Unmuting the Past: Sound-led Creative Practice and the Colonial Legacy of the Silent Expeditionary Film
Seminar
Between the birth of cinema and the post WWII era, expedition (or ‘travel’) films made in the Australian colonies were shot silent and are missing an important dimension and voice. Many of these films reflect a colonial gaze, laying claim to place through their visual construction, and exhibited to…
Welsh Poetry and English Politics: Edward IV and William Herbert (d. 1469)
Seminar
Why is Wales important to historians of medieval England? Through a case study of the Welsh Marcher lord, Sir William Herbert, first Earl of Pembroke, this paper aims to show that the political history of England cannot be fully understood without a consideration of power relations in Wales and the…
EP Thompson at 100: History, Law, Politics
Seminar
EP Thompson (1924-1993) was one of the great British historians of the past century. His work reshaped our thinking about the relationship between law and society. His classic texts, such as The Making of the English Working Class and Whigs and Hunters not only transformed eighteenth- and…
‘But Golden Dreams’: William Dampier’s Narrative of Depletion
Seminar
When we think about 17th and 18th-century pirates, we think about dynamics of accumulation: Plundered ships, colonial violence, commercial aggression, ruthless acquisition. Historians have emphasized the role that piracy played in British expansion in the early eighteenth century, as…
The Beach as Archive: contemplating histories in landscape and culture.
Seminar
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…
Tom Wills: The Insubordinate Life of an Australian Sporting Legend
Seminar
There are many versions of the origins of our Australian game of football, but all of them include T.W. Wills in some way. A champion cricketer, he had been exposed to the game of rugby when he was at Rugby School in England. In Melbourne in 1858, with several other men, he organised the first…
What is History in a Settler Colonial Society? Mapping the limits and possibilities of ethical historiography
Lecture
In his 1995 study of history, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot insisted on the need to recognise the discipline’s power to curate and control. Critical, structural analysis of history-making would expose not only the past under examination, he…