BLACKHEATH HISTORY FORUM PROGRAM 2023

13th May                    Wendy Whiteley & Ashleigh Wilson – Conversations About Art, Life and Gardening
10th June                   Frank Bongiorno – Dreamers and Schemers
8th July                       Richard Fidler – The Book of Roads and Kingdoms
12th August              Ann McGrath,  Jakelin Troy  – the Language of Deep History
2nd September       Mina Roces: The Filipino Migration Experience (History @ The Pub)
9th September        Meg Foster – Boundary Crossers
14th October           Noah Riseman – Transgender Australia
11th November       Alecia Simmonds – Stories of Love from the Archives of Law

Wendy Whiteley & Ashleigh Wilson in conversation

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. (Bookings open mid-April)

Mina Roces: The Filipino Migration Experience

We have one more History @ the Pub event in September.

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

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.