PUBLIC LECTURE BY PROFESSOR ANN CURTHOYS

‘Looking for gender? Writing Aboriginal-settler relations into Australian political history’ by Professor Ann Curthoys, University of Sydney

Thursday 16 June, 3:30pm,
Building 19, Room 1056
University of Wollongong

Following the lecture, Professor Curthoys will launch Claire Lowrie’s new book:

Masters and Servants: Cultures of Empire in the Tropics,
Manchester University Press, 2016

Thursday 16 June 2016, 5pm
LHA Research Hub, Building 19, Room 2072
University of Wollongong

Looking for gender? Writing Aboriginal-settler relations into Australian political history
When writing colonial political history, most of the time, the historical actors we consider are male. Whether they are Indigenous leaders or pastoral labourers, missionaries, pastoralists, convicts, free immigrants, British officials, or intellectuals debating questions of Aboriginal policy and colonial governance, they are usually men. Women are always there, as members of both Indigenous and settler societies, but very rarely as visible or individually named political actors.  My lecture will explore the challenges of putting both colonialism and gender into Australian political history, creating what the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner called “a single field of life”.

Biography
Ann Curthoys is an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney and the University of Western Australia. She was formerly Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University and an ARC Professorial Fellow at the University of Sydney. She works on Australian history in an international context, and on questions of history, theory, and historical writing. Her books include Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers; (with John Docker) Is History Fiction?; (with Ann McGrath) How to Write History that People want to read.