Author James Findlay in Conversation with Professor Michelle Arrow
From innocent criminals to radical revolutionaries, feisty feminists to manly pioneers, egalitarian settlers to violent invaders, Caught on Screen shows how over successive generations the shape-shifting convict emerged on screen as a potent historical symbol.
Join us for a night of conversation and celebration as we launch James Findlay’s new book: Caught on Screen, with our special guest, Professor Michelle Arrow.
Thursday, 6 Nov, 5:30pm for a 6 pm start – 8pm AEDT
Vere Gordon Childe Centre Boardroom, Camperdown NSW, Australia
Convicts loom large in Australian history.As transported criminals and the first European settlers, they have shackled the nation to a curious and contested origin story. Historians were largely silent on their exploits until the second half of the twentieth century, but before then a tradition of convict representation on screen appeared with the rise of cinema, taking hold of the popular imagination. From silent films to more recent television series, screen culture has elevated the convict experience to become a key historical narrative through which filmmakers and audiences have repeatedly reframed and challenged an understanding of Australia’s colonial past. Caught on Screen traverses this history of convict representation for the first time.
Through detailed archival research into their production and reception, the book explores engaging case studies produced in Australia and internationally, including the work of Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock and Jennifer Kent. It illuminates the fact that the convict as historical symbol is one that intersected with, and helped to direct, major debates about nationalism, the legacies of colonisation, Aboriginal dispossession and the origins and character of Australian society.
James Findlay:
James Findlay is lecturer in the discipline of history where he teaches Australian history and researches historical film and television studies, convict history, Australian popular culture, and public history. He has held the Australian Film Institute Research Collection Fellowship and prior to his appointment was the Archival Project Manager for the Society of Australian Genealogists. Before becoming a historian, he worked extensively in film and television production, mostly in the field of documentary, for companies including Beyond Television, Screenworld, and Film Australia.
Michelle Arrow:
Michelle Arrow is professor in modern history at Macquarie University. She is the author of several books, including The Seventies: The Personal, the Political and the Making of Modern Australia (2019), which was awarded the 2020 Ernest Scott Prize for history, and the edited collection Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the Revolution (2023). She is currently working on a biography of the Australian writer and broadcaster Anne Deveson. Her most recent book is Personal Politics: Sexuality, Gender and the Remaking of Citizenship in Australia, co-authored with Leigh Boucher, Barbara Baird and Robert Reynolds (Monash University Publishing, 2024).
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences School of Humanities History at Sydney2025 | Semester 2 seminar series
History on Wednesday Semester 2 | 2025
12.10pm – 1.30pm | Vere Gordon Childe Centre (F09) and Zoom Aug 20 | Dr Ekaterina Heath (Sydney) Napoleon in Australia: Collections, Memory, and Living Monuments.
Aug 27 | Powerful Stories Network Event – Prof. Victoria Haskins (Newcastle) Burning the House Down: Arson and Aboriginal Resistance in Settler Colonial Australia
Sept 10 | Powerful Stories Network Event – Dr Rebecca Sheehan (Sydney) A Mixed Inheritance: Ancestral Callings, Archival Hauntings, and the Legacy of Miscegenation in Nineteenth Century Sarawak
Sept 24 | Associate Prof. Leigh Boucher (Macquarie) ‘Community through catastrophe’: The HIV/AIDs crisis in Darlinghurst.
Oct 22 | Presented in affiliation with the Medieval and Early Modern Collabroative Network – Chet Van Duzer (Rochester) Mapping the Unknown: Cartographers’ Strategies for Navigating Uncertainty
Nov 5 | Powerful Stories Network Event – Prof. Kat Ellinghaus (La Trobe) & Prof. Barry Judd (Melbourne) Ngura Ninti (‘Knowing Home’): A methodological approach for ethically based truth telling in Australian history writing. Zoom link to be sent with event reminder.
Dr. Roberto Chauca was one of nine early-career researchers who were awarded Travelling Fellowships by the Australian Academy of the Humanities to conduct projects addressing issues of national and international significance, such as the impact of political mis/disinformation on social platforms, historical attitudes towards women’s work & how Pacific communities respond to climate interventions.
Humanities Travelling Fellowships enable early-career researchers to undertake research overseas, where they may access materials otherwise inaccessible, connect with international organisations, researchers and forge new networks.
For a list of all recipients and their project, click the link above.
Unearthing Indigenous Voices from Early Modern Amazonia 1560-1561
Across 1560 and 1561, Spanish captains Pedro de Ursua and Lope de Aguirre charted the second European voyage along the Amazon River. Dr Chauca Tapia’s project aims to unearth, for the first time, a complete edition of two anonymous accounts of that expedition—which alludes to a search for the mythical city of El Dorado, and the murder of Ursua.
