In Conversation with Kerrie Davies at Harry Hartog
Book launch
This event is hosted by Harry Hartog ANU in conjunction with the National Centre of BiographyOn 14 July Dr Kerrie Davies will be in conversation with Dr Michelle Staff on Davies' new book, Miles Franklin Undercover: The little-known years when she created her own brilliant career (Allen…
‘Reading biographies to overcome loneliness’: Reflections of an accidental biographer
Seminar
Frank Moorhouse (1938–2022) is best known as a writer of literary fiction. All of his fiction is connected, with his many books sharing characters and experiences, including across generations, and covering much of the 20th century: one of the most sustained feats of the imagination in Australia’s…
Women at the edge of the world: human extinction discourse history and historiography
Seminar
The concept of human extinction in European discourse simultaneously invokes a universal 'we' while delineating exclusive 'others'—notably dying races, languages, and tribes—exposing a paradox rooted in Enlightenment thought, colonialism, and scientific rationalism. This presentation critically…
2025 ANU Archives Annual Lecture
Seminar
Professor Croft will draw on her engagement with archives and understanding of personal and family history in her story of the long journeys of ‘Handsome’ Joe Croft – the sobriquet shared by her grandfather and father. The place of archives held in the Noel Butlin Archives Centre at ANU from…
‘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…