On behalf of the History Department, I’d like to congratulate Jamie Dunk. His recent book, Bedlam at Botany Bay, has just been shortlisted for the Ernest Scott Prize.
The prize is awarded annually to “the book judged to be the most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand or to the history of colonisation published in the previous year”.
This is a wonderful achievement as evidenced by the judges’ comments below. Well done Jamie!
All best,
Mark McKenna
Chair, Department of History
James Dunk, Bedlam at Botany Bay, New South, 2019
It’s the history of New South Wales, but not as we know it. The names are familiar, as are the events – Macarthurs, Wentworths, Blaxland, Bligh, rebellion, inquiries, select committees – but by paying close attention to the ‘strong personalities’, ‘eccentricities’ and ‘unfortunate endings’, Dunk puts us in the mirror house, where all that was familiar now feels strange and illuminating of quite a different colony. This is more than a collective biography, a history of whitefella madness, or the bureaucratic and jurisdictional journey to self-government. Dunk’s book reminds us that there is nothing inevitable about how things turn out: this is a rare feat in history-writing.
Feeling a bit lost as Uni starts? Worried about how to manage your workload? Nervous about speaking up in tutorials? Anxious about assessments? Unsure of who to ask for advice?
We are here to help!
This year, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) has introduced a new peer mentoring program, “Communities of Support”, designed to offer you guidance and support as you as you navigate your first full year of university study.
Communities of Support offers all FASS first years regular mentoring sessions with senior undergraduate students who have volunteered to provide you the benefit of their experience, enthusiasm, and encouragement as you settle in to life at university. By participating in the program, you will learn a lot about how University works, what skills, strategies, and ‘life-hacks’ might help you to do well in your studies, and be guaranteed the support of a university peer who is invested in your general welfare and wellbeing.You will also get the chance to meet other first year students in a friendly and supportive environment.
Mentoring sessions begin in Week 3 of Semester 1 and will take place in small groups for one hour per week. (Semester 2 mentoring will take place fortnightly.) The day and time of your session will be scheduled according to your availability.
Once you have registered, we will be in touch with the time, day, and location of your first mentoring session and contact details for your assigned mentor.
Thanks in advance for your participation. We hope you find the experience rewarding, and please do feel free to contact our CoS Project Officer, Mr Simon Wyatt-Spratt if you have any questions (simon.wyatt-spratt@sydney.edu.au).
Kieryn
DrKierynMcKay | LINK Project Manager
Department of English | The University of Sydney
________________________________ Room S353 | John Woolley Building A20 | The University of Sydney | NSW | 2006
The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney would like to invite you to become a volunteer mentor for a new Faculty-wide first year mentoring program in 2020. Entitled “Communities of Support”, this extended mentoring program aims to address student transition, support, and retention issues among some of our most underrepresented cohorts as they enter and undertake their first year of study. We also hope to contribute to student well-being and satisfaction by encouraging stronger communities among our FASS student cohort.
About the Communities of Support (CoS) Program
Transitioning to life at University can be challenging. How do change your timetable? How do you keep on top of your workload while working a part-time job? How do you prepare for exams or undertake research for your assessments? How do you make new friends in a Faculty as big and as broad as FASS? First year students are often overwhelmed by the difficult task of adjusting to the many new experiences they encounter in their first year of study. Those students who are among the first in their family to attend university or who come from low-socioeconomic backgrounds are also less likely to have members of their family or community who can provide effective support as they transition to higher education. We would like to do more to help.
The FASS Communities of Support Mentoring Program offers extended peer support to first year students across their first year of study. Open to all FASS first year undergraduates but designed to cater specifically to those of low-socioeconomic backgrounds and/or first in family, the program offers weekly mentoring throughout Semester 1, fortnightly mentoring in Semester 2, and follows a structured schedule of topics that progress in-step with the first year experience.
Your Involvement
As a Communities of Support (CoS) Mentor, you would be helping to enrich the first year experience for our ‘mentee’ program participants. As a second year, third year (or beyond!), you have already learned a lot about how life at University works, and what skills, strategies, and ‘life-hacks’ help you to do well in your studies. We be thrilled if you could offer your general knowledge, experience, and your support to those who are just starting out at University.
Mentoring is a very rewarding experience, and your involvement in the CoS program will help to develop your leadership capacity, communication skills, and your own cultural competencies in working with diverse student groups. We also hope that the program will offer a stronger sense of community for all of our Mentors and Fellows across the Faculty. Finally, allvolunteer mentorswill receive will receive a $100 shopping voucher on completion of the program.
