From television, film and multi-media, through to heritage projects and commissioned histories, opportunities for professional history practice in Australia have become increasingly diverse in both application and form.
This one day workshop will explore a number of public and professional arenas in which historians are applying their wide-ranging skills and scholarship.
Practitioner historians will discuss and illustrate their own experience of working across a variety of environments - in the electronic media, through to museums practice, as commissioned historians, and in the very public context of walking history tours.
Speakers will demonstrate the application of scholarship and multi-disciplinary skills in these specific public and professional history projects, and reflect and discuss the challenges and pleasures of ‘making' and ‘doing' history outside the academy.
Sessions and Speakers
9.30am - 10.30am Making History on the Small Screen
ABC TV is currently producing a two part series exploring the history of Australian settlement, through the stories and lives of the ‘rogues gallery' of characters who constituted the fledging colony from 1788. The presenter of the series is historian and broadcaster Michael Cathcart, who will discuss the challenges and complexities of producing histories for the small screen.
11am - 12pm Making History Inside Museums
The curators of The Melbourne Story, Museum Victoria's new permanent exhibition, sought fresh ways of showing things that people are already familiar with. Lead Curator Deborah Tout-Smith will discuss the pleasures and pitfalls involved in creating the exhibition, and reflect on the relationship between objects and interpretation in the re-visioning of a museum space.
12pm - 1pm Telling Digital Stories
Historian Corinne Manning will talk about her own experience of making digital oral histories, as part of La Trobe University's Kew Cottages History Project. Corinne will discuss the opportunities being made available to utilize both audio recordings and images in new digital production formats to tell personal and collective histories. This is a burgeoning area in community and professional history practice, as technology opens up new methods and larger audiences for the creation and reception of histories.
2pm - 3pm Walking into History
Historian Seamus O'Hanlon takes his knowledge of Melbourne's inner city urban and social history ‘to the streets', in walking history tours around the city's inner suburbs. Seamus will discuss the pleasures of bringing history to life on foot, of the visceral way the past can be ‘seen' in the present, through streetscapes and sites, and how history can be embodied in urban built heritage.
3pm - 4pm Creating Commissioned Histories
Members of the Professional Historians Association of Victoria (PHA) will offer insight into the process involved in producing a commissioned history. From tendering for a commission, sourcing archives, conducting research and collecting oral history, through to planning and writing a manuscript, working with a steering committee and bringing a book to publication, the greatest challenge is often balancing the wants and needs of the commissioning agent with one's own experience as an historian.
Date: Thursday 10 July, 2008
Time: 9am -4pm
Venue: State Library of Victoria Conference Centre
