Vere Gordon Childe Lecture. Hannah Forsyth – Virtue Capitalism
When: Sat 12th Oct 2024, 4:00 pm (doors open 3.30pm)Where: Blackheath Public School Hall
Entry: $10 Waged, $5 Unwaged
What Max Weber called the ‘Protestant Ethic’ was already an important value shaping work across the 19th century English speaking world, but the growing professional class took virtue even further, hoping to entangle social and economic profit. It did not always turn out as they expected, however, so that since the 1970s, major reforms disrupted the economy they built. Hannah Forsyth’s new history of how white-collar professions grew to prominence sheds new light on twentieth century economic organisation. It helps to explain several aspects of our present world, including conservative antagonism to experts, including Australia’s ‘teal’ independents. This Gordon Childe lecture follows in the footsteps of scholars like Childe, who have been interested in the material underpinnings of class and inequality.
Shortlisted for the 2024 NSW Premier’s History Awards General History Prize. The Judges’ comments – Hannah Forsyth’s fascinating study deploys a fresh analytical lens to chart the development of an important historical phenomenon across time. Focused on the broad historical development of the professional middle class and its social logic, Virtue Capitalists is theoretically sophisticated, empirically wide-ranging and strongly argued. It provides fresh and stimulating insights into the rise and fall of the professional expert as a figure of authority and power. In doing so, it greatly enriches our understanding of contemporary life.
Hannah Forsyth is a historian of work, education and capitalism based in the Blue Mountains. She was Associate Professor of History at the Australian Catholic University until late 2023 and is now working part-time for Jobs and Skills Australia, as well as pursuing freelance writing. Hannah is author of Virtue Capitalists (Cambridge 2023) and A History of the Modern Australian University (NewSouth 2014).
You can follow her writing at hannahforsyth
Catherine Bishop – The World We Want: Cold War Teens Talk Politics
When: Sat 9th Nov 2024, 4:00 pm (doors open 3.30pm)Where: Blackheath Public School Hall
Entry: $10 Waged, $5 Unwaged
For 25 years of the Cold War the New York Herald Tribune World Youth Forum flew 30 specially selected teenage boys and girls from around the world (including Australia) to New York. For 3 months, they lived with American families, attended American schools and debated world issues on television (now available on YouTube). Feted as future leaders (which many became), delegates met celebrities, politicians, diplomats, and sometimes the President. Catherine Bishop’s latest book brings to life the story of the Forum and its impact on these impressionable teens.Historian Dr Catherine Bishop is the author of Minding Her Own Business, which won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize, Women Mean Business and Too Much Cabbage and Jesus Christ. She is currently researching a history of Australian businesswomen since 1880. The World We Want is her most recent book.
PAST EVENTS
Dr Alexandra Roginski – Touching the Town: Popular Phrenology and Charismatic Careering in the Tasman World
When: Sat 14th Sep 2024, 4:00 pm (doors open 3.30pm)
Where: Blackheath Presbyterian Church Hall 123-125 Wentworth St, Blackheath NSW 2785
Entry: $10 Waged, $5 Unwaged
2024 History Week: Marking Time
*Please note the venue is changed due to Local Government Elections using the School Hall.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a cadre of self-appointed professors and ‘madames’ took the popular science of phrenology into even the smallest new settlements in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Claiming to judge innate character and intellect from head shape, these performers – who often hid sordid pasts – injected chaos and levity into the towns they visited in exchange for small incomes and a touch of authority. In this presentation, Dr Alexandra Roginski will explain why phrenology – a science contested from its outset – held such a firm grip on the public imagination well into the twentieth century, and will introduce some of the men and women who refused to let it go.
Dr Alexandra Roginski is a historian, writer and heritage consultant based on Wurundjeri Country in Bulleke-Bek (Brunswick, Victoria) who studies ideas and practices of the body in earlier times. She is the author of two books: Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Cambridge, 2022), and The Hanged Man and the Body Thief: Finding Lives in a Museum Mystery (Monash University Publishing, 2015). She has published academic journal articles and chapters and written for titles including the Times Literary Supplement, the Australian Book Review and The Age. Alex is a Visiting Fellow of Deakin University and a former CH Currey Memorial Fellow of the State Library of New South Wales, where she carried out a research project on histories of self-improvement.