If you are willing to participate as a CoS Mentor, you will be matched with 2-4 first year participants who will become your ‘mentee group’ across the year. We will provide you with mentoring training, as well as a calendar of topics and relevant ‘talking points’ to help guide your mentoring sessions. You will also be paired with a postgraduate CoS Leadership Fellow who you will meet with once a month to consult on your progress, ask questions, and who will offer you general support. Please note that your time commitment to the project will involve one hour per week throughout Semester 1 and one hour per fortnight throughout Semester 2 for your small group mentoring sessions, and one additional hour per month for coffee catch-ups with your allocated Fellow. All mentoring sessions and Fellows coffees will be arranged according to your availability.
CoS Mentor Registration
All FASS students who are second-year undergraduates and above are invited to apply to become a volunteer CoS Mentor. We particularly encourage students who are themselves E12 scholarship recipients, are among the first generation in your family to go to University, are from diverse cultural backgrounds, come from a regional/rural area, and/or belong to other under-represented cohorts at the University. Please note that if you have already signed up for an existing mentoring program, you can still enrol for this program, but we expect you to honour your original commitment as well.
If you are selected for the program you will be asked to attend a welcome and training session on Friday, March 6, from 10am – 3pm. Alternative arrangements can be made for those who cannot attend.
Thanks in advance for your help and participation, and please do feel free to contact our CoS Project Officer, Mr Simon Wyatt-Spratt if you have any questions (simon.wyatt-spratt@sydney.edu.au).
Global Royal Families: Concepts, Cultures, and Networks of International Monarchy, 1800-2020.
Conference held at the German Historical Institute London (GHIL), 16-18 January 2020. Conveners: Falko Schnicke (GHIL), Cindy McCreery (University of Sydney), and Robert Aldrich (University of Sydney).
Co-financed by the GHIL and the University of Sydney, the event brought together scholars from four continents and eight countries to discuss the timely issue of global monarchies. Over the two and a half days there were nearly forty attendees and nineteen speakers presenting ideas spanning royal families across two centuries and the continents of Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Despite the wide variance in time periods and geographical locations, there were many overlapping and complementary themes between the papers, including the importance of the visibility of monarchs, the need to secure status on a global stage, as the role of royals as official and unofficial diplomats, and the media’s influence over the public image of a royal person or dynasty. The conference’s main findings could be seen in its constant intertwining of global, national, and regional aspects of royal families and in proving the reoccurring political significance of monarchies in different nineteenth- and twentieth-century contexts.
The conference opened with Robert Aldrich’s (University of Sydney) introductory talk detailing the coverage of global royal families in history and historiography. Starting with comparative examples from both the early nineteenth century and modern-day marriages between the Napoleon and Habsburg dynasties, Aldrich highlighted the intertwined genealogical, political, and cultural ties between royal families across the world. He maintained that in the nineteenth century European monarchies were affected by empire, which demonstrated their power to conquer and their interest in collections of ‘exotica’, yet simultaneously non-European monarchies were adopting western styles of clothing, architecture, and court culture to be more accepted on the global stage.
The first session focused upon royalty in international affairs and diplomacy and opened with a paper by Moritz A. Sorg (University of Freiburg) which examined the extent to which the First World War damaged royal family relationships across Europe. Sorg provided parallel case studies of Ferdinand I of Bulgaria and Ferdinand I of Romania to demonstrate how the First World War placed related monarchies on opposite sides, and the consequential impact this had on how these royal individuals were viewed in their respective countries and under the condition of increasing nationalism. Next, Michael Kandiah’s (King’s College London) paper focused upon how the British royal family since 1952 has utilized their ‘soft power’ to improve diplomatic relations between countries. Using oral testimonies of British diplomats, Kandiah explored how Queen Elizabeth II has been able to use her royal status, which places her above politics in order to maintain good relationships through official engagements, both internationally and in Britain.
The second session centred on the House of Windsor and their relationship with foreign royal houses. Continuing the focus on Queen Elizabeth II and the current British royal family, Falko Schnicke (GHIL) delivered a paper which analysed the content of speeches given at state visits and highlighted the input that the Government and the Palace had over these. He proved that is was the Foreign Office which inserted the references to personal family remarks within the speeches to demonstrate the network of monarchies and the intensity of the international royal relationships. Thus, the royal family functioned as a collective unit rather than as individuals. Following this Hilary Sapire (Birbeck College, University of London) examined the relationship between the British and Zulu royal families (in South Africa) in the colonial period and through the early twentieth century. She argued that royal events and the links to the British monarchy were used by both Zulu monarchists and nationalists to advance their cause for independence.
