Annual General Meeting
HCSA's Annual General Meeting 2025
The HCSA's 23rd Annual General Meeting will be held on the 15th of October 2025 at the Historian Hotel, Adelaide.
Join us from 5.30pm for a 6pm meeting start, and for a talk by Dr Heidi Ing, 2025 Historian of the Year, on the art of collaborating for history.
Register your attendance here.
All financial members are eligible to nominate members of the General and Executive Committees. To nominate, please use this form.
HCSA's Annual General Meeting 2024
The HCSA's 22nd Annual General Meeting was held on Wednesday, 16 October, at the Historian Hotel, Adelaide.
There was a strong turnout of members, and new executive and general committees were elected.
We would like to acknowledge and thank all committee members who are exiting their roles for their hard work over the last few years: Caroline Adams, Heidi Ing, Helen Chadwick and Patricia Michel.
The night featured a talk by the 2024 Wakefield Press Essay Prize winner, Amanda Wells on “Halting Chowilla Dam: a tale of drought, salt, science and politics in 1960s South Australia”
Abstract:
Chowilla Dam was proposed in 1960 by Premier Sir Thomas Playford as the solution to South Australia’s water woes. By the time its construction was put on hold in 1967, the era of grand engineering spectacles had passed, Playford was out of office, and the River Murray basin was in the grips of a severe drought, causing water quality and quantity to plummet. This talk will explore the tale of the doomed dam, and examine how shifting sciences, political-economics, and ecologies saw the once lauded plan fall by the end of the 1960s. The talk is based on the 2024 Wakefield Press Essay Prize winning article “Halting Chowilla Dam: Salt, Science, and River Murray Politics in the 1960s.”
Bio:
Amanda Wells is an environmental historian whose PhD research with the University of Newcastle examines the environmental and more-than-human history of citrus growing in the Riverland in the 1950s and 1960s. Amanda is an active member of many Australian and South Australian history organisations, including the Australian and Aotearoa NZ Environmental History Network, the History Council of South Australia, the Friends of South Australia’s Archives, and the Professional Historians Association (SA). Amanda lives and works in the Barossa Valley, on Ngadjuri Country.
