Making Public Histories - Institute for Public History

Thursday 26 April 2012 - 5:30pm

The Anzac Centenaries: the challenge of making thoughtful histories

Amidst the nationalism of the forthcoming World War 1 centenaries, how are we to create thoughtful and even critical histories and commemoration? In this session, Alistair Thomson (Monash University, author of Anzac Memories) will reflect on the changing ways Australians remember war, from national to family histories. Marina Larsson (Senior Policy Officer, Veterans Heritage, Veterans Unit, Department of Planning and Community Development, author of Shattered Anzacs) will examine the process of discerning which histories are meaningful to individuals, families and communities and consider how particular social groups will find a voice during the centenary. Jean McAuslan (Manager Exhibitions and Collections, Shrine of Remembrance) will reflect on the Shrine's engagement with communities and families in the development of content for a travelling exhibition that will emphasise Victorian contributions to the war and align with key 2014 - 18 anniversaries.

 Thursday 31 May 2012 - 5:30pm

... but is it oral history?

The practice of oral history has undergone many changes since social scientists and historians first recorded people's stories and used them as part of their research and enquiry. In this seminar, speakers will look at traditional and non-traditional uses of oral history, ranging from multimedia used in exhibitions to biography and medical research. Laura Jocic, Curator, Australian Fashion and Textiles, and Roger Leong, Curator, International Fashion and Textiles will discuss the Manstyle: Men & Fashion exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. Nathalie Nguyen (Monash University and author of Memory Is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora) will discuss her work on memory, war and migration, focusing on refugee stories. Lenore Manderson (Monash University and author Surface Tensions) will discuss the role of oral history from the point of view of a medical anthropologist, social historian and public health researcher, whose work explores the harrowing challenges of bodies disfigured by life-saving surgeries and technologies, and the heartening sense of perseverance among those who must learn to live in new ways with their changed bodies.

Thursday 21 June 2012 @ 5:30pm

Beyond Love & Devotion: Exhibiting and Engaging with the Past

How effective are exhibitions in presenting the culturally unfamiliar?
In this seminar, Shane Carmody, Director of Development at the State Library of Victoria will consider the Love & Devotion: From Persia & Beyond exhibition as it draws to a close highlighting how & why the Library created the exhibition and the associated public programs. Dr Kate Brittlebank (Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Monash University) will reflect on the public & media responses to the exhibition and her own response to the value of such an exhibition, as a teacher of pre-modern Asian history & specialist in pre-modern Islamic South Asia.

The discussion will be chaired by Professor Constant Mews, Director, Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology and a medievalist, teaching within the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University.

Love & Devotion: From Persia & Beyond Exhibition is a free exhibition held at the State Library from 9 March 2012 to 01 July 2012.  Further information on the exhibition can be found at www.slv.vic.gov.au

Other Seminars under Development: June 21; August 23 & September 20 2012.

Thursday 20th September  2012 @ 5:30pm

The Founders & Survivors Project: Australian life courses 1803- 1920: Digital History Making

Founders & Survivors is a partnership between historians, genealogists, demographers and population health researchers. It seeks to record and study the founding population of 73,000 men women and children who were transported to Tasmania for the study of survival under stress,
resilience and intergenerational experience.
The project depends on an army of volunteer historians and genealogists who are working through an online workstation, researching individual convict voyages, finding out who the convicts on the ship were, analysing what happened to them during their servitude, and discovering the outcome of their lives afterwards.
The panel comprising Sandra Silcot, the research database developer, Claudine Chionh the developer of the public interface, Rebecca Kippen the historical demographer and Janet McCalman, the historian, will discuss the projects creation and progress.
http://www.foundersandsurvivors.org/

SEMINAR ARCHIVE

Past Seminars

Thursday 22 March 2012 - 5:30pm

A History of Active Citizenship: the Australian Women in Leadership Project

The Australian Women in Leadership Project aims to identify the extent of women's leadership within movements for social and political change in Australia, from the neighbourhood to the international level, and to make this record of active citizenship nationally available. Nikki Henningham (Melbourne University) will introduce the project, especially its online components, and Judy Smart (Melbourne University) will present an example of the research coming out of the project - a study of the leadership of Dame Ada Norris.

Project Website: see http://www.womenaustralia.info/awal/

This year marks 20 years since the formation of the Professional Historians Association of Victoria. In that time, membership has grown to 150, making PHA (Vic) the largest Professional Historians Association in Australia. Members work in a range of fields - from writing commissioned histories and reports, assessing heritage significance, and completing oral history projects, to careers in the media, museums and the government sector.

To celebrate this milestone and to reflect on twenty years of professional history in Victoria, this session will feature a series of short presentations from professional historians discussing their work and how it reflects the continuing importance of history in our community. This will be followed by a panel discussion addressing a number of questions faced by historians: How does technology impact on our role? What is our role within the community? What sort of histories will we be writing? Will we still be writing? What is the future of history?

Talking about Australian Generations: Making Oral History

Australian Generations, one of the nations most ambitious oral history projects will interview 300 Australians from between 1930 and 1990 to explore the changing experience of everyday life and the significance of generational memory and identity.
A panel featuring Al Thomson (Monash University); Kevin Bradley (National Library of Australia and Michele Rayner (ABC Radio National) will discuss issues in recording life stories across the country and with different age groups, and about creating an online digital history archive and national radio history series.

Making Identity: creating a new exhibition at the Immigration Museum

New Directions in Digital Histories: The Old Bailey Proceedings Online as Public History

Remembering the Dunera - Emeritus Professor Ken Inglis (in association with the Jewish Museum of Australia)

Seventy years after the Hired Military Transport Dunera disgorged in Sydney its cargo of anti-Nazi Germans and Austrians, most of them Jews, transported from England not as refugees but as interned enemy aliens, the strange story of their incarceration has undiminished power to appal, astonish, and inspire. The youngest of the ‘boys' are now in their mid-eighties. There has been some instructive writing on them; but much has yet to be told about their diverse fortunes and misfortunes before, during and after World War II. The documentary records, verbal and visual, are rich, and so are the memories of survivors and their families.

Accomplished historian of Australian society, Ken Inglis is well placed to embark on a study of the men whom fate assigned to the Dunera -‘His Majesty's most loyal internees', one of their poets sang. His scope is broad: the book he hopes to write will begin before the Great War in which some of them served the Kaiser, and take in the recent tribulations of boat people.

Beyond the kitchen: Australian women food writers in a changing society

Cookbooks provide a remarkable record of Australian history and changing social values. In this seminar presenters will explore the contributions to history and change of six prominent women food writers: Dr Adele Wessell (Southern Cross University) and Alison Wishart (Curator National Museum of Australia ) on Flora Pell, author of Our Cookery Book reprinted at least 24 times from 1916 until the 1950s; Charmaine O'Brien (author and food writer) on Australia's first celebrity chef Margaret Preston; and Professor Donna Lee Brien (Central Queensland University ) on Margaret Fulton, Stephanie Alexander and Maggie Beer.

A seminar to coincide with Women's History Month (March 2011)