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The Annual History Council Lecture
Historyweek is launched by the Annual History Lecture.
Each year one of Australia's most esteemed historians is
chosen by the History Council to deliver the Lecture at
Government House, Sydney. The Lecture is the History
Council's key public activity.
In recent years the event has been recorded in association
with the ABC Radio National Social History Unit and the
lectures have subsequently been broadcast on Hindsight.
The broadcast always generates interest and stimulates
debate. It is now one of the most significant and thought
provoking events in the history community.
The History Council produces a monograph of the lecture
for sale to the public.
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Monographs currently available for sale:
Please click on the previous lectures for more information:
2008 Joy Damousi Elocution Lessons
2007 Iain McCalman Historical Re-enactments
2006 Hilary Golder Evidence and Accountability
2005 Bruce Scates The Ghosts of Gallipoli
2004 Peter Read A Haunted Land No Longer?
2003 Rae Frances White Slaves: White Australia: Prostitution...
2002 Tim Bowden, Shaping History Through Personal Stories.
2001 Professor Ien Ang, Intertwining Histories: Heritage & Diversity.
2000 Dr Shirley Fitzgerald, History? You Must be Joking.
1999 Dr Don Watson, The Politics of History.
1998 Professor Jill Roe, History for the People.
1997 James Wilson-Miller, Koori: The Ultimate Survival Story.
1996 Professor Stuart MacIntyre, The Necessity of History.
Annual History Lecture
2008
Joy Damousi
Elocution Lessons: A history of Australian speech and accent
ABSTRACT
Professor Joy Damousi will look at Australian speech during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the practice of elocution - the art of speech and eloquence - was at its peak. She will examine this phenomenon when the idea of ‘Australian speech’ was evolving, and being debated. At that time, it was taken for granted that the annunciation of ‘good speech’ was not only desirable but also necessary to enhance success in both society and professional life.
From a nation-shaping perspective, it considers the role of elocution in the greater civilising mission of the British Empire as language and speech helped to define and promote an imagined ‘British’ community. It also explores how Australians attempted to define their identity individually and nationally through their speech in relation to American pronunciations. As a culture that viewed Englishness in all its forms as being as the pinnacle of sophistication, Australia was affronted by the American twang and its connotations of informality and classlessness. On the eve of the Second World War, the presence of the American voice on Australian film screens had the effect of making Australians question what exactly it was that constituted good Australian speech.
BIOGRAPHY
Joy Damousi is Professor of History and Head of the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely on aspects of Australian cultural history on topics such as convict women, grief and war widows, memory war and mourning, Freud and psychoanalysis and the history of Australian speech. In 2007 she co-edited, with Desley Deacon, Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity: Essays on the History of Sound (ANU E-Press). Currently, she is writing a history of elocution and speech in Australia entitled, The Language of Empire: Making Australia English, 1840-1940.
2007
Iain McCalman
Historical Re-enactments. Should we take them seriously?
ABSTRACT
Re-enactments have become the pervasive popular historical form of our time. We watch films like United 93 with original participants playing themselves, or Downfall where actors carry the CGI-produced faces of real-life Nazis. We view television documentaries where adventurous individuals relive the perils of sailing with Shackleton to the Antarctic. We laugh as hapless individuals endure the stresses and humiliations of everyday life in English country houses and medieval monasteries. At modern museums we participate in lost craft labours, ancient historical pageants and vanished social rituals. And at weekends all over the western world hundreds of enthusiastic amateurs dress re-enact past battles sporting recreated uniforms and weapons.
Iain McCalman’s encounter with re-enactment began in a television series purporting to retrace the Endeavour voyage of Captain James Cook along the Barrier Reef to Indonesia. For several of onboard, being historians and able seamen under simulated ‘eighteenth-century conditions’ proved so frustrating that they determined to explore whether re-enactment could ever be historically valuable. In this talk McCalman will discuss the popular appeal of re-enactment, some scholarly criticisms of it, and offer some examples of how it can perhaps be harnessed to good effect for both teaching and research purposes.
