‘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…
‘The name of the product I tested is Life’: The Life and Poetry of Peter Porter - ‘Duelling with diffidence’
Seminar
In a time of debased international politics and media manipulation of truth, the spin-and-cant-skewering precision of poetry is more important than ever. This talk argues for a new look at Peter Porter (1929-2010), lauded Australian poet whose broad international span (poems on subjects as diverse…
Historians, Bodies and Visual Culture
Seminar
A seminar with Professor Ludmilla Jordanova In many ways, history is a field that cleaves to central themes over substantial periods of time, as is reflected in the long-standing distinction between political, economic and social history. Arguably political history generously defined still takes…
The Lethal Maternal: The Past in the Present and Future Projections
Symposium
The conviction of Kathleen Folbigg in 2003 for the manslaughter of her first infant child and the murder of three others over a ten-year period exposed her to a torrent of hatred. Tarred ‘the most hated woman in Australia’ and a ‘monstrous mother’, she became a cipher for deeply rooted feelings and…