The first day closed with a keynote by Frank Mort (University of Manchester), which analysed how the media was used to transform the monarchy under George V and Queen Mary, and Edward VIII into a consumable entity for the public. The increased visibility of the royal family through informal royal visits both in Britain and the colonies helped to make them more accessible to the ordinary public. Mort took a bottom-up approach to judging how the public emotionally responded to different members of the royal family through drawing upon first-hand accounts of seeing royalty. He argued that the rise of human-interest journalism meant that there was a more extensive and global coverage of the royal family, and an attempt to make them more approachable by conducting unceremonious visits. He stressed the differences between George V and Queen Mary helping to solidify the notion of the royal family as a domestic unit, whilst the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) fostered a celebrity culture around his younger lifestyle.
The second day of the conference began with session three which looked at the global reach of the British monarchy, with John R. Davis (Queen Mary London/ Historic Royal Palaces) beginning with British attitudes towards India in the nineteenth century. Using Queen Victoria’s diaries and royal library catalogues, Davis argued that Queen Victoria was first introduced to German philology through Prince Albert. This early introduction to philology and reoccurring meetings with renowned scholars such as Max Müller, helped to fuel her interest in Indian culture during the latter part of her life. Moving into the twentieth century, Christian Oberländer (University of Halle-Wittenberg) contrasted this with a paper analysing how the British royal family were a model for the Japan’s Imperial house, looking particularly at the role of the Japanese sovereign as a ‘symbol’ emperor after the Second World War. He argued that by effectively adopting the emperor as a head of state and embracing state visits, the Japanese Imperial family was able to open themselves up to the public at home and in the West.
Session four continued the theme of royal travel through focusing on the Spanish and Austrian royal families. Firstly, Javier Moreno-Luzón (Complutense University of Madrid) explained how Alfonso XIII of Spain (r.1886-1931) fostered closer relations with Latin America through royal visits, celebrations, and a shared culture to create a transnational image of the royal family. He argued that since the late nineteenth century until the end of the 1920s, the royal family successfully promoted Spanish national identity centring on the monarchy through the careful selection of sending different royal individuals to Hispanophone Latin American countries. Thereby they were able to simultaneously promote the historic ties to Spain and highlight a progressive future. Aglaja Weindl (University of Munich) provided a case study of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and how he was an ‘unexpected global royal’ because of his world tour in 1892-3. This extensive travel not only educated the Archduke but provided an opportunity to build better relations with other Protestant and Orthodox countries. Consideration of the routine of ceremonies with bad company whilst undertaking official duties was emphasized and provided a humanistic account of royal life.
Session five focused upon global encounters, with Judith Rowbotham (University of Plymouth) using a range of local, national, and colonial newspapers to analyse the reception of the British royal family within different colonies. With examples of tours through India, Canada, Australia, and beyond from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, she emphasized the impact that these visits had on global networking and diplomacy. Through specifically tailoring the tone of the visit and the activities, this not only aided relationships with the authorities, but allowed a sense of community to develop in the colonial public. Cindy McCreery (University of Sydney) followed this with a case study of the 1881 visit to Japan by King Kalakaua of Hawai’i and Princes Albert Victor and George of Great Britain, and explored how this occasion was used to foster better relations between the countries. With similarities that mirrored Oberländer’s paper, McCreery argued that the opening up of Japan to royal visits was an attempt for the country to reinvent its global image, appear more welcoming, and encourage trade deals. Such a tour also allowed the King of Hawai’i to develop an international presence. Photographs of the visit demonstrated that there was a clear acknowledgement of the status of foreign royalty, whilst showing differences in hierarchy due to age and position to the throne.
The following session centred around the importance of letter-writing between royals, with emphasis on female family relations. Susanne Bauer (University of Trier) explained her research project cataloguing and analysing the 20,000 letters of Augusta Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Queen of Prussia and Empress of Germany. She argued that Augusta expressed many political opinions within these letters, tried to advise her husband (whether he asked for advice or not), and was a key factor in building relationships with royalty and politicians across Europe and beyond with approximately 230 royal and non-royal correspondents. Mary T. Duarte (Cardinal Stritch University, Milwaukee, USA) analysed the letters between four generations of female royals over the course of the nineteenth century from the line of ancestors of Maria Theresa of the House of Habsburg. She scrutinized the type of advice passed from mother to daughter, and between grandmother and granddaughter, especially pertaining to marriage and sexual life. She contended that as the generations went on the tone of this advice softened, although duty and obedience was still often accentuated.
The second keynote of the conference was delivered by Irene Stengs (Meertens Instituut/ Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam), who provided an in-depth anthropological analysis of the mourning culture in Thailand following the death of King Rama IX in 2016, and the meaning of the symbolism and rituals in the coronation ceremony of King Rama X in 2019. Taking a step-by-step approach through the elements and stages of the coronation ceremony, Stengs highlighted how this event was used to unite the country through a shared experience and emotions. Whilst there was historical and religious precedent for several aspects of the event, the incorporation of modern technology, such as mass television broadcasting and drones, allowed an increased accessibility and personal quality to the new monarch. She also presented a close analysis of the use of colour by the organizers of the event to mark a new reign, and explained the significance this holds within Thai culture.
