Forty Years since First Contact: Revisiting the classic documentary by Bob Connolly and the late Robin Anderson, in conversation with Professor Martin Thomas
Seminar
First Contact (1983) is the Oscar-nominated documentary about the Leahy brothers, gold-hungry Queenslanders who explored New Guinea in the 1930s. Armed with guns and trade goods, they were typical colonials in search of El Dorado. But in one way they were different: they travelled with a movie…
The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1970
Seminar
In this presentation, Christopher Ewing argues that racism was constitutive of queer, German politics in the aftermath of gay liberation. At the same time, importance of racism to queer politics cannot—and should not—be understood without also attending to antiracism. Racist and antiracist politics…
Environmental Exchanges Seminar - Lianne Leddy
Seminar
This semester, the Centre for Environmental History's Environmental Exchanges seminar series will include four fantastic papers from a diverse group of historians on the theme 'extraction'. All seminars will be held both in person, and online (Zoom links will be provided via Eventbrite or email…
Protesting School Access for First Nations Communities, 1900s-1950s
Seminar
Schooling today, as in the past, is a central site of protest and struggle for First Nations self-determination and justice. First Nations’ leaders have repeatedly identified Australia’s schooling system as a root cause of failed social transformation. As scholars of contemporary Indigenous…
Fibro Modernity: Life and Death in an Asbestos Australia
Seminar
In the first few decades after World War II, Australia embraced asbestos as an essential ingredient of Post-War Reconstruction and suburban modernity. The legacy of this development is one of the highest rates of mesothelioma in the world and a lingering anxiety of our built environment. Since the…
The Fin de Siècle Imagination in Australia, 1890-1914, using biographical microhistories to explore this era
Seminar
Abstract TBA about a week prior to the seminar.
Philip Payton - D.H. Lawrence and Cornwall: In Search of Utopia
Workshop
This talk is based on my forthcoming biographical study D.H. Lawrence and Cornwall: In Search of Utopia, to be published shortly by University of Exeter Press. The story is this: Increasingly disillusioned with English industrial-urban society, an alienation exacerbated by the outbreak of the…