History Week 2024
Dr Alexandra Roginski – Touching the Town: Popular Phrenology and Charismatic Careering in the Tasman World. Saturday 14th Sep 2024 at the Blackheath Presbyterian Church Hall.
Kate Laing – Sisters in Peace: Women and Pacifism in Australia
When: 7th Sep 2024, 4:00 pm (doors open 3.30pm)
Where: Gardners Inn Hotel
Entry: $15 (includes one drink)
Bookings
2024 History Week: Marking Time
Is preparing for war the best means of preserving peace? This question has never been solely the concern of politicians and strategists. In 1915, during the First World War, the Women’s International Congress at The Hague was convened after alarmed and bereaved women from both sides of the conflict insisted that their opinions on war and the pathway to peace be heard. From this gathering emerged the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which to this day campaigns against militarism and nuclear weapons. In Australia, the formation of a section of WILPF connected political women to a worldwide network that sustained their anti-war activism. This talk will give a glimpse into the activities of the group throughout the twentieth century.
Dr Kate Laing received her PhD from La Trobe University and has published on Australian feminist history in peer-reviewed journals. She has worked at various universities teaching Australian history and as a researcher and project officer. She is currently working in the Public Service.
Pub talks – $15 (includes one drink), Sat 7th Sep 2024, 4:00 pm. Book through Humanitix or pay at the door. Eftpos and cash are accepted.
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.
Shannyn Palmer – Deep listening in a time of truth-telling on Angas Downs Station
When: Sat 10th Aug 2024, 4:00 pm (doors open 3.30pm)
Where: Blackheath Public School Hall
Entry: $10 Waged, $5 Unwaged
Angas Downs is a pastoral station in Central Australia, but pastoralism is only a fraction of the story of this place. Like all places, it has accrued people and stories, in multiple layers, over time. Listening to Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack and Sandra Armstrong, two Anangu with deep and abiding connections to the station, a very different kind of place emerges from that conjured in myths and histories of pioneers and pastoralists that have shaped understandings of the past in Australia. Drawing on the experiences and perspectives shared by Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack and Sandra Armstrong in Unmaking Angas Downs: myth and history on a Central Australian pastoral station, this talk will explore the transformative power of deep listening for historical research and writing in a settler colonial nation.
Shannyn Palmer is a community-engaged practitioner, facilitator and award-winning writer living and working on the Ancestral lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. She works with cultural institutions and communities to facilitate ethical community engaged practice and enable meaningful intercultural collaborations. She is particularly interested in community engaged practice as a methodology for disrupting settler colonial systems and knowledge. She has a PhD in History from the Australian National University and her first book, Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station, won the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History and the 2023 Northern Territory Chief Minister’s History Book Award.
Andy Macqueen – Making incursions: a Frenchman goes exploring.
When: Sat 13th Jul 2024 4 pm (doors open 3.30pm)
Where: Blackheath Public School Hall
Entry: $10 Waged, $5 Unwaged
The July Forum coincides with NAIDOC Week from the 7th to the 14th July, 2024, which celebrates and recognises the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
The only serious official attempt to cross the Blue Mountains was by Ensign Francis Barrallier, a French refugee, in 1802. He failed, but left us with a wonderful account of his incursions into Gundungurra country. In doing so, he was one of the first Europeans in the colony – perhaps THE first – to record the notion of Aboriginal ownership of country. Barrallier had bright prospects in the colony but fell victim of the feuding between his fellow Rum Corps officers and Governor King. His talents were employed in West Indies instead. In speaking to his new book, “The Frenchman”, Andy Macqueen will argue that Barrallier’s French origin and associations influenced his undertakings and his fate in the colony, and will discuss whether his understanding of Aboriginal people and their rights differed from those of his English masters.
