What made you decide to pursue a career in history? I have always had a love of history, for as long as I can remember. When I was a child I was so enraptured by stories of early explorers that I used to walk around the farm pretending I was Ludwig Leichhardt or Burke … Read more
by Francesca Beddie, blog editor… In his discussion of historians and their craft, Tom Griffiths (The Art of Time Travel, 2016) describes Geoffrey Blainey* as magpie. It is a metaphor Blainey has also used for his research. Griffiths explains: Blainey prods the earth inquisitively, feeds quirkily…he scavenges bright details and oddments that catch his … Read more
In the next two blog posts, Laila Ellmoos reflects on two conferences held in Victoria in 2016: the Australian Historical Association (AHA) conference in Ballarat and the Working History conference in Melbourne, organised by the Professional Historians Association (Victoria) (PHA Vic). This year the annual conference of the AHA was held in the Victorian … Read more
… While doing research on occupied Germany after the Second World War, Christine de Matos came across material that should be considered as we confront today’s refugee flows. In November 1948, a British woman named Mary Sutherland made an official tour of the British zone of occupation in post-war Germany. Sutherland’s area of expertise was … Read more
Dr Anna Clark’s 2016 Peter Tyler Oration left her PHA audience with an important challenge: how does the profession build the connections between people’s appetite to understand where they came from and the broader story of society’s historical development? This is the task uncovered by Clark’s research into ordinary Australians’ attitude to history. She conducted interviews … Read more
… by Patricia Curthoys Over the past few years I have been involved, with William Emilsen, from Charles Sturt University, in editing a collection of Australian Methodist biographies (Patricia Curthoys and William W. Emilsen, Out of the Ordinary: Twelve Australian Methodist Biographies, Unley, MediaCom Australia, 2015). The collection was published in November 2015, one … Read more
… Ian Willis recently gave a public lecture on the Liverpool Field Hospital and its involvement with the Red Cross at the Royal Australian Historical Society at History House in Sydney. ‘All in a muddle’ was how Mrs Isabelle Wallace Turner, the president of the Greenwich Red Cross, described the chaotic situation she witnessed … Read more
Travelling across America, the country reveals a tapestry of contradictions. These were certainly evident in the lead up to Memorial Day, celebrated on the last Monday of May. In cemeteries and towns the bunting, flags and flowers come out, to remember the fallen and to welcome the beginning of summer. For some the weekend … Read more
by Francesca Beddie… Like many visitors to Washington DC, my first stop was the National Mall. There on a wet week day, most people stood in awe of the Lincoln Memorial; a few braved the rain to walk the length of the sombre 247 feet (75 meters) of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. This is … Read more
Imogen Dixon-Smith (Master of Museum & Heritage Studies, University of Sydney) explains how her prize-winning essay came to be… The development of the paper I submitted to the Public History Prize in 2015 started in a university subject I was taking titled ‘The Idea of Heritage’. I was set the task of pursuing a … Read more