Ian Hancock: On Writing About Ainslie Gotto
Workshop
Ian Hancock will discuss the different lives and careers of Ainslie Gotto - as Prime Minister John Gorton's chief of staff, a company director with Drake International, interior designer, Liberal party activist, and major figure in the national and international Women Chiefs of Enterprise. He will…
Fighting Words
Workshop
Can a book change the world? If books were integral to the creation of the imperial global order, what role have they played in resisting that order throughout the twentieth century? To what extent have theories and movements of anti-imperial and anticolonial resistance across the planet been…
Related Histories: Studying the Family
Conference
In 2015 Graeme Davison observed that family history had emerged from the world of the ‘private hobby’ and, taking on new understandings of genealogy, memory and history, become a new ‘shared civic endeavour.’ Everywhere we see evidence of a remarkable upsurge of interest in family history as…
Karen Fox: Fame, Reputation, Significance, and Biography
Workshop
Reputations – and historians’ assessments of the significance of a life – may change over time, and can be the subject of intense conflict, as demonstrated by a range of recent controversies around the world over statues, portraits, and other modes of memorialisation. In this Biography Workshop…
Indigenous Lives and the Australian Dictionary of Biography
Lecture
It has been more that 50 years since the first volume of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) was published. Over that time the ADB has consolidated its reputation as the pre-eminent repository of Australia’s story. It charts the lives of more than 12,000 individuals who lived during the…
Katherine Aigner: Writing Uncomfortable Stories
Workshop
Katherine Aigner, a PhD student in the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at the ANU, will discuss 'How do you write uncomfortable stories?' Says Katherine: Through a biographical study of Lorraine Mafi-Williams (1940-2001), an Indigenous filmmaker, writer, actress, activist, and educator, an…
The Enigmatic Mr Deakin
Other
The private papers of Australia’s second prime minister reveal a solitary, religious character who found distasteful much of the business of politics, with its unabashed self-interest, double-dealing and mediocre intellectual levels. And yet politics is where Deakin chose to do his life’s work. In…