BLACKHEATH HISTORY FORUM PROGRAM 2023

14th October           Postponed – Noah Riseman – Transgender Australia
25th November       Alecia Simmonds – Stories of Love from the Archives of Law

Entry: $10 Waged; $5.00 Unwaged.

Tickets for each event can be purchased online through Humanitix, the Australian owned humane event ticketing platform that donates all profits from booking fees to children’s charities. Tickets will also be available at the door. Card and cash payments accepted.

*New Date* Alecia Simmonds – Stories of Love from the Archives of Law 

We have a new date for this talk!

Award-winning author Alecia Simmonds uncovers a hidden history of love and heartbreak in the archives of law

When: Saturday 25th November, 4PM (doors open 3.30pm)
Where: Blackheath Public School Hall, Leichhardt St, Blackheath, NSW
Entry: $10 waged $5 unwaged
Online bookings here with a limited number of tickets available at the door.

We accept card and cash payments.
Afternoon tea: cash payments are appreciated at the afternoon tea table, but you can also buy cake vouchers ($3 each) and coffee/tea vouchers ($3 each) along with your entry at the door when you arrive.

Until well into the twentieth century, heartbroken men and women in Australia had a legal redress for their suffering: jilted lovers could claim compensation for ‘breach of promise to marry’. Hundreds of people, mostly from the working classes, came before the courts, and their stories give us a tantalising insight into the romantic landscape of the past – where couples met, how they courted, and what happened when flirtations turned sour. In packed courtrooms and breathless newspaper reports, love letters were read as contracts and private gifts and gossip scrutinised as evidence.

In Courting, Alecia Simmonds brings these stories vividly to life, revealing the entangled histories of love and the law. Over the long arc of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pre-industrial romantic customs gave way to middle-class respectability, women used the courts to assert their rights, and the law eventually retreated from people’s romantic lives – with women, Simmonds argues, losing out in the process. Challenging our preconceptions about how previous generations loved and lost, and prompting fascinating questions about the ethics of love today, Courting is a transcontinental journey into the most intimate corners of the past.

Dr Alecia Simmonds is a senior lecturer in law at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her first book, Wild Man, won the 2016 Davitt Prize for best nonfiction crime writing. She has been the recipient of prestigious academic grants and her writing has appeared in publications including The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Arena and Inside Story.

The October 14th talk by Noah Riseman has been postponed because of the Federal Referendum.

Noah was to speak on his newly published book on Australian trans history exploring the lives and impacts of trans and gender-diverse Australians. Transgender Australia: A History Since 1910 will be launched in Sydney at the Gender Centre in Marrickville, 12 October at 6.15 for a 6.30 start.

Trans and gender diverse people have always been present in Australian life, whether they’ve lived quiet lives in the country, performed in cabaret shows, worked on the streets or run for parliament. But over the last century there have been remarkable changes in how they have identified and expressed themselves. Transgender Australia is the first book to chart the changing social, medical, legal and lived experiences of trans and gender diverse people in Australia since 1910.

Drawing on over a hundred oral history interviews and previously unexamined documents and media reports, it highlights how trans people have tried to live authentically while navigating a society that often treated them like outcasts. It is the first book to chart the history of gender diverse Australians, exploring both progress and ongoing battles. It is also a celebration of ways that transgender participation has enriched our lives in all its cultural diversity.

About the Author

Noah Riseman is Professor of History at Australian Catholic University, where he specialises in Australian histories of sexuality, gender and race.

He is author or co-author of five books, including: Defending Country: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Military Service since 1945 (2016); Serving in Silence? Australian LGBT Servicemen and Women (2018); Indigenous Peoples and the Second World War: The Politics, Experiences and Legacies of War in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (2019); Pride in Defence: The Australian Military and LGBTI Service since 1945 (2020) and Transgender Australia: A History Since 1910 (2023).

Dr Meg Foster – Crossing Bushrangers: hidden stories from Australia’s colonial past

The second History Week feature on the 9th of September is back at the Blackheath Public School Hall.

Bookings are closed.

History @ the Pub – Mina Roces: The Filipino Migration Experience

As part of History Week 2023 we have one more History @ the Pub event on 2nd September at Gardners Inn in Blackheath.

