Dr Anna Clark’s 2016 Peter Tyler Oration left her PHA audience with an important challenge: how does the profession build the connections between people’s appetite to understand where they came from and the broader story of society’s historical development? This is the task uncovered by Clark’s research into ordinary Australians’ attitude to history. She conducted interviews … Read more

  … by Patricia Curthoys Over the past few years I have been involved, with William Emilsen, from Charles Sturt University, in editing a collection of Australian Methodist biographies (Patricia Curthoys and William W. Emilsen, Out of the Ordinary: Twelve Australian Methodist Biographies, Unley, MediaCom Australia, 2015). The collection was published in November 2015, one … Read more

  … Ian Willis recently gave a public lecture on the Liverpool Field Hospital and its involvement with the Red Cross at the Royal Australian Historical Society at History House in Sydney. ‘All in a muddle’ was how Mrs Isabelle Wallace Turner, the president of the Greenwich Red Cross, described the chaotic situation she witnessed … Read more

  Travelling across America, the country reveals a tapestry of contradictions. These were certainly evident in the lead up to Memorial Day, celebrated on the last Monday of May. In cemeteries and towns the bunting, flags and flowers come out, to remember the fallen and to welcome the beginning of summer. For some the weekend … Read more

  by Francesca Beddie… Like many visitors to Washington DC, my first stop was the National Mall. There on a wet week day, most people stood in awe of the Lincoln Memorial; a few braved the rain to walk the length of the sombre 247 feet (75 meters) of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. This is … Read more

  Imogen Dixon-Smith (Master of Museum & Heritage Studies, University of Sydney) explains how her prize-winning essay came to be… The development of the paper I submitted to the Public History Prize in 2015 started in a university subject I was taking titled ‘The Idea of Heritage’. I was set the task of pursuing a … Read more

  …by Stephen Gapps… The 17th of April 1816 is not a date etched in wider Australian memory nor even that of Sydneysiders concerned about their past. However it is imprinted in the memory of descendants of Dharawal and Gandangarra people who were massacred by a military expedition sent out on the orders of Governor … Read more

  Ian Willis visits an artists’ retreat… What has history got to do with an artists’ retreat you might ask? Quite a bit as it turns out. I was recently invited to address such a gathering at Varroville in New South Wales; it was quite an enlightening and stimulating occasion. The three-day 2016 Artists’ Retreat was … Read more