‘Such sweet things out of such corruptions.’ On writing the history of a twentieth-century expedition.
Seminar
June 2025 will see the publication of Martin Thomas’s Clever Men: How worlds collided on the scientific expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948, a project catalysed by the exquisite sound recordings of Aboriginal music in the ABC archives. They are among the many cultural treasures accumulated by the…
Untamed affections: contested care in settler Australian women’s interactions with native animals, 1880-1950
Seminar
In an incomplete and uneven process between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonial disdain for ‘freakish’ Australian native species gave way to affection, mythologisation, and conservationist concern. This pre-submission seminar examines the neglected roles of settler women in…
Cruelty, Coverture, and Colonial Women’s Writings: A Social and Cultural History of Domestic Violence in New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria, 1880-1914.
Seminar
Domestic violence was arguably at its most visible in colonial society by the end of the nineteenth century. As a result of developments in law and literature, as well as a growing consciousness amongst women about the unacceptability of their experiences, both colonial female writers and wives…
‘Serious and Seemingly Inherent Obstacles to Successful Judicial Biography’ in Writing Sir Gerard Brennan: The Law’s Good Servant
Seminar
Twelve years before I commenced work on a ‘judicial biography’, the US jurist Richard Posner warned that in addition to ‘all the problems of general biography’ the writer of a such a biography also faces other ‘serious and seemingly inherent obstacles,’ including:the impossibility of reliably…
Treating prejudice: Japanese doctors in a white Australia
Seminar
Next year marks the 125th anniversary of the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act and formal establishment of the ‘White Australia policy’. At least one major publication is being prepared to mark this anniversary and review diverse aspects of the stringent restrictions placed on the…
Watering the Forest: Beyond hydraulic developmentalism in the Murray Darling Basin
Seminar
In the early 1980s a new danger faced the Barmah-Millewa Forest, just upstream of Echuca on the border of Victoria and New South Wales. Bordering an 80-kilometre narrow stretch of the Murray River, this forest of river red gums and moira grass had endured decades of unseasonal water flows on…
India’s Eucalyptus Affair: Development, Environmental Management and Politics, c 1960-1990.
Seminar
Between 1960 and 1990, India developed the world’s second largest area of Eucalyptus cover. Today, however, multiple states have banned its planting and state forest departments even uproot mature trees from the roots and replant with native species.Meanwhile, in other countries, this natively…