‘Off the Beaten Track’ travelling lectures is brought to key regional centres of NSW during History Week by the Copyright Agency Limited and the History Council of NSW . The series showcase outstanding and innovative historical scholarship.
The inaugural series was launched in 2005, when renowned historian Richard Waterhouse visited Orange, Kempsey and Wagga Wagga. In 2006, Richard White presented his lecture ‘The City, the Bush and the Australian Holiday’ at Armidale, Dubbo, Broken Hill and Merimbula. In 2007 Associate Professor Ian Jack presented a lecture on 'The Pastoral Legacy' in the regional centres of the Murray Darling Basin . 2008 saw Profeesor Emerita Jill Roe AO tour Goulburn, Tumut and Parkes with a lecture on Miles Franklin.
Supported by our Regional Partners
Previous lectures:
2008
Jill Roe AO
Brains from the Bush: creativity and culture in rural and regional New South Wales, from Miles Franklin to Marie Bashir
A friend once described writer Miles Franklin, who was born in the high country and spent her young days near Goulburn, as ‘a most unusual and gifted person’. The current governor of New South Wales, Professor Marie Bashir, was born at Narrandera. This lecture will take a look at the changing circumstances and prospects for ‘unusual and gifted’ people in rural and regional New South Wales over the past century or so. Which factors have encouraged and which discouraged their aspirations? How are such people faring now? What blockages might there still be? These and other issues will be addressed through the prism of biography and autobiography, including something from the lecturer’s own background.
BIOGRAPHY
Professor Emerita Jill Roe AO is President of the History Council of NSW. She recently retired as Professor and Head of the Department of Modern History at Macquarie University. She has a particular interest in the relationship between biography and history and served as Chair of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography from 1996 to 2006. Her biography of the Australian writer Miles Franklin will be published by HarperCollins later this year.
2007
Ian Jack
The Pastoral Legacy
Grazing by cattle and sheep over the last two centuries has changed the face of the Australian landscape. Throughout the diversity of the countryside, there is tangible evidence of the many faces of pastoralism. This evidence has importance to the historian no less than the leases, reports, surveys, maps and assessments preserved in public archives, no less too than the station records still be found on many properties or in local historical societies' collections. Vernacular buildings, innocent of an architect's intervention, have a beauty born of functionality and the patina of old wood or corrugated iron: as a result, there is an aesthetic value alongside the historical. Shearing-sheds have for long been icons of the wool-industry: now redundant, many are vulnerable and require recording and interpretation, for there are significant differences among them.
Stockyards scattered strategically over extensive runs have stories to tell about stockmen and their mustering practices, but can tell their stories only when they are analysed and plotted on a map. The sheer size of many country properties has allowed early homesteads and early out-buildings to co-exist alongside their newer replacements, so there is a dynamic of time in this pastoral legacy. The lecture will examine the implications of this evidential and aesthetic diversity, with illustrations drawn from Ian Jack's experiences on pastoral properties throughout Australia .
BIOGRAPHY
Ian Jack has retired from the Department of History at the University of Sydney , where he served as Head of Department and Dean of the Faculty of Arts. Co-founder of the courses in Historical Archaeology and coordinator of public history education at the University, he has been increasingly involved in the heritage of rural vernacular buildings and industrial archaeology, was a long-serving member of the NSW Heritage Council and is currently President of the Royal Australian Historical Society. He is the author or co-author of numerous books, including the two volumes of Australian Pioneer Technology, Australia 's Age of Iron and Regional Histories of New South Wales.
2006
Richard White
The City, The Bush and The Australian Holiday
The relationship between the bush and the city has been one of the great forces in underpinning Australian history and of course a great source for myth an the arts. Today the most common interplay takes place in the Australian holiday, when country people visit the city or the coast, and as city people ‘get away’ to the beach, to the wilderness or to what they imagine as a simpler life on the land. Over more than a century Australians gradually established rights to time away from work, and created a notion of ‘the holiday’ at the centre of the Australian way of life. But in the last quarter of the twentieth century that holiday has been transformed along with transformations in the nature of work both in the city and on the land. What are the implications for the ways country and city people understand each other in such recent phenomena as they grey nomad, the farm stay, the holiday house, the five star resort and the disappearance of the distinction between work time and leisure time?
BIOGRAPHY
Richard White teaches Australian history and the history of travel and tourism at the University of Sydney. His publications include Inventing Australia, the Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing and Cultural History in Australia as well as numerous articles on national identity, travel history and Australian culture. His most recent book, a collaborative monograph, is On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia. He is currently writing a history of the cooee and working on Australian drive tourism in Europe and overland through Asia. He has also had links with many other cultural institutions as a consultant, speaker and committee member.
2005
Professor Richard Waterhouse
Agrarian Ideals, Pastoral Realities: the Use and Misuse of Land in Rural Australia, 1788-2004
The Bush has always played a central role in Australian society and culture, but its history is not a simple one. In a captivating lecture, Richard Waterhouse presents a rich and complex story of the land and its people, exploring the dreams and disillusionment that have characterised Australian perceptions of rural life from 1788 to the present. At the turn of the twenty first century, what is the place of the Bush within Australian culture and society? And how can an understanding of the history of rural Australia illuminate the present-day realities of regional life?
BIOGRAPHY
Richard Waterhouse is Bicentennial Professor of Australian History and Head of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney. A renowned historian of colonial history, he is the author of a number of books and articles on Australian and United States social and cultural history, including his recently published work The Vision Splendid: a Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia (2005). Four generations of Richard’s family – extending back to his great-great grandparents – all made lives for themselves in the Bush.
The Off the Beaten Track series is generously supported by
the Copyright Agency Limited and the Local Council Libraries.
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