Under the Fellowship, Dr Chauca will travel to Madrid, Spain, to access documents at the National Library of Spain and the Royal Academy of History, and develop a monograph-length manuscript for publication.
“This fellowship will provide me with the opportunity to challenge the conventional interpretation of Spanish explorations along the Amazon River in the early modern period, generally portrayed as events of heroism and discovery. Instead, the documents I seek to transcribe and translate from the Madrid archives will reinforce my research profile as a historian who has sought to position Indigenous knowledge as the foundation that enabled Europeans to learn about the human and natural landscapes of the Americas.”
With Shauna Bostock, Andre Dao, Katerina Teaiwa, and Sophie Loy-Wilson
Wed, 27 Aug, 5:30pm – 7:30pm AEST
Chau Chak Wing Museum
Camperdown NSW, Australia
In this Wood Memorial Lecture/History Now event, Dr. Sophie Loy-Wilson from the discipline of History at the University of Sydney will sit down with three extraordinary scholars who have drawn on lived experiences and different methodologies to produce creative histories that have made an impact on how we think about and do history. Shauna Bostock, André Dao, and Katerina Teaiwa will discuss their past and future projects, and challenge us to imagine new ways of approaching, practicing and presenting history in Australia today.
The Wood Memorial Lecture is funded by a generous endowment to the discipline of History in the School of Humanities to facilitate a public Lecture in Australian History.
Please join us for a reception following the lecture.
This event is in the 2025 History Now series. History Now is presented by the History Council of NSW in conjunction with the Chau Chak Wing Museum and the Vere Gordon Childe Centre and the Powerful Stories Network. History Now 2025 is supported by Create NSW.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Shauna Bostock is currently the Indigenous Australian Research Editor at the National Centre of Biography at ANU. A former primary school teacher, Shauna Bostock’s curiosity about her ancestors took her all the way to a PhD in Aboriginal history, which turned into a book entitled Reaching Through Time: Finding my family’s stories(Allen & Unwin). The book was awarded the NSW Community and Regional History Prize in 2024, and praised as a ‘compelling blend of Indigenous history, community history and the history of colonial settlement.’
André Dao is an author and researcher from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. His debut novel, Anam, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Voss Literary Award. In 2024, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. André was awarded the 2024 Pascall Prize for Cultural Criticism for essays published in The Saturday Paper, Meanjin and Liminal. He is a postdoctoral fellow with the ARC Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law at Melbourne Law School, where is working on a history of how the computing company, IBM, travelled to the Global South.
Katerina Teaiwa is Professor of Pacific Studies in the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University. She is a scholar, artist, activist and nationally award-winning teacher of Banaban, I-Kiribati (Tabiteuean) and African American heritage born and raised in Fiji. Her exhibition “Dance Protest” is currently showing at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney.
Dr James Findlay, Lecturer in the History Department presenting to students at Canley Vale High School
Last week, the History Department once again celebrated the successful completion of our History Extension Mentoring Program, a cornerstone of our Social Inclusion Program. As the second iteration of the program since its relaunch in 2023, we have been privileged to continue working with schools such as Canley Vale High School and Corowa High School, while also making connections with Hastings Secondary College, Port Macquarie, Woonona High School, and Gymea Technology High School.
The aim of the program is to address the underrepresentation of students from low socio-economic, regional/rural and diverse backgrounds at the University of Sydney, and in history courses especially. The program initiates and strengthens connections between partner schools and the University and is structured in such a way as to be of service to our partner schools, responding to the needs of both students and their teachers. By familiarising high school students with the University, the program aims to foster the aspirations of students from disadvantaged communities by introducing them to University life – while supporting their learning at high school.
The History Extension program in the HSC consists of two parts – ‘constructing history’ and the ‘major project’: a 2500-word research essay on any historiographical topic of their choosing. For most students, this is the most significant historical work they have done. Our program provides a number of workshops to support students both academically but also pastorally through developing these extended works, with each session constituting an hour long talk from a member of staff in the department and an hour of mentoring with their volunteer mentors from our undergraduate and postgraduate history cohorts.
Featuring four sessions over the course of a year, the program paired HSC students studying the History Extension course with a University of Sydney History student volunteers as a mentor for their major project for the unit. With projects ranging from a historiographical investigation of goth subculture to revisionist accounts of colonialism, the project both gave these students vital support through this challenging unit, while building a relationship with a mentor who can support them through the various trials and tribulations of the HSC.