BIOGRAPHY
Iain McCalman is a Professor of history and a Federation Fellow at the University of Sydney. He is a specialist in 18 th century British and European history and has a particular interest in popular culture and low life. His most recent book, The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro (2003), has passed into eleven languages. The immediate past President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he is also a member of the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. As a passionate advocate for the humanities, he engages in journalism and works on documentary films as well as books.
2006
Hilary Golder
Evidence and Accountability: Creating and Reading the Public Record
ABSTRACT
The lecture suggests the relevance of an administrative perspective, not only to current political contests over ministerial accountability, but also to historical debates about frontier violence and questions of evidence. It presents case studies from before and after 1856. Considering the depth and detail of the colonial legacy also raises questions about the creation and use of contemporary records. How do the shrinking of the public sector and the acceleration of technological change affect historical practice?
BIOGRAPHY
Dr Hilary Golder has worked as a public historian for thirty years, exploring the archives of federal, state and local governments. Her PhD thesis on divorce in NSW drew on court records and since then she has written widely on social, legal and administrative history. She has also worked as curriculum consultant at the University of Western Sydney (designing courses utilising state records), and was a research fellow in the School of History, La Trobe University (investigating married women's property laws). Her latest publication, commissioned by NSW State Records, is titled Politics, Patronage and Public Works: The Administration of NSW, 1842-1900.
2005
Bruce Scates
The Ghosts of Gallipoli: Revisiting the Anzac Battlefields
ABSTRACT
 Gallipoli has an iconic place in Australian history. Ninety years after the Landing, it remains central to the way we define ourselves as a people. Since the 1920s, Australians have embarked on pilgrimages to the cemeteries of the Great War; the thousands who gather for the Dawn Service near Anzac Cove are but the most recent generation of these Gallipoli travellers. The 2005 Annual History Lecture will explore the changing memory of war through the historical experience of pilgrimage, examining the significance these 'sacred' sites have acquired in the minds (and historical sensibilities) of many Australians. It will chart the varied responses of young and old, men and women, the pilgrims of the 1920s and today's 'backpacker' travellers. The lecture will draw on interviews, surveys, and a rich archival testimony. It will explore the complex intersection between the personal and collective memory and lay to rest the ghosts of Gallipoli.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr Bruce Scates is Associate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. His work on Anzac Pilgrimage has been funded by the Australian War Memorial, the Department of Veterans' Affairs and a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council. He has also been awarded a NSW History Fellowship and served on the Executive Committee of the History Council of NSW.
2004 Peter Read
A Haunted Land No Longer? Changing Relationships to a Spiritualised Australia
ABSTRACT
In 1989 DJ Mulvaney proposed that 'the greatest gift of Aboriginal society to multi-cultural Australia' was 'a spiritual concept of place'. If Mulvaney was right, then non-Aboriginal Australians enunciated the most precise and passionate spiritual concepts of place in the two decades after 1980. 'Multicultural' Australians, however, did not seem to share the great gift. Nor did the gift come without cost to the Indigenous people themselves.
Today, new forms of Australian senses of belonging are sometimes not concerned with Australian land, nor, indeed, land of any kind. Non Anglo-Celtic Australians have yet to embrace the spiritualised landscape of Australia with any enthusiasm. Mulvaney's observation is losing some of its force. It's beginning to sound a little dated. What, then, has replaced it? What are the consequences for Indigenous Australia?
BIOGRAPHY
Peter Read is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Cross Cultural Research, Australian National University. For a number of years he worked in Indigenous History, especially in NSW and in the Northern Territory. His publications from that time include A Hundred Years War, The Stolen Generations and Charles Perkins A Biography. He then undertook a three volume study of the way in which Australians form and maintain attachments to sites and places of significance to them, Returning to Nothing, Belonging and Haunted Earth. In this lecture he will be drawing on work in both these periods.
2003 Rae Frances
White Slaves: White Australia: Prostitution and the making of Australian Society.
