Apartheid’s Baboons: how the state weaponised animal bodies
Seminar
There is a forgotten archive of the dying days of a white supremacist regime. In 1997, the Apartheid-era covert bio-chemical warfare program was exposed, after a top agent was arrested and classified files revealed. These files and subsequent revelations allow us to reconstruct this clandestine…
Self-Interest & Morality: Adam Smith and the Moral Problem of Selfishness in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Seminar
The tension between self-interest and morality is one of the strongest and longest-running themes in Western philosophy. It rests on the question of how far, if at all, it is morally permissible to be selfish. Debates about the moral status of self-interest came to a head in the eighteenth century…
A Secretive Century: Monte Punshon’s Australia
Seminar
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…
Ancestor’s Words: Noongar letter writing in government archives, 1860-1960
Seminar
Colonial archives are being transformed into sites of Indigenous cultural revitalisation. The project ‘Ancestors’ Words: Noongar letter writing in government archives, 1860-1960’ seeks to renew Noongar storytelling about who we are and where we come from by returning letters written by Noongar…
‘My handsome, kind, gentle, treasure of a son - and yours too’: Anne Deveson, motherhood and mental health advocacy in late twentieth century Australia
Seminar
Released in 1991, Anne Deveson’s powerful memoir Tell Me I’m Here remains a landmark examination of the experience of mental illness in Australia. Deveson offered a candid account of her eldest son Jonathan's experience with schizophrenia, her family’s attempts to weather the storms of his illness…
Asia-Pacific Lives exhibition
Exhibition
In collaboration with the School of Culture, History & Language (CHL), the National Centre of Biography presents the free exhibition Asia-Pacific Lives as part of CHL's annual flagship multicultural festival and showcase program, Immersia. Drawing on the many volumes…
Shanghai Demimondaine: From Sex Worker to Society Matron
Seminar
In this Biography Workshop Nick Hordern explores the hitherto unknown life of Australian woman Lorraine Murray (1910–2000). Arriving in Shanghai in 1933, Lorraine found herself in the sex industry. In 1936 she quit the industry, but struggled to find a new path, until the American author…