PHA NSW/ACT at the Australian Historical Association Conference

Historians from all over Australia and beyond are in Canberra this week for the annual Australian Historical Association conference. Hosted by the Australian National University, the theme of this year’s conference is ‘the scale of history’.

This year organisers had to close conference registrations nearly two weeks before the start of the conference. With over 350 presenters and up to 15 concurrent sessions, this conference is an intense festival of history. You can download the conference program and abstracts from the conference website.

This will be the 7th year that the conference will be tweeted. This is an enjoyable way to get involved in the conference from wherever you may be in the world. Just follow the conference hashtag, #OzHA2018 on Twitter. Look out for the blog posts of conference participants too.

Professional Historians contribute to the conference each year. We have found nine members of PHA NSW in the program who are presenting papers:

Tuesday 11:00 – 12:30

  • Carol Liston is a co-presenter of a paper titled, ‘Colonial surgeon Patrick Hill (1794-1852): Unsung pioneer of Australian mental health care’. Arndt Tutorial Room 4

Tuesday 3:30 – 5:00

  • Adele Nye, ‘Teaching history in Australian universities: Multiple dimensions of a rich discipline’. Arndt Tutorial Room 1
  • Ian Willis, ‘A local cultural icon challenges the forces of neo-liberalism on Sydney’s fringe’. CBE Tutorial Room 6
  • Terry Kass, ‘False testimony: R H Mathews, surveyor and ethnographer’. CBE Tutorial Room 3

Wednesday 11:00 – 12:30

  • Joy McCann, ‘Writing the life story of the Southern Ocean’. CBE Tutorial Room 6
  • Laila Ellmoos, ‘Interesting, humorous, thrilling’: The Great Strike of 1917 on film’. CBE Tutorial Room 3

Wednesday 1:30 – 3:00

  • Catherine Bishop, ‘Local business, global phenomenon: Putting Sydney’s businesswomen in an international context’. CBE Lecture Theatre 2

Thursday 3:30 – 5:00

  • Robin McLachlan, ‘Australasian miners response to Klondike Goldfield regulations, bureaucracy and corruption, 1897-99’. Arndt Tutorial Room 2

Friday 11 – 12:30

  • Kate Bagnall, ‘Chinese Australian families and the legacies of colonial naturalisation’. CBE Lecture Theatre 2

It is difficult in such a big conference to hear all the papers you want, but if you have a chance, drop in and hear what your fellow professional historians are doing, or follow the conference on Twitter at #OzHA2018.