ABSTRACT
The death in a Sydney migrant detention centre in April this year of a Thai sex worker focused public attention on the ongoing traffic in young women between Asia and Australia's brothels. It also highlighted the conditions under which such women work once in Australia, and the inadequate way in which Australian authorities deal with these cases. But this story was 'news' only in the sense in that it was the most recent example of a long history of Australian involvement in an international traffic in sex workers. Known as the 'white slave trade' this traffic in women played an unexplored part in the evolution of Australia as a nation. It is this history, and the lessons we can draw from it, which provides the focus for this year's History Lecture.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr Rae Frances is Associate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. She has published extensively on the history of gender and labour in Australia, including a prize-winning book, The Politics of Work (Cambridge University Press, 1993). She is currently writing a book on the history of prostitution in Australia since 1788.
2002 Tim Bowden
Shaping History Through Personal Stories
ABSTRACT
Oral historian Tim Bowden explored the influence of powerful, personal anecdotes on the crafting of history. From interviews with Australians who have participated in important and momentous events in locations as diverse as Papua New Guinea, Asia and Antarctica, Bowden has looked at Australia and Australians at their limits. While this was not pre-planned, it led to a sense of the peculiarities of Australian behaviour and of our conceptions of where Australia begins and ends - particularly Australians' perception of their place in the region and what is distinctive about Australianness.
BIOGRAPHY
In 2002 Tim Bowden, best known as the former host of the ABC's popular Backchat program, founder of the ABC's Social History Unit, the author of the official history of Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions from 1947-1997 and inveterate collector of yarns, will delivered the 6th Annual History Lecture for the History Council of New South Wales.
2001 Professor Ien Ang
Intertwining Histories: Heritage and Diversity
ABSTRACT
"The challenge, I believe, is to recognise that the national historical record consists of divergent, unequal but intertwining histories. These intersecting strands of history can never be smoothed into a single national narrative but they nevertheless produce a common symbolic field of interrelated experiences, stories, and memories which we can call our collective heritage. After all, Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians have a very long history of co-existence, a history of ugly conflict and violence but also, often against the odds, of cooperation and cross-cultural exchange. There is room for both pride and shame, celebration and remorse, triumph and tragedy. Perhaps this is what 'reconciliation' is all about: it is about a cross-cultural conversation which could lead to the building of a new, intercultural common ground, where a shared 'heritage' is created and made, rather than simply preserved, through the sharing of different perspectives on the past." Professor Ien Ang
BIOGRAPHY
Professor Ang is Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Institute for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney. She has published a number of books and essays and recently co-edited Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West was published at the end of the 2001. She is an expert on media audiences and is internationally renowned for her work in transnational and crosscultural studies, and race and gender studies. While not a trained historian, in the past few years she has engaged intensively with the historical antecedents of multicultural Australia, and in particular with the role and place of Asian migration in the national imagination.
2000 Shirley Fitzgerald
History! You Must be Joking
ABSTRACT
"According to the rhetoric of now, everything is new. New millennium. New technology. New market. The new idea is valued, old wisdom is recast as irrelevant... Right now, there are good sound reasons to explain all this rebuttal of the 'old', They are to do with the reality that we are going through a period where capitalism has never been less contested, never been more free to do as it pleases. The so-called 'triumph of capitalism', we are told, allows us all to live an ideology-free lifestyle in a context of increasing wealth. There is very little organised political opposition to the speedy and, to many, terrifying acceleration of the economy into a global formation that challenges national autonomies. And in such a context, it might be better that people do not know too much about the past. Because such knowing could be a dangerous thing." Dr Shirley Fitzgerald
In a professional development seminar for academics some years back the 'facilitator' declared that history served no useful purpose in an organisation that wanted to effect change. All old data could and should be discarded, she said, so that no one could be encumbered by the past. In response, a somewhat battle scarred academic who was struggling in a world of economic rationalism asked, "so should we sell the library, close the University archives and discard all student records?" "Exactly!" said the facilitator, smiling broadly that we had finally seen reason. There was a murmur of disbelief amongst the participants as we all pondered a rather dismal future.
The Annual History Lecture, History! You must be joking by Dr. Shirley Fitzgerald gives all of those who were privileged to hear her address and those who can now access it in print the opportunity to ponder the value, necessity and place of history in our society. She has with wit, intelligence and the skill of a superb historian given us a view of the importance of history as a method of analysing that which has brought us to contemporary times. Dr. Fitzgerald then gives us an appreciation of the power of history for discovering ways in which we can deal with the uncertainty of the future.