Bookings Closed

Mina Roces will be speaking to her book The Filipino Migration Experience which introduces a new dimension to the usual depiction of migrants as disenfranchised workers or marginal ethnic groups. She tells the story of the Filipino migration experience from the perspective of the migrants themselves, tapping into hitherto underused primary sources from the “migrant archives” and more than 70 interviews. Bringing the fields of Filipino migration studies and Filipina/o/x American studies together, this book analyzes some of the areas where Filipino migrants have forever changed the status quo.

Mina Roces is Professor of History at University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She is author of Women’s Movements and the Filipina, 1986-2008, Kinship Politics in Postwar Philippines, and Women, Power, and Kinship Politics

The History Week theme for 2023, Voices from the Past, is an opportunity to engage with the histories of those who were often voiceless in the past such as women, migrants, workers, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Sometimes these voices were once heard but now sit forgotten in archives. At other times they have been ignored or all but erased.

Enjoy interesting conversation along with good food and drink at Gardners Inn, Blackheath, the oldest continuously licensed hotel still trading in the Blue Mountains. After the talk stay for a meal at one of the best Pub Food locations in the area, their Beef & Guinness Pot Pie is a signature treat.

Pub talks – $15 (includes one drink), 4 pm Saturday, 2nd September. Book through Humanitix or pay at the door. Eftpos and cash are accepted.

Ann McGrath, Jakelin Troy – Everywhen: Australia and the language of deep history

Bookings are now closed.

Saturday, 12th Aug 2023 Editors Ann McGrath & Jaky Troy reflect upon the idea of ‘EveryWhen’, a new collection on Australian Indigenous ideas about time and deep history..

Everywhen asks how knowledge systems of Aboriginal people can broaden our understanding of the past and of writing and performing history. Indigenous ways of knowing, narrating, and re-enacting the past in the present blur the distinctions of time, making all history now. Significantly, questions of time and the language of Country are at the heart of Indigenous sovereignty. In Australia, and much of the western world, history has been conceived of too narrowly. History is not as straightforward – or as recent – as some might think.

Ann McGrath is Professor of History and Director of the Research Centre for Deep History at ANU. She co-ordinated the history project of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2017. Her books include Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia (2015) and Born in the Cattle (1987),
Jaky Troy is Professor of Linguistics and Director, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research Portfolio at the University of Sydney. She is well-known for her work on Aboriginal languages through her book The Sydney Language (1994), in retrieving the language of her own people, the Ngarigu of the Snowy Mountains, and in introducing Indigenous languages into school curricula. .

Laura Rademaker is an ARC DECRA research fellow in the school of history at ANU. Her research focuses on Australia’s Indigenous history, religion and gender in Australia. She is interested in cross-cultural engagements through history, as well as how history writing itself can become more cross-cultural. Her first book, Found in Translation (2018), was awarded the Australian Historical Association’s Hancock Prize.
All talks will be held in the Blackheath Public School Hall in Leichhardt St, Blackheath, NSW.

Talks start at 4 pm, doors open 3.30 pm for our famous afternoon tea, selling coffee, tea and cake.
Entry: $10 waged $5 unwaged

Online bookings preferred but a limited number of tickets are available at the door.
We accept card and cash payments.
Afternoon tea: cash payments are appreciated at the afternoon tea table, but you can also buy cake vouchers ($3 each) and coffee/tea vouchers ($3 each) along with your entry at the door when you arrive.
Payment can be made at the door or you can book in advance online.

Writer-broadcaster Richard Fidler returns to the Blackheath History Forum with his latest work The Book of Roads and Kingdoms.

Saturday 8th July 4 pm

Bookings are closed for Richard Fidler

The Book of Roads & Kingdoms is the story of the medieval wanderers who travelled out to the edges of the known world during Islam’s fabled Golden Age; an era when the caliphs of Baghdad presided over a dominion greater than the Roman Empire at its peak, stretching from North Africa to India. Imperial Baghdad, founded as the ‘City of Peace’, quickly became the biggest and richest metropolis in the world.

“Fidler expertly weaves together these beautiful and thrilling pictures of a dazzling lost world with the story of an empire’s rise and utterly devastating fall.”

Entry: $10 waged $5 unwaged
All talks will be held in the Blackheath Public School Hall in Leichhardt St, Blackheath, NSW.

Online bookings preferred but a limited number of tickets are available at the door. We accept card and cash payments.
Talks start at 4 pm, doors open 3.30 pm for our famous afternoon tea, selling coffee, tea and cake.
Afternoon tea: cash payments are appreciated at the afternoon tea table, but you can also buy cake vouchers ($3 each) and coffee/tea vouchers ($3 each) along with your entry at the door when you arrive.

