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*2011 Annual Lecture
South Australia and Australia Reflections on their histories
The History Council of South Australia Annual Public Lecture 4 August 2011 at Napier Theatre 102, University of Adelaide.
Presenter: Dr John Hirst. Born and educated in Adelaide, Dr Hirst is well-known both for his wide-ranging historical scholarship (as evidenced in numerous books, including Adelaide and the Country 1870-1914, Convict Society and Its Enemies, and Sense and Nonsense in Australian History) and his willingness to participate in contemporary political and social.
*2010 Annual Lecture
Settler Societies
The History Council of South Australia Annual Public Lecture 27 July 2010 at the Ann & Basil Hetzel Lecture Theatre, Institute Building, State Library of South Australia ground floor.
The decades from the 1830s to the 1860s were a foundational period in Australian history, arguably at least as important as Federation. Convict transportation was brought to a staggered end, first in New South Wales and last in Western Australia. The numbers of free settlers rose dramatically, surging particularly with the 1850s gold rushes. Most colonies achieved Responsible Government: a dramatic shift from penal settlements to self-governing societies. Yet there is much that is little understood about how inhabitants of the Australian colonies perceived the growth of a free settler society from its convict origins, how ‘Australians’ understood their rapidly evolving place in a profoundly changing world.
With particular reference to South Australia as a systematic colony of free settlers, this lecture will look at the growth of a settler society in Australia. It will consider settlers and residents’ knowledge of and reactions to specific events around the British Empire, reactions to frontier conflicts in other colonies, and commentary on wars elsewhere. It will also consider gendered conceptions of the free settler, and ideas about what it meant to be a free ‘white’ settler in an empire based on racial hierarchies. Settlers’ placing of the maturing Australian colonies in imperial and global context casts light on what the transition to self-government in Australia meant both to them and to others.
Presenter: Professor Angela Woollacott Manning Clark Professor of History, Head, School of History The Australian National University.
*2011 About Time – South Australia’s History Festival
The historian’s dilemma: moral arbiter and/or objective observer?
The History Council of South Australia presented a panel session on 5 May 2011 at the Ann & Basil Hetzel Lecture Theatre, Institute Building, State Library of South Australia ground floor.
This panel session was part of the 2011 About Time History month program – South Australia’s History Festival, which ran through the month of May and marked the 175th anniversary of the foundation of South Australia.
The panel discussion considered notions of historical responsibility, approaches to past injustices, and the role of the modern historian in examining and explicating past events for present and future generations.
Speakers: John Bannon past-president of the History Council, former politician and premier, is the author of Supreme Federalist: the Political Life of Sir John Downer
Rosa Garcia is Education Manager at the Migration Museum
Alan Mayne a widely published social historian, is Head of School, David Unaipon College of Indigenous Research, University of South Australia
Rebecca Richards an Anthropology graduate from the University of Adelaide, will shortly commence studies in Oxford as Australia’s first Indigenous Rhodes Scholar
Moderator: Wilfrid Prest, President of the History Council
*The History Council Banner
Our new banner, designed by Alison Fort, seeks to represent something of the diverse historical themes, locations and periods in which members of the History Council are interested and involved.
As the peak body for history in this state we represent a broad membership, including secondary and tertiary history teachers whose professional concerns embrace history in the broadest sense.
So while the selection of images has a strong SA bias, it is not restricted to South Australian subjects. Images were drawn mainly from South Australian collections, but also from interstate and overseas. We are most grateful to the various rights-holders for permission to reproduce these images.
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*History Council Website Images
Each main page of this website features a distinctive pictorial image of South Australian life. Most of the original photographs reproduced here date from the first half of the twentieth century. The one exception depicts a relatively new aspect of the rural landscape in a state committed to reducing its former reliance on energy generated by fossil fuels.
We are most grateful to the State Library of South Australia, National Archives of Australia and a private collector for permission to reproduce these images.
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