Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 29 November
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Must-Read Histories is marks the launch of a new website, History Speaks. Fully searchable and interactive, it features Australia’s leading historians discussing historical research, and the place of history in wider debates. In Must-Read Histories, History Speaks contributors ‘go live’ to discuss the question: what are the indispensable works of Australian history?
Which titles do our leading historians and writers nominate as the history books we should all read and know? Manning Clark’s A History of Australiaor Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore? Anne Summers' Damned Whores and God’s Police or Henry Reynolds' Why Weren’t We Told? Donald Horne’s The Lucky Countryor Tim Flannery’s The Future-Eaters?
Which works of art most acutely reveal the Australian experience? Does Peter Carey’s novel The True History of the Kelly Gang evoke the Kelly story better than any history? Is Kate Grenville’s Secret River a better evocation of first contact in Australia than Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers?
Books, monographs, plays, novels, even films and poetry are all up for discussion as the nation’s leading historians outline and debate their choices for the must-read texts on Australian history.
Stuart Macintyre, Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, chooses Brian Fitzpatrick’s The Australian Commonwealth(1956).
Marcia Langton, Professor of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, nominates Watkin Tench’s A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, in New South Wales, Including an Accurate Description of the Situation of the Colony; and of its Natural Productions; Taken on the Spot (1793).
And Tim Soutphommasane, Research Fellow at Monash University’s National Centre for Australian Studies, turns his eye toRussel Ward’s The Australian Legend (1958).
The event will be hosted by Dr Clare Wright from La Trobe University. Clare is a noted scholar (author of Beyond the Ladies Lounge) and public historian. She is well known to ABC audiences from The Einstein Factor, and next year presents her new ABC documentary Utopia Girls, which charts the story of how Australian women were first in the world to win full political equality.
Featuring
Stuart Macintyre
Stuart Macintyre has been chair of the Heritage Council of Victoria since 2015, and is regarded as one of Australia's most influential historians.
He's the former Dean of Arts at the University of Melbourne, and is Emeritus Laureate Professor of the University of Melbourne and a Professorial Fellow of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies.
Stuart was president of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia from 2007 to 2009. With Alison Ashford, he edited the Cambridge History of Australia (2013). His most recent book is Australia's Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s, published in 2015.
The Heritage Council of Victoria is an independent statutory body which identifies and protects places and objects of cultural heritage significance to the State of Victoria.
Tim Soutphommasane
Tim Soutphommasane is a political theorist and human rights advocate. From 2013 to 2018 he was Race Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission. His previous books include Reclaiming Patriotism, The Virtuous Citizen, Don’t Go Back To Where You Came From and I’m Not Racist But... He has been a columnist for the Age and the Weekend Australian.
Marcia Langton
Professor Marcia Langton AM holds the Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Her doctoral fieldwork was conducted in eastern Cape York Peninsula during the 1990s, and her experience of the statutory land claim and native title system in this region was informed by a decade of administration and fieldwork in the Northern Territory. She was awarded a PhD from Macquarie University in 2005. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences of Australia, a member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and the Chair of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership.
She is the editor of a new book: Community Futures, Legal Architecture: Foundations for Indigenous Peoples in the Global Mining Boom, published by Routledge. This book brings together in one volume the critical research and thinking from academic and practitioner colleagues over the last five years.
Clare Wright
Professor Clare Wright OAM is an award-winning historian, author, broadcaster, podcaster and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media.
Clare ...