Frank Bongiorno – Dreamers and Schemers

Saturday, 10th June

“A work of political history like no other, Dreamers and Schemers will transform the way you look at Australian politics.”

In this compelling and comprehensive work, renowned historian Frank Bongiorno presents a social and cultural history of Australia’s political life, from pre-settlement Indigenous systems to the present day.  Depicting a wonderful parade of dreamers and schemers, Bongiorno surveys moments of political renewal and sheds fresh light on our democratic life. From local pubs and meeting halls to the parliament and cabinet; from pamphleteers and stump orators to party agents and operatives – this enthralling account looks at the political insiders in the halls of power, as well as the agitators and outsiders who sought to shape the nation from the margins.
All talks will be held in the Blackheath Public School Hall in Leichhardt St, Blackheath.

Talks start at 4 pm, doors open 3.30 pm for our famous afternoon tea, selling coffee, tea and cake.

Entry: $10 Waged; $5.00 Unwaged. Card and cash payments accepted.
Afternoon tea: cash payments are appreciated at the afternoon tea table, but you can also buy cake vouchers ($3 each) and coffee/tea vouchers ($3 each) along with your entry at the door when you arrive.
Payment can be made at the door or you can pay in advance online.

Bookings are now closedfor Frank Bongiorno 

Wendy Whiteley & Ashleigh Wilson in conversation

Bookings now closed.

Saturday, 13th May will be the start of our main season featuring Wendy Whiteley & Ashleigh Wilson in conversations about art, life and gardening.

All talks will be held in the Blackheath Public School Hall in Leichhardt St, Blackheath.  Talks start at 4 pm, doors open 3.30 pm for our famous afternoon tea, selling coffee, tea and cake.

Entry: $8 We accept card and cash payments.

Afternoon tea: cash payments are appreciated at the afternoon tea table, but you can also buy cake vouchers ($3 each) and coffee/tea vouchers ($3 each) along with your entry at the door when you arrive.

Payment can be made at the door or you can book in advance online.

Peter Doyle & Nancy Cushing:  Suburban Noir: Crime & Mishap in the 1950s & 1960s.

Small-time heists. Love gone wrong. Murder and misadventure. The forensic records of everyday crime and catastrophe constitute a special class of material culture. As the by-products of detailed observation, as mappings of domestic relationships and the often twisted enactments of human desires, they present as a kind of accidental historical ethnography. The researcher into the forensic past (in my case, Sydney of the 1950s and 60s) is confronted with almost unimaginable masses of potentially revealing, contradictory, sometimes baffling, often ethically complicated material culture. The forensic archive seems to offer so much evidence, so many answers, the research problem becomes, at least in part, to find the question that the material answers.

Peter Doyle is a non-fiction writer and novelist. He has curated major exhibitions on pulp publishing and forensic material cultures. His books include Suburban Noir (2022), City of Shadows, (2005) and Crooks Like Us, (2009), and the novel The Big Whatever (2015). He is the recipient of two Ned Kelly Awards for his fiction, as well as a Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award. He is an Honorary Associate Professor of Media at Macquarie University, Sydney.

Nancy Cushing is Associate Professor in Australian History at the University of Newcastle with research interests in Australian environmental history and the history of Newcastle. Her most recent book is A History of Crime in Australia.

Heidi Norman – The Voice to Parliament: reform, compromise and history.

Professor Heidi Norman shares her research on the decision to focus effort on achieving a constitutionally enshrined Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ‘voice’ to Parliament. Reflecting on past struggles such as the political decisions and strategy that underpinned the 1967 Referendum campaign, Norman argues the ‘Voice’ is a carefully considered political strategy that sidesteps difficult reforms to achieve manageable and practical change.

Professor Heidi Norman is a leading researcher in the field of Australian Aboriginal political history, a historian who draws on anthropology, political-economy, cultural studies and political theory. Her research has included histories of the NSW Annual Aboriginal Rugby League Knockout, the social and economic impact of mining on Gomeroi lands and people and economic impacts on Aboriginal lives in cities. Her books include What Do We Want? A Political History of Aboriginal Land Rights in NSW (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2015) and Does the media fail Aboriginal political aspirations? 45 years of news media reporting of key political moments (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2019). Recent research has been focused on the social, economic, and cultural benefits of Aboriginal land repossession in NSW and current research documents the political history of Aboriginal Affairs from 1980-2025. She is from the Gomeroi nation of northwestern NSW.