agency and moral responsibility moving attention away from the social and structural reasons people die from opioid overdose.

Ruth Morgan: The rise of climate violence: Seeking justice in the climate crisis

Negotiations of the international climate regime have, since the late 1980s, been entangled in rival market and justice globalisms, and more recently, the assertion of global Indigenism. Each of these global imaginaries have found expression in the climate regime – foregrounding them shines a light on how claims about climate and climate change are very often ‘politics by other means’. This paper examines the recent genealogy of climate violence as a conceptual vehicle to advocate for the urgent transformative structural changes necessary for climate justice.