The final day of the conference started with a session exploring the regional dynasties and transnational royal families. Aidan Jones (King’s College London) gave a case study of Alexander II of Russia’s visit to Britain in 1874 on the occasion of his daughter Marie’s marriage to Prince Alfred. He analysed the dynastic politics of the marriage arrangement and the wider implications this had for international diplomacy. Priya Naik (University of Delhi) followed this with a paper exploring the consumption of Britishness by Indian Princes in the first half of the twentieth century. She argued that the consumption of goods, language, culture, and customs by Indian Princes was an attempt for them to be accepted within British society and to join an international aristocratic network.
The final session analysed the different international models of monarchy. Nicholas Miller (University of Lisbon), like McCreery, focused on King Kalakaua of Hawai’i (r.1874-1891) but this time comparing him to Sultan Abu Bakar of Johore (r.1886-1895) in the Malay States. He focused upon the two kings’ different approaches to ruling small monarchies and gaining international recognition for theirs states, as well as addressing the issue of labour migration. Charles Reed (Elizabeth City State University, Elizabeth City, USA) closed the conference by returning to India via the Gaekwad of Baroda. Like Naik, he highlighted the Gaekwad’s desire to foster good relations with the British. Reed’s approach was to explore how this was achieved through the lens of royal visits to Britain from the later nineteenth century and the public image they were trying to promote of a princely state in India during the colonial period and after independence.
The conference closed with reflections from the co-organizers who drew out some of the key themes across the papers. The breadth of time period and geographical locations had highlighted that monarchies achieved local, national, and global reaches. Several papers highlighted that royalty was used, often unofficially, for diplomatic reasons to improve relationships between dynasties and nations, which provoked discussions about how individual royal persons perceived their role. It was agreed that monarchy is an evolving concept, and in recent times through embracing modern technology and utilising media coverage, royal families were able to appear relatable and relevant to contemporary society. The importance of the family unit at the heart of the monarchy was understood to be a central factor in emphasizing the longevity and stability of the institution. Finally, the visibility of royalty, either through first-hand accounts of travel, or increased coverage in the press and accompanying images, was a central theme across many of the papers. This increased visibility frequently allowed the royal individuals to appear more personable and enhanced their popularity nationally and globally. The conference illustrated some of the paradoxes of private life and public role for royal families on a global stage. It also confirmed the need for further studies, even in the twenty-first century, continuing and evolving the central position in political, social, and cultural life occupied by monarchs and their royal families in many countries.
Department of History, The University of Sydney, CCANESA, Madsen Building
20-21 February 2020
Jim Masselos, Sydney and India
This conference celebrates the teaching, research, philanthropy and
friendship of Dr Jim Masselos. After completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Sydney,
he took a doctorate at the University of Bombay, and then returned to Sydney,
where he taught for 36 years until his retirement in 2001; he is currently an
Honorary Reader in the Department of History in the School of Philosophical and
Historical Inquiry.
Jim is an
internationally renowned specialist in the history of Indian nationalism, the
history of Bombay and the history of early photography and popular art in
India. Among his many publications are Nationalism
on the Indian Subcontinent: An Introductory History (1972; revised ed., Indian
Nationalism: A History, 1985); Towards Nationalism: Group Affiliations
and the Politics of Public Associations in Nineteenth Century Western India (1974);
Dancing to the Flute: Music and Dance in Indian Art (with Jackie Menzies
and Pratapaditya Pal) (1997); Beato’s Delhi, 1857, 1997 (with Narayani
Gupta, 2000, reprinted as Beato’s Delhi 1857 and Beyond, 2011); The
City in Action: Bombay Struggles for Power (2007) and Bombay Then and
Mumbai Now (with Naresh Fernandes) (2009), three exhibition catalogues,
five edited books – including Bombay and
Mumbai: The City in Transition, co-edited with our conference keynote
speaker, Sujata Patel (2003) – six
special issues of academic journals, and seventy-odd journal articles and book
chapters.
Jim is a Fellow
of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Asiatic Society of Mumbai –
one of fewer than ten foreigners elected since 1947 to a society that traces
its origins to 1804. Bombay Before
Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim, edited by Prasant Kidambi, Manjiri Kamat
and Rachel Dwyer, was published last year by Oxford University Press, and
launched in both London and Mumbai.
This conference
has been made possible by generous funding from the John Anthony Gilbert
Bequest and the Alexander John Anderson Bequest of the Faculty of Arts and
Social Sciences, allocated by the Dean of the Faculty, and by supplementary
funding from the Department of History, for which we are extremely grateful.
