Professor Anna Clark (UTS) delivered the 2024 Allan Martin lecture on 23 July. She is a leading Australian historian, and author of Teaching the Nation: Politics and Pedagogy in Australian History (2006), History’s Children: History Wars in the Classroom (2008), Private Lives, Public History (2016), Making Australian History (2022) and The Catch: Australia’s Love Affair with Fishing (2023).

Her lecture challenged historians to think about the history of History within a settler-colony like Australia, and the ethical and moral arguments for addressing and expanding its limits. In the wake of the Uluru Statement from the Heart and its call for truth-telling, Anna pressed home the need for a reckoning with the complicity of History as silencing as much as revealing truths about Australia’s past, and as a necessary precondition for expanding and re-imagining how History is practiced here.

During her visit to the ANU, Professor Anna Clark also participated in two workshops organised by the School of History.

The Allan Martin is an Annual Lecture hosted by the School of History. It has been running for 20 years, first established through a generous endowment by Professor Beryl Rawson, Allan Martin’s widow. Our goal for the event is to draw together the broader History community to recapture and celebrate the qualities that Allan Martin epitomised as a scholar and a person. He was a generous supervisor and mentor, a kind and self-effacing man, and an excellent scholar who was one of the first three doctoral students in History at ANU. He is known for his magisterial biographies of Henry Parkes and Robert Menzies.