Professor James Belich

Professor Belich will be speaking on ‘The Settler Revolution’

From 1815, with start-dates varying across frontier regions, European long-range settlement changed pace and character. It speeded up, shattering non-European tribal societies that had survived European contact for generations, and began to drag in masses of technology and money, as well as migrants. Previously, 'normal' settlement had taken a century or two to create substantial cities; this new explosive form of settlement created great settler cities in a couple of decades. The prime beneficiaries of explosive settlement were English-speakers - in the US West and in what became the British dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. What caused this 'settler revolution' and why did it favour English-speakers? This paper contests the view that rational choice and/or growth-friendly institutions were the key factors. It summarizes an alternative explanation, emphasizing ideology and technology, offered in my recent book, Replenishing the Earth; The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-world, 1783-1939.

Professor James Belich obtained his doctorate at Oxford while on a Rhodes Scholarship then worked as an historian and university lecturer in New Zealand. He held the Inaugural Keith Sinclair Chair in History at the University of Auckland and is currently Research Professor of History at the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington. He has held visiting positions at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Georgetown, and Melbourne. His previous books, all award winners, include a two-volume history of New Zealand, Making Peoples and Paradise Reforged, and The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, which won the Trevor Reese Prize in Commonwealth History in 1988 and was later made into a television documentary series. His latest book is Replenishing the Earth; The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-world, 1783 -1939 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009). It provides a new interpretation of the European settlement of North America and Australasia.

Emeritus Professor Geoffrey Bolton

Professor Bolton will be speaking on 'Throwing Stones at People in Grass Castles?' addressing the rise and criticisms of the overlander legend, with special reference to Mary Durack.

Professor Geoffrey Bolton is a graduate of The University of Western Australia and The University of Oxford. He has held academic posts at six Australian universities between 1957 and 1996 and was foundation professor of Australian Studies at The University of London from 1982 to 1985. He was ABC Boyer lecturer in 1992 and Western Australian Citizen of the Year (professions) in 2003. He was Chancellor of Murdoch University 2002-06 and is still a researcher at that university. Professor Bolton is the author of many books and articles and he has been General Editor of the prestigious, five-volume Oxford History of Australia and author of volume five of that series. He is working currently on a biography of Sir Paul Hasluck.

Dr Ross McKibbin

Dr McKibbin will be speaking on 'Britain and Australia: Historical Comparisons and Contrasts'.

Dr Ross McKibbin is one of Australia's most eminent historians, a Sydney undergraduate who then made his career at St. John's College, Oxford. He is a fellow of the British Academy.  In 2008, he gave the Ford lectures, the most prestigious in his field, in Oxford and they will be published in 2010 by OUP.  McKibbin's most celebrated work, Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951 (OUP, 1998 with many further editions), is a classic, arguably the best social and cultural history of any society over two generations.  McKibbin is also a splendid essayist, frequently featuring in the London Review of Books, where his trenchant exposures of the lies and hypocrisy of New Labor send tremors through the British government.  Ross has always retained a deep personal and intellectual contact with Australia, regularly visiting Sydney and reading widely on a comparative basis about his country of origin, so ambiguously 'British' in its own class and culture.

Professor Pat Grimshaw

Professor Grimshaw will be speaking on  ‘Rethinking Approaches to Women in Missions: The Case of Colonial Australia’

Professor Grimshaw’s major areas of research have included Pacific history, the history of the United States West, and women’s and family history in Australia. Her books include Women’s Suffrage in New Zealand, 1987 [1972] and Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth Century Hawaii, 1989. Among her co-authored publications is Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Societies, 2003, and among her co-edited, Women’s Rights and Human Rights, 2001. She is currently completing two books. One focuses on gender and race in the colonies of Australasia. A second, jointly written with Shurlee Swain and Ellen Warne, is a history of working mothers in Australia since 1880. This will be called Balancing Acts: Women, Breadwinning and Childcare in Twentieth Century Australia and is based on archival and interview materials. Her most recent project is a history of missions in Australia from 1820 to 1940.

Professor Andrew Porter

Professor Porter will be speaking on 'Evangelical Visions and Colonial Realities'

Professor Porter held the Rhodes Chair of Imperial History in the University of London from 1993 to 2008. From 1979 to 1990, he edited the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. He has published widely and is frequently invited to speak abroad. Professor Porter’s main interests lie in the history of Britain’s empire since the late eighteenth century, in its growth, its decline, and in the consequences which these developments have had both for the British themselves and for other peoples around the world. His most recent publication Religion versus Empire? British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion 1700-1914 (Manchester University Press, 2004) was awarded the Biennial Reese Memorial Prize in 2006 for a wide ranging scholarly work in the field of Imperial and Commonwealth history. Professor Porter has also explored imperial themes for wider audiences, editing and contributing chapters to The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1999), and the Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 8: c.1815-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2006) among others.

Dr Mike McCarthy

Dr McCarthy will be speaking on ‘At the junction of a national malaise: History, society and politics in the search for HMAS Sydney’

Michael McCarthy, a member of the Department of Maritime Archaeology at the Western Australian Maritime Museum, has extensive experience with archaeology and history relating to shipwreck sites and associated issues. He leads the Museum’s HMAS Sydney/HSK Kormoran studies and was part of the inspection team after the two wrecks were found. In close association with conservation specialists, Dr McCarthy led the interdisciplinary studies at the wreck and land camps associated with the Dutch East India ship Zuytdorp, and the iron-hulled SS Xantho. He led the ‘Australian Contact Shipwrecks’ program, a study designed to examine the impact of shipwrecked peoples on the indigenous population and an indigenous maritime depictions project. He has also supervised the study of port-related structures and lighthouses along the Western Australian coast. He initiated and led the award winning ‘outreach’ and ‘wreck access’ programs catering for public access to materials and to sites. Dr McCarthy has published extensively on iron and steamship archaeology, on archaeology and history and on maritime archaeological sites.