All sessions will
take place in the meeting room of the Centre for Classical and Near Eastern
Studies of Australia (CCANESA), on the first floor of the Madsen Building, on
the main campus (near City Road) of the University of Sydney.
Morning coffee and afternoon tea will be provided to all participants, and lunch will be provided to paper-givers and chairs. The conference dinner is open to all participants at their own expense.
Conference convened by Professor Robert Aldrichand Dr Cindy McCreery, Department of History, SOPHI, FASS, The University of Sydney
Thursday, 20
February
8.45 Registration
9.00 Welcome
and practical information
9.30 KEYNOTE
ADDRESS
‘Studying Indian History and Society: Beyond Colonial and National
Perspectives’
Sujata
Patel (Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla)
10.45-11.00 Morning
coffee
11.00-12.30 Session
1
‘Divine Damsels in distress: The Yoginis of
Hirapur and Beraghat’
Richard
Barz (Australian National University)
‘Religion and Empire: Roman Catholicism in Colonial Bengal and the
Transnational World, 1841-1947’
Tim
Allender (University of Sydney)
‘Nineteenth-Century
Commercial Laws and History’
Gail Pearson (University of Sydney)
12.30-1.30 Lunch
1.30-3.00 Session
2
‘Alternative
Visions: Hindi and Australia’
Peter Friedlander (Australian National
University)
‘Mapping
Knowledge of New South Wales from Calcutta in the Late Eighteenth Century’
Eileen
Chanin (Australian National University)
‘Night Train to Varanasi’
Sean
Doyle
3.00-3.30 Afternoon
Tea
3.30-5.00 Session
3
‘Indian Perceptions of a Burmese Nationalist in the 1920s’
Yuri
Takahashi (Australian National University)
‘The Politics of Place in Colonial Ahmedabad’
Rob
Wooding
‘The Sounds of
Anticolonialism: Gandhi, Noise and the Microphone’
Kama
Maclean (University of New South Wales)
7.00 Conference dinner (at participants’ own
expense) at Salt & Palm Restaurant, 22 Glebe Point Road, Glebe – a short
walk from the conference site (restaurant to be confirmed).
Friday, 21 February
9.30-11.00 Session
4
‘Bombay Roots, Global Networks: Kapila Khandvala, 1930s and 1940s’
Heather
Goodall and Devleena Ghosh (University of Technology, Sydney)
‘Indian Labour History and the 1974 Strike’
Stephen
Sherlock (University of New South Wales, Canberra)
‘The
Huntington Thesis and India’
Howard
Brasted (University of New England)
11.00-11.30 Morning
Coffee
11.30-1.00 Session
5
‘The Collection of an Indophile’
Jackie
Menzies (Art Gallery of New South Wales)
‘A Slice of India, 1966: Experimenting with Devices from the
Australian Bicentennial History Project (1988)’
Robin
Jeffrey (Institute of South Asian Studies, Singapore)
‘Cut
and Come Again: Imagining the Sequel to Jim Masselos’ India: Creating a
Modern Nation (1990)’
Peter
Mayer (University of Adelaide)
1.00-2.00 Lunch
2.00-3.00 Session
6
‘Ayahs in Australian History’: Searching for Subaltern Women’
Victoria
Haskins
‘Nineteenth-Century
Indian Photography and the Crisis of Postcolonial Secularism’
Sushma
Griffin (University of Queensland)
3.00-4.00 Roundtable
discussion on Indian history in Australia
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney
Since 2012, the
Departments of English, History, and Classics and Ancient History have worked
with low-socioeconomic high schools across NSW to engage with a wider cohort of students,
make us better, more inclusive teachers, foster aspiration, and encourage
students of diverse backgrounds to participate in higher education.
Further information about these programs can be found here: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/widening_participation/
and https://historymatters.sydney.edu.au/category/history-and-social-inclusion/
This year, as part of a successful Strategic Education
Grant (Widening Participation), we will recruit Leadership Fellows from across
the Faculty (two per School), for HDR students to play a critical role in our
new project entitled “Communities of Support: First Generation Students and the
Transition to University.”
This Faculty-wide two-tier project will address student
transition and retention issues among some of our most at-risk students, and
contribute to student well-being and satisfaction. The project aims to create a
pool of trained student volunteers and Leadership Fellows from each School who
will work closely with current low-ses and First in Family students to co-create
an intensive mentoring experience for incoming students in 2020. We hope to
build a community of engaged, informed, and trained students and enrich the
student experience for all, as well as hep inform a more formal Faculty-wide
transition program in the future.
Our Leadership Fellows will be given the opportunity to advance key academic skills, including
inclusive teaching and mentoring in higher education; providing mentorship to
undergraduate volunteers, design support activities for volunteers to support
their mentees, lead cohorts of volunteers in the delivery of grant projects,
and provide general event coordination and publicity support.
