Ranking Australia's Prime Ministers: an exercise in interpretation
The Hon. Dr Barry Jones AO
Our public discourse, such as it is, and our democratic ethos, rests on the assumption of a common memory, a common context, shared understanding and experience. Sometimes confidence in this can be shaken. Australian history has become a battleground in which political partisans claim ownership of our past. Most history debates have been crude and superficial, compounded by a shallow grasp of historical detail. Geoffrey Bolton observed that to a seventeen year old, Paul Keating was medieval history, Bob Hawke was ancient history and Bob Menzies was pre-history. Of Australia's 26 Prime Ministers only a handful are remembered.
Writer, lawyer, social activist, quiz champion and former politician, Barry Jones has been described as one of Australia's 'Great Minds'
JANET McCALMAN & LEN SMITH Fractional Identities: The Political Arithmetic of Aboriginal Victorians
The story of how a team that included an Aboriginal genealogist, a demographer and a medico, as well as historians and computer specialists, recreated the history of Aboriginal Victoria, and uncovered the hidden political arithmetic of colonization.
2006
ROBERT MANNE Australia and Turkey: Uncomfortable Thoughts on Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide
2005
TOM HARLEY Creating a National Heritage List
2004
GRAEME DAVISON The Cars That Ate Melbourne: Triumph and Tragedy in the History of the Postwar City
Nothing changed Melbourne in the late twentieth century as much as the car. Yet the car is now so taken for granted that we do not recognise that it has a cultural and political history.
Annual Lecture
Ranking Australia's Prime Ministers:
an exercise in interpretation
The Hon. Dr Barry Jones AO
Our public discourse, such as it is, and our democratic ethos, rests on the assumption of a common memory, a common context, shared understanding and experience. Sometimes confidence in this can be shaken.
Australian history has become a battleground in which political partisans claim ownership of our past. Most history debates have been crude and superficial, compounded by a shallow grasp of historical detail. Geoffrey Bolton observed that to a seventeen year old, Paul Keating was medieval history, Bob Hawke was ancient history and Bob Menzies was pre-history.
Of Australia's 26 Prime Ministers only a handful are remembered. This lecture sets out to identify turning points in Australia's history and relate these events to the Prime Ministers who both shaped them and were shaped by them.
Writer, lawyer, social activist, quiz champion and former politician, Barry Jones has been described as one of Australia's 'Great Minds'
Don't miss the opportunity to hear one of Australia'sfinest thinkers and public speakers