History is the fabric of our society, which is woven from the threads of the past, and Shirley Fitzgerald has produced a tapestry of history's place in our lives. She draws on the experience of globalisation, mass consumerism, competition vs. contemplation, economic acceleration, cyberspace, and the power of public relations to point out that 'history is not about the past. It's about understanding causation.' The Annual History Lecture by Dr. Shirley Fitzgerald is compelling analysis of history's place in contemporary society.
Wendy Brady, President, HCNSW, 2000
BIOGRAPHY
Shirley Fitzgerald is the City Historian, City of Sydney; Chair, State Records Authority of NSW; past President and current Vice President History Council of NSW; past President of PHA NSW Inc; experienced in working in the media; research interests and publications in urban history and history of Sydney. Her publications include Red Tape, Gold Scissors, a history of the Chinese in Sydney and various other studies of the city.
1999 Dr Don Watson
The Politics of History (or, the History of Politics)
ABSTRACT
"Of course History has always been problematic. In any democratic society it is bound to be argued about. But its fair to say I think that it has never worn so many disguises. Never have there been so many stories from which to choose. We need a story, don't we? We need our own story. Read a child a familiar bedtime story - and change it. Make the first bowl of porridge just right, the second one too hot. The child will pick it up at once, and correct it for you, possibly angrily. This is the first flowering of political correctness. In its most basic form that is perhaps what history is. Its much the same with adults - and much the same with politics. Don't you dare change the story." Dr Don Watson
In this lecture, Dr Don Watson addressed the problems of writing political history. He concluded, somewhat ruefully, that even the most perfect mastery of the discipline is unlikely to save the historian who takes on modern politics.
1998 Professor Jill Roe
History for the People: reflections on the changing nature and importance of history in public policy in NSW over the last thirty years
ABSTRACT
"I began by supposing that something has been lost. At first it seemed a matter of idealism...But history can survive without high-mindedness, as in the case of Miles Franklin. What has really happened since the 1960s is that a gap has opened up between history and the people which no amount of breast-beating will close. A more realistic balance of federal-state responsibilities in maintaining essential intellectual frameworks is now needed, as well as much better communication between academic historians and those who teach and promote history in the wider community." Professor Jill Roe
Professor Jill Roe reflects on the changing nature and importance of history in public policy in New South Wales over the last thirty years. She argues that a gap has opened up between the people and history as taught in our public institutions since the 1960s and she suggests a strategy for closing that gap.
BIOGRAPHY
Professor Jill Roe is currently President of the Australian Historical Association. She holds a Personal Chair in history at Macquarie University, Sydney and has served on national reviews of history honours and research funding. Her long term research interest is the life and work of Miles Franklin. She has recently completed research on Australian war brides in the US and long term links with Australia.
1996 Professor Stuart Macintyre
The Necessity of History
The Inaugural History Council Lecture
ABSTRACT
"History has an ambiguous status in the public culture. It is attached to heritage as a cultural commodity. It forms part of the repertoire of cultural consumption. It operates as a form of self-understanding and assists the negotiation of a diversity of identities and sympathies. It is far less prominent as a source of public understanding. Just as the study of history appears irrelevant to those vocationalists who have turned education into skills training and the production of useful knowledge, so in public life history is frequently ignored by those who seek to shape the future." Professor Stuart Macintyre
The History Council's Charter commits it to advocating for history in public institutions, at all levels of government and in public debate. In delivering the Inaugural History Lecture, 1996, with both critical thoughtfulness and a sense of urgency about the importance of history, Professor Stuart Macintyre has set the tone for what will become the Council's premier annual public event and publication.
Shirley Fitzgerald, President, HCNSW, 1997.
BIOGRAPHY
Stuart Macintyre is a graduate of the University of Melbourne and completed higher degrees at Monash and Cambridge; he has previously held posts at Cambridge, Murdoch and the Australian National University. His principal interests are labour and social history, both in Britain and Australia, the study of social and political change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and intellectual history. His recent publications include A History for a Nation: Ernest Scott and the Making of Australian History (1994).
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