Previous annual lectures

 2012

1977 and all that:
cricket's revolution as event, history and drama Gideon Haigh, journalist and author

In this talk about history and the drama of the 1977 World Series Cricket Revolution, well known cricket writer Gideon Haigh will discuss the Packer cricket circus as he remembers it, as he wrote about it at the time, and as it is about to be dramatized in the upcoming Channel 9 television mini series.  Gideon Haigh is one of the world's preeminent cricket writers. He has been a journalist for almost thirty years , and contributed to more than 100 newspapers and magazines; including the acclaimed The Cricket War: The Inside Story of Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket.

2011

 Mothers of the Revolution: Sex, Suffrage and the Birth of a Nation

Dr Claire Wright—Historian, Author and Public Commentator

At the turn of the twentieth century, one country audaciously broke global ranks by setting the gold standard for women’s citizenship rights.  For the first time in modern history, women could both vote and stand for election in a federal parliament, a high water mark in the international struggle for democratic equality.  That country was not at the heart of Empire.  It was not the Land of the Free.  That country was the world’s newest nation—Australia—admired and closely observed for its progressive pluck. Drawing on research from her upcoming ABC TV documentary, Utopia Girls, Dr Clare Wright will discuss the women and men who put Australia on the political map.  At a time when the global community is calling for leadership on climate change and humanitarian policy, Clare will reflect on how history is made—and all too easily forgotten.  Dr Clare Wright is an award-winning historian, author and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media.

2010

The Making of Modern Australia:  A People's History
William McInnes - Acclaimed Actor and Author

 The Making of Modern Australia is a landmark social history series that tell the big stories of post-war Australia through the eyes and the personal archives of those that live it - the people of Australia themselves.

William McInnes