Andy Macqueen is a respected Blue Mountains historian, and a past member of the Blackheath History Forum committee. He is also a committed conservationist, and was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for his work in that field. He has produced six history books and many articles including several peer-reviewed papers published by the Blue Mountains Association of Cultural Heritage Organisations. His topics include colonial exploration and first-contact history, surveying history and conservation history. His latest book, The Frenchman: Francis Barrallier, life and journeys 1773-1853, is a major overhaul of his 1993 book Blue Mountains to Bridgetown. It presents much new content, and fresh perspectives.
Graeme Davison
Listen, Our Ancestors! Family History and the Lure of the Deep Past
When: Saturday 8th June 4 pm (doors open 3.30pm)
Where: Blackheath Public School Hall
Entry: $10 Waged, $5 Unwaged
Family history is the oldest kind of history and still the most popular. Thanks to the advent of DNA analysis and the digital revolution, thousands of ordinary people now pursue the pleasant sport of ancestor hunting. Why do they do it and what do they expect to find at the end of the trail? As a critical observer of how Australians use the past, Graeme Davison has long been interested in understanding the family history boom, but only in retirement did he research his own family history. In Lost Relations (2015) and My Grandfather’s Clock (2023) he reflects on the intersections between family history and national history and investigates such topics as the significance of heirlooms, the value of DNA and the digital archive, travelling the land and searching for the ‘deep past’. In the process, he also finds a different authorial voice, one that blends the critical methods of the historian and the search for personal identity.
Graeme Davison is Emeritus Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor of History at Monash University. He is best known for his writing on Australian urban and social history where his books include The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (1978 and 2005), The Unforgiving Minute (1994), Car Wars (2005) and City Dreamers (2016).
Kate Fullagar
Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled
When: Saturday 11 May, 4PM (doors open 3.30pm)
Where: Blackheath Public School Hall
Entry: $10 Waged, $5 Unwaged
Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled
Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colony’s first governor, and Bennelong the Yiyura leader. Fullagar’s new book gives an account of both men’s lives, and it challenges many misconceptions, among them that Bennelong became alienated from his people and that Phillip was a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence. To present this history afresh, Bennelong & Phillip relates events in reverse, moving beyond the limitations of typical Western ways of writing about the past, which have long privileged the coloniser over the colonised.
Bio:
Kate Fullagar FAHA is professor of history at the Australian Catholic University. She is also co-editor of the Australian Historical Association’s journal, History Australia. Her most recent book is Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Kate specializes in the history of the eighteenth-century world, particularly the British Empire and the many Indigenous societies it encountered. She is the award–winning author of The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (New Haven, 2020) and The Savage Visit (Berkeley, 2012); the editor of The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century (Newcastle, 2012); and co-editor with Michael McDonnell of Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age (Baltimore, 2018).
Rachel Franks
Robert Howard: A Colony’s Noseless Hangman
When: Saturday 6 April, 4PM (doors open 3.30pm)
Where: Gardners Inn, Blackheath
Entry: $15
Robert Howard: A Colony’s Noseless Hangman
Robert Howard (1832–1906) used to be a household name. Today, the noseless hangman – better known as ‘Nosey Bob’ – who sparked fear and fascination everywhere he went is largely forgotten. In this forum, Rachel Franks will detail how the longest-serving executioner for New South Wales, is central to understanding changing attitudes towards capital punishment in Australia. Nosey Bob is a compelling figure in the story of Sydney. More importantly, he is a critical chapter in the history of how generally enthusiastic spectators at early executions were overtaken by campaigners for the abolition of the death penalty.
Dr Rachel Franks holds PhDs in Australian crime fiction from Central Queensland University and true crime texts from the University of Sydney. A qualified educator and librarian, her extensive work on crime fiction, true crime, popular culture and information science has been presented at numerous conferences as well as on radio and television. An award-winning writer, her research can be found in a wide variety of books, journals, magazines and online resources. She is the author of An Uncommon Hangman: The Life and Deaths of Robert ‘Nosey Bob’ Howard (NewSouth, 2022).
Pub talks – $15 (includes one drink), 4 pm Saturday, 6 April 2024. Book through Humanitix or pay at the door. Eftpos and cash are accepted.
Payment can be made at the door or you can book in advance online.
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.