In reflecting on the four sessions, we have held across the past six months; this has been an incredibly valuable experience for mentors and mentees alike. For mentor Lizzy Kwok, “The mentoring program was an incredibly enjoyable and fulfilling experience! As much as we meant to “teach”, I learnt so much from younger students who had such a wide variety of interests — from medieval England to imperial Russia.” Across the board, not only was this a chance for mentors to further engage in historical studies but translate their passions into something greater.
For the students, connecting with both mentors and historians in the department has offered a chance to demystify the university ‘institution’ which can often feel quite far away. This was not only a chance for engagement with the university, but an opportunity for their ideas and voices to be heard.
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences School of Humanities History at Sydney
Refugees, Migrants, and Visitors: A long history of Indigenous Mobility
Elizabeth Ellis | Princeton
Tuesday 3 June 2025, 3:00-5:00pm followed by a reception
What does a deep historical view reveal about Indigenous migration and movement in North America? And what can North America’s Mississippian past tell us about how Native people confronted colonial empires in the eighteenth century? This talk will focus on the patterns and practices of Indigenous migration, naturalization, and refugee acceptance that helped Native peoples along the Mississippi river survive imperial invasion. By examining both forced migration and voluntary relocation, we can see how early modern Indigenous nations confronted the new American empire in the age of Revolutions.
Elizabeth Ellis is an associate professor of history at Princeton University where she teaches early American and Native American history as well as Indigenous studies. Her first book is “The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South.” She is currently researching early Native American iconography and working on a collaborative project on eighteenth-century painted deer hides (minohsaya). Liz also writes about contemporary Indigenous issues and political movements. She is a citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, and she serves as the tribal history liaison for her nation.
Venue: The Chau Chak Wing Museum, University Place, Camperdown Campus Click here for map
This event is part of a three day symposium on Indigeneity, Mobility and the Age of Revolutions sponsored by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame (USA). For more information about the symposium, please contact Sam Fisher at Samuel Fisher [email protected] or Michael McDonnell at [email protected].
Symposium Program Schedule
Events take place in the Chau Chak Wing Museum (CCWM) at the University of Sydney unless otherwise noted.
Tuesday, June 3
9:30 – Pasifika Sydney Walking Tour with Talei Magioni (optional – details to come)
12:00-1:00 pm – 50 years of Papua New Guinea’s independence(optional)
Dame Meg Taylor speaks with Professor Ben Saul in “Looking back and looking forward: 50 years of Papua New Guinea’s independence.” Room TBC, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown campus. Free, but separate registration required.Click here for more information and registration.
3-4:45:Keynote Address: “Refugees, Migrants, and Visitors: A Long History of Indigenous Mobility”
Professor Elizabeth Ellis, Princeton University
With a response by Leila Blackbird
5:00: Reception
6:30: Dinner, Camperdown Rydges Hotel Restaurant
Wednesday, June 4
9:30-10:30: Australian Association for Pacific Studies Plenary Session (co-sponsored by the Keough Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame): “Stori and Sovereignty: Marking the 50th Anniversary of Papua New Guinean Independence.”
Miranda Johnson, “Revolution, Rupture, and Resurgence: Concepts in Indigenous and Other History-Writing”
2:30-3:00 – Coffee
3:00-5:00: Panel 2, “Expanding the Age.”
Samuel K. Fisher, “Good Foreigner, Bad Foreigner: Gaelic Contexts for the Age of Revolutions in Ireland”
Claudia Haake, “Writing as Witnessing: Sioux Leadership after Displacement to Reservations, 1860s to 1890s”
Victoria Bonilla-Báez, “Desnudando Uruguay: Survival through the death of the Indio and the appropriation of El Gaucho”
5:30-7:00: Dance Protest: Project Banaba Exhibition and Cocktail Event – CCWM. Hosted by the Australian Pacific Studies Association
7:30: Dinner: Glebe (tbd)
Thursday, June 5
9-10:30: Panel 3, “Travelling through the Age.”
Kate Fullagar, “Coming Home to the Age of Revolution”
Bruce Buchan, “The Enlightenment’s Enslavement of the Indigenous Dead: The Mobility of Human Remains in the Early Colonisation of Australia”
10:30-11: Coffee Break
11-12:30: Panel 4: “Life and Deathways in the Age”
Annemarie McLaren, “‘Something mysterious and sacred’: Catholic Baptism and Aboriginal People in Early Colonial New South Wales, Australia”
Lyndon Fraser, “Reflections on Mobility, Death, and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Nineteenth-Century Aotearoa/New Zealand”
12:30-1:30: Lunch
1:30-3: Australian Association for Pacific Studies SessionCelebrating Pacific Lives and Voices in Australia. Featuring Katerina Teaiwa, Kate Fullagar, Solstice Middleby, Talei Mangioni, and Victoria Stead.