The Leadership Fellow program runs from February to
December 2020. The specific responsibilities, dates of commitment, and key
programs of involvement for Fellows are outlined below. All duties will be
conducted under the supervision and guidance of Project Manager, Dr Kieryn
McKay, with the support of Project Assistant, Simon Wyatt-Spratt, and under the
general direction of Associate Professor Melissa Hardie and Professor Michael
A. McDonnell.
All Fellows will receive training in Inclusive Teaching and
Low-SES Volunteering to qualify for their position. Fellows will receive a $500
honorarium and a certificate of achievement for their contributions to the
program, both of which will be presented to Fellows at the end of their
Fellowship term.
Qualification
To apply to become a Leadership Fellow, you must be
currently enrolled in a Higher Degree Research program in FASS.
Applications require candidates to
provide a brief outline of relevant experience and the details of two referees.
All applications for the2020 Leadership Fellow schemeare due by noon (12:00 pm) on Friday, January 31st.
Leadership Fellows 2020 – Responsibilities
The specific duties, dates of commitment, and key involvement for Fellows are outlined below. All responsibilities will be conducted under the supervision and guidance of the Project Manager, Dr Kieryn McKay, and with the support of Project Assistant, Simon Wyatt-Spratt, and under the general direction of Associate Professor Melissa Hardie and Professor Michael A. McDonnell.
Responsibilities
and time commitments for Fellows are outlined below. Please note that some
activities require advanced preparation, and you will be required to
communicate with a small pool of volunteers (4-6 maximum) throughout the year.
Time commitment: welcome and training session, 10 am-4 pm on Friday, February 7th; Mentor/Fellows Partnerships Lunch, 12-1 pm Friday, Feb. 28; a once-monthly lunch with Project officers and involved academics; end-of-semester and year Social event and evaluations.
Outline: Leadership Fellows will be trained by program leaders in inclusive teaching and support, and will then in turn be responsible for coordinating and supporting small groups of undergraduate students as they mentor new first year students through the year. Leadership Fellows will also provide valuable input into the mentoring program and meet with undergraduate volunteers at least once a month, as well as meeting Project officers and academics every month. As a Leadership Fellow you will help to coordinate the program and will play a key leadership role for our group of volunteer mentors.
University of Technology, Sydney, Building 10, Level 5, Room 580
9:30am-3:30pm
Acclaimed Australian filmmaker Jennifer
Kent’s film The Nightingale (2019) has generated intense debate – and prompted
audience walkouts – since its premiere at the 2018 Venice Film Festival. Set
during the Black War in Van Diemen’s Land in 1825, the film is an unflinching
depiction of colonial, and sexual violence. Kent told The Saturday Paper that
she ‘wanted to tell a story that is relevant to my history and my country.’ Her
vision of British colonisation, and its consequences for those caught in its wake,
taps into a conversation with a strong presence in Australia’s public,
political and cultural life over the last three decades. This symposium will
investigate this complex and groundbreaking historical film from a number of
interdisciplinary perspectives, drawing together scholars across Australia to
explore and interrogate the historical representation of gender, race and
colonialism on screen.
Spaces are limited. For further information and RSVPs, contact: james.findlay@sydney.edu.au
Metcalfe Auditorium, Ground Floor, Macquarie Street, Sydney
The well-documented convict cargo was accompanied by a far more elusive group of involuntary arrivals – the soldiers. We know much about the various regiments that served in New South Wales, but far less about the enlisted men who gave them form and force.The focus of this study is the frontier penal station of Newcastle, where the soldiers were charged with a double remit – as the agents of expansion and as the enforcers of confinement. This dual military function is examined through the story of two wooden boxes, including the Macquarie Collectors chest. This is curated as a National Treasure, an early example of Australiana and as an artistic colonial collaboration. My analysis relocates the chest in its military and penal contexts where it begins too look more acquisitive than collaborative – the incidental spoils of a frontier war and the perks of an exploited labour force. A second and more humble wooden box focuses upon the experiences of enlisted men, who felt themselves to be as trapped and tormented as the convicts they guarded. Relationships between convicts and soldiers were characterised by a tension between conflict and cooperation, between class commonality and regimental discipline and between the complex loyalties of religion and ethnicity. This paper, while seeking to negotiate these micro-geographies of class, race, gender and power on the penal frontier, also aims to reveal that the soldiers, were less tangential to the construction of convict society (as opposed to the destruction of Aboriginal society) than the monolithic archive of the Colonial Office would have us suppose. Indeed some soldiers crossed the regimental rubicon and joined convict bushrangers and pirates.
And everyone loves a pirate! So do come it’s on November 5th. Melbourne cup day or Guy Fawkes – depending on your cultural reflexes!
Remember Remember the 5th November!
Tamsin O’Connor is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Sydney. Her thesis entitled, ‘All those Places of Condemnation’: Power Relations and Convict Resistance at the Penal Stations of New South Wales 1804 – 1842,’ focuses on the settlements at Newcastle and Moreton Bay, which existed on either side of the Bigge Report. She has published her research in a number of edited collections.
The Aesthetic Needs of the Masses: Artistic Reception in the Aftermath of the Great Leap Forward
Dr Minerva Inwald
Please join us for the first in the OSA Lunchtime Seminar Series
In May 1962, as the People’s Republic of China was recovering from Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, the newly constructed Museum of Chinese Art in Beijing held its inaugural exhibition: a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Mao’s treatise on socialist cultural work, “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature”. This paper analyses descriptions of the new Museum and its inaugural exhibition to explore how the party-state mobilised artistic practice to contribute to post-Leap recovery efforts. In contrast to Great Leap Forward cultural policies that demanded art rouse enthusiasm for labour amongst workers, peasants and soldiers, in 1962, cultural bureaucrats argued that art should serve the “aesthetic needs” of the masses. Articles in People’s Daily and professional journals discussing the new Museum presented the institution as a space for aesthetic pleasure, describing, or even imagining, the enjoyment of exhibition visitors as they toured the Museum’s halls and gardens. This paper argues that cultural bureaucrats used ideas about reception both in an effort to win back a disillusioned population with the promise of amusement and pleasure, and to model an idealised relationship between the people and the socialist state; praising exhibition visitors for reporting their opinions and critiques of artworks, cultural bureaucrats suggested that the party-state was concerned with popular opinion and responsive to criticism. Exploring the party-state’s deployment of reception as a political resource, this paper considers the complex ways in which meaning was made in socialist artistic culture.
Dr Minerva Inwald
Dr Minerva Inwald is a Researcher based in the Department of History, University of Sydney, focusing on the cultural history of the People’s Republic of China in the Mao era. Using Chinese-language primary sources to examine how exhibitions at this prestigious space were used to communicate ideas about the role of art in China in relation to conceptions of ‘the people,’ her research seeks to investigate broader questions of how art objects circulate in museum contexts, as well as outside museums such as in domestic, work and public spheres. Minerva graduated with Bachelor of Arts (Languages) Honours degree from the University of Sydney in 2012, and in the same year was awarded the Francis Stuart Prize for Asian Art History form the Department of Art History. She has contributed a number of papers at academic conferences in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and recently undertook an 8-month postgraduate exchange program at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts.
About the OSA Lunchtime Seminar Series
On the last Tuesday of every month from October, the Oriental Society of Australia will hold lunchtime seminars for all to attend and hear from researchers working across different geographical and cultural understandings of Asia.
The series will feature early career and higher degree researchers, and we hope to develop a network of perspectives from across the region. Please join! And get in touch if you would like to present at a future date.
This room can be best accessed just across from the new Education Building off Manning Road.
Aug. 21 – Sheila Fitzpatrick, University of Sydney, “Russians, White and Red: a Story of Postwar Immigration to Australia”
Abstract: The paper, summarizing the book of the same title I am currently completing, deals with two immigration streams – Displaced persons from Europe and Russians from China – that arrived here in the late 1940s and ‘50s. The first problem to discussion is “Who is a Russian?” Then I go on to look at wartime collaborators, fascists, Orthodox believers, boy scouts, and even a few “Reds” (Russian-speaking Jews sometimes being put in that category) and Soviet spies.
Bio: Sheila Fitzpatrick is primarily a historian of modern Russia, especially the Stalin period, but has recently added a transnational dimension with her research on displaced persons (DPs) after the Second World War. She received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002 and the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2012. She is past President of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (formerly AAASS) and a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Having worked for most of her career in the United States, she moved back to Australia in 2012.
Sep. 4 – Glenda Sluga, University of Sydney, “Climate and Capitalism”
Abstract: This talk takes up the 1972 UN Human Environment conference: the first example of the attempted global governance of environmental issues and climate change that foundered on the challenges of development and North-South antagonisms. I will argue that history connects Delos, the ancient capital of the Athenian League, with the club of Rome, and the New International Economic Order.
