Tiffany Shellam: Boongaree, Bundle and Migeo
Webinar/Online
Boongaree, Bundle and Migeo: Reading Indigenous lives through exploration texts Royal Navy archives have been a site of rich reward for historians keen to trace the life of an expedition, or to write a biography of a captain or senior officer. They have not often been considered as a storehouse…
AJBH vol 5 launch
Book launch
Jack Waterfod will launch issue 5 of the Australian Journal of Biography and History, a special edition in which 10 articles collectively revisit political biography in Australia by tracing new directions in its production and reception – how is it being redefined, what is its current significance…
Terry Irving: Writing the Biography of Vere Gordon Childe
Webinar/Online
I think of Marxist biography as an example of Ray Monk’s assertion that biography produces not truth but a way of seeing connections. But how does the biographer articulate the relationship between individual consciousness and social being? How does a Marxist biography differ from a ‘life and times…
Ann-Marie Priest: The Many Voices of Gwen Harwood
Webinar/Online
Ann-Marie Priest, My Tongue Is my Own: The Many Voices of Gwen Harwood Gwen Harwood was known as the trickster-poet. She was enamoured of masks and disguises, and famously used pseudonyms to confound editorial expectations. In her private life, she played many roles, from Burning Sappho to the…
Jacqueline Kent: Biography - some things they don't tell you ...
Workshop
This talk will be in two parts. Drawing on my own experience as a biographer, I’d like to go through some of the pitfalls of researching and writing biography, and offer some suggestions about dealing with them. Firstly, there’s choice of subject, which can be fraught. What happens if you discover…
Alan Roberts: William Robert Wake
Workshop
Alan Roberts — Writing the Biography of an 18th Century Church of England Clergyman: William Robert Wake The clergyman William Robert Wake (1755–1830) was not an important character in terms of the Anglican hierarchy, but the large quantity of surviving documentation enables a biographer to look…
Deep Time Dreaming: A Biographical Reflection
Webinar/Online
In 2018 I published a book on the lives and times of a handful of Australian archaeologists, including John Mulvaney, Isabel McBryde, Rhys Jones and Sylvia Hallam. The book, Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia, attempted to capture the dramatic transformations in Australian history and…