Location: Business School, Belinda Hutchinson Building, Lecture Theatre 1090.
3:30-5: Concluding Discussion
5:15-7: Book Launch (optional) for Lisa Ford, Kirsten McKenzie, Naomi Parkinson, and David Andrew Roberts, Inquiring into Empire: Colonial Commissions and British Imperial Reform, 18-19-1833, published by Cambridge University Press.
To be launched by Zoë Laidlaw, University of Melbourne, at the Vere Gordon Childe Centre, University of Sydney.
7:30: Dinner: Newtown (tbd).
Participants
Leila K. Blackbird née Garcés (Louisiana Creole, unenrolled adoptee of Apache and Cherokee descent) is the Pozen Family Human Rights Doctoral Fellow of U.S. & Atlantic History at the University of Chicago.
Victoria Bonilla-Báez is an Uruguayan and Indigenous Pampeana woman of Black-Indigenous and Iberian decent and a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. She is also the recipient of the Indigenous Knowledges, Health and Sustainability Scholarship tied to the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project ‘Planetary Health Histories: Developing Concepts’ led by Prof Warwick Anderson, Prof Jakelin Troy, Prof Anthony Capon, and Prof Sverker Sörlin. Currently her research looks at silenced Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous knowledges on caring for land, waterways, and non-human species that are embedded and ‘hidden in plain sight’ within Uruguay’s rural areas. Her research is tied to the lands of her own ancestors, which are under threat due to monoculture farming and deforestation. As an emerging anthropologist and Indigenous woman she has both a cultural and academic duty to ensure that her peoples and her lands stories are told. This unearthing of knowledges and stories are part of broader cultural duty as an Indigenous women to add to the Gran Quillapí del Oyendau, a metaphysical memory keeper, where women weave (re)emerged knowledges and (re)assemble the memories that have been scattered throughout time.
Bruce Buchan is an intellectual historian whose work traces the entanglement of European political thought with the experience of empire and colonisation, focussing on the Early Modern and Enlightenment periods. Bruce’s research seeks an understanding of concepts by bringing different fields of historical enquiry into productive conversation, most notably colonial history, histories of sound and noise, the history of science and medicine, and the history of ideas and political thought. His previous research on European perceptions of Indigenous government, the conceptual history of asymmetric warfare, and the meanings of civility, savagery and civilisation have appeared in a wide range of journals.
Elizabeth Ellis is an associate professor of history at Princeton University where she teaches early American and Native American history as well as Indigenous studies. Her first book is “The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South.” She is currently researching early Native American iconography and working on a collaborative project on eighteenth-century painted deer hides (minohsaya). Liz also writes about contemporary Indigenous issues and political movements. She is a citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, and she serves as the tribal history liaison for her nation.
Samuel K. Fisher is Associate Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and a Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. He is the author of The Gaelic and Indian Origins of the American Revolution: Diversity and Empire in the British Atlantic, 1688-1783 and co-editor of Cnámh agus Smior/Bone and Marrow: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern.
Lyndon Fraser is an anthropologist and historian who works at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and as a Research Fellow in Human History at Canterbury Museum. Lyndon co-edits The New Zealand Journal of History, serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for Irish Historical Studies, and is a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Kate Fullagar FAHA FRHistS is Professor of History at Australian Catholic University andVice President of the Australian Historical Association. She is the author of The Savage Visit: New World Peoples and Popular Imperial Culture (Univ. of California Press, 2012) and The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (Yale Univ. Press, 2020). Her most recent book is Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Simon &Schuster, 2023). She is General Editor, with Katerina Teaiwa, of a forthcoming six-volume Cultural History of Oceania (Bloomsbury, 2027).
Claudia Haake is Principal Research Fellow in History at La Trobe University. Her primary research interest is Native American History from the 19th century onward. She is especially interested in North American Natives from Mexico and the US. Her major areas of interest in Native American Studies are ethnicity, identity and culture. Her work for her first book has focused on identity issues in a transnational comparative framework, investigating the cases of the Mexican Yaquis and the United States Delawares.
Miranda Johnson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Otago. She is a historian of colonialism and decolonisation, focusing on issues of settler identity, race, indigeneity, citizenship, and the politics of writing history. Her research focuses on Anglophone settler societies of the South Pacific and North America. Her first book, The Land is Our History: Indigeneity, Law and the Settler State (Oxford University Press, 2016) examined the wide-ranging effects of legal claims of Indigenous peoples in the settler states of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada in the late twentieth century. It won the W. K. Hancock Prize in 2018 from the Australian Historical Association. Miranda is currently president of the New Zealand Historical Association.
Michael McDonnell is Professor in Early American History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (2015) and numerous other publications on the Age of Revolution.
Ann McGrath has led the Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Program on Deep History for the past seven years. Based at the Australian National University, she is the WK Hancock Distinguished Chair of History and currently serves on the Council of the National Museum of Australia. Her publications include Illicit Love: Interracial sex and marriage in the United States and Australia (2015) which won the NSW Premiers History Prize, and Born in the Cattle (1987), awarded the inaugural Hancock Prize. Along with Laura Rademaker and Jakelin Troy, she co-edited Everywhen: Australia and the language of Deep History (NewSouth Publishing 2023) and with Jackie Huggins, edited Deep History: Country andSovereignty (NewSouth Publishing 2025). Ann has co-directed and produced various films, including A Frontier Conversation (2006), Message from Mungo (2014) and Japarta (2025). Her work has been recognised by the Human Rights Award for non-fiction, the John Barrett Prize, and the Archibald Hannah Junior Fellowship at the Beinecke Library, Yale. She has been awarded Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and the Australian Academy of Humanities. She has gained memberships of the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham and Fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton as well as two Rockefeller Foundation Scholarly Residencies at Bellagio.
Annemarie McLaren is an historian of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century world and the British empire, with a particular interest in the Indigenous societies encountered and how intercultural exchange took place. In 2020, her doctoral thesis was awarded the biennial Serle award for best postgraduate thesis in Australian history by the Australian Historical Association. She has also been the recipient of national and international research and essay prizes. She has held research fellowships at the Museum of Anthropology & Archaeology (Cambridge), the Omohundro Institute & Jamestown Rediscovery Center (Virginia) and Griffith University (Brisbane). She is review editor and board member of the journal Aboriginal History and a board member of the History Council of Western Australia.
In the third issue of the reestablished journal Souffles Monde/Anfas al-‘alam – which continues the trajectory of the pioneering Maghrebi intellectual journal of the same name that first published in the late 1960s – we introduced the concept of “collaborative ontologies” as a methodology for re-empowering a praxis-based critical theory. Our premise is that any viable 21st century critical theory needs to be grounded in engaging with, learning and taking the lead from Indigenous ways of knowing and being (epistemologies and ontologies) as being developed and practiced today by Indigenous scholars, activists and practitioners in both post-settler colonies of the Global North (Australasia and North America) as well as Global South (Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia). Our work builds on the genealogies and trajectories of critical theory, postcolonial studies, and decolonial studies, in particular the feminist streams across them. We argue that engaging with the histories, experiences, ideas and practices of Indigenous scholars and activists based on Indigenous research principles and methodologies is crucial to developing new forms of collective knowledge production, solidarity and action in a world increasingly – literally – on fire, with multiple polycrises that have rendered most theories and strategies for social change more or less inoperative today.
In this seminar, we apply the concept of collaborative ontologies to our work with grassroots communities of artists in Port Harcourt (Nigeria), Ezbet Khairallah (Cairo, Egypt), and the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, to explore new ways of writing history from below, and building “counter-archives,” which feminist scholars describe as collective record keeping of radical and unauthorized stories (Salime, 2022; Dakhli, 2020). We argue that this is not a merely theoretical exercise. In fact, our argument is that only through sharing our most basic experiences of being-in-the-world can we develop authentically collaborative ways of knowing and acting in it, and through these activities finally move away from an increasingly necrocapitalist modernity, and towards a global political, economic, cultural, and discursive system that heals rather than destroys our world.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Mark Le Vine is Professor of modern Middle Eastern and African histories and cultures at UC Irvine and founding director of the Program in Global Middle East Studies. A 2020-21 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author and editor of a dozen books, most recently We’ll Play till We Die: Journeys Across a Decade of Revolutionary Music in the Muslims World (California, 2022), Altered States: The Remaking of the Political in the Arab World (Routledge 2023), and Art Beyond the Edge: Creativity and Conflict in a World on Fire (California, 2025)
Lucia Sorbera is Senior Lecturer and Chair of Discipline of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney. She published widely in history of Egyptian feminism, women’s political activism, and cultural productions in the Arab world, among them, the book Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures. Beyond Norms and Transgression from the Abbasids to the Present. Day (with Serena Tolino and Aymon Kreil, I.B. Tauris, 2021). Her forthcoming book, Biography of a Revolution. The Feminist Roots of Human Rights in Egypt, is published by University of California Press.