Bio: Glenda Sluga is Professor of International History, and ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow at the University of Sydney She has published widely on the cultural history of international relations, internationalism, the history of European nationalisms, sovereignty, identity, immigration and gender history. In 2013, she was awarded a five-year Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship for Inventing the International – the origins of globalisation. Her most recent book is Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and with Patricia Clavin, Internationalisms, a Twentieth Century History (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Sep. 25 – Mark McKenna, University of Sydney, “Finding the Centre: Uluru and the legacies of Australia’s frontier”
Abstract: The centre of Australia – geographical, political, psychological & ‘spiritual’ – is an elastic idea with a long history. As the literary scholar Roslynn Haynes remarked in 1998: ‘Because Australia is the only island continent, the notion of its centre has acquired a unique significance’. We do not ‘conceptualise the centre of any other continent’ in quite the same way. In this seminar, I’ll explore how and why Australians have become preoccupied with the idea of ‘the centre’ and how their ideas have changed over time. In doing so, I’ll pay particular attention to Uluru and its relatively recent invention as the ‘spiritual centre’ of the nation, a change that was dramatically illustrated by the release of the Uluru Statement from the Heart in May 2017. Entangled with this history is the story of the shooting of an Aboriginal man at Uluru in 1934, an event that has continued to resonate as Uluru has become a place of national and international significance.
Bio: Mark McKenna is Professor of History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of several prize-winning books, including The Captive Republic: A History of Republicanism in Australia 1788-1996, Looking for Blackfellas’ Point: an Australian History of Place, An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark, and From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories. In this seminar, Mark will draw on a chapter from his forthcoming book, Untitled (2020).
Oct. 16 – Sarah Bendall, University of Sydney, “They do swarm through all parts of London: The place of the Bodymaking and Farthingalemaking trades in the Textile Industries of Seventeenth-Century London”
Abstract: During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the female silhouette underwent a dramatic change. This period saw the frequent addition of solid materials such as whalebone, wood, and metal into European wardrobes, and clothing was intentionally distorted as ideas of form, size and structure were artfully explored. The desirable body during this period was achieved by using two main foundation garments: bodies and farthingales. Accounts and bills reveal that tailors often made foundation garments; however, these records also show that two separate, specialised branches of tailoring –bodymaking and farthingalemaking –were also established in the late sixteenth century. Scarcely any scholarly investigation of these trades has been conducted and so we know very little about their significance to England’s textile industries. Utilising guild records, household accounts and artisans’ bills this paper explores the origins, scale, organisation and reputation of these trades in the seventeenth century. It seeks to recover these artisans from historical obscurity and put them back into the bustling textile landscape that characterised the craft trades of early modern London.
Bio: Sarah A Bendall is currently an Associate lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. She was previously a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Western Australia, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Bodleian Libraries Oxford and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. Her research examines the history of dress, jewellery and armour in early modern England, Scotland and France, particularly in relation to ideas of gender and the histories of garment production/consumption. Her work has appeared in Gender and History, Renaissance Studies and Fashion Theory. Her PhD (Sydney) examined how sixteenth and seventeenth-century female foundation garments (bodies and farthingales) shaped both the body and notions of femininity in England. Her current research examines the textile industries that that sourced and produced garments made with baleen (whalebone), to examine the relationship between fashion and ecology in early modern Europe.
Oct. 30 – James Curran, University of Sydney, “Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character(1893): A vision of China’s rise and a post-western world.”
Abstract: This paper will explore CH Pearson’s classical work, National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893) and look in particular at how from his Australian vantage point Pearson explored the importance of modernisation for the West and its future relations with the world, especially China. Pearson was an English liberal intellectual who moved to Victoria in 1870 and in the following decades played a key role in the colony’s public life. He came to believe that the Australian colonies were at the forefront of the social forces modernising the Western world, but predicted that great problems were emerging for the West as this process was extended to Asia, Africa and South America.
Bio: James Curran specialises in the history of Australian and American foreign relations. In 2013 he held the Keith Cameron Chair at University College Dublin, and in 2010 was a Fulbright scholar at Georgetown University. Prior to joining academia, Curran worked in The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Office of National Assessments. A non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, he is also a regular commentator on radio and television, and his opinion pieces on foreign affairs and political culture have appeared in major Australian newspapers as well as the Lowy Interpreter, China-US Focus, the East Asia Forum and the Council on Foreign Relations ‘Asia Unbound’ series.
Nov. 6 – Macarena Ibarra, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, “Rethinking the Republican City: The Debates about Heritage in Santiago de Chile (1880-1920)”
Abstract: To come.
Bio: Macarena Ibarra is a Historian from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She has an MA from the University of Leeds, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Her teaching and research focuses on twentieth century urban and planning history with a particular interest both in the politics of urban public health, and in the debates and practice about cultural heritage. Some of her recent publications are the co edited books Vísperas del Urbanismo en Latinoamérica (2018), Patrimonio en Construcción (2017), the articles Hygiene and Public Health in Santiago de Chile´s Urban Agenda, 1892-1927 (2015) and the entry Urban History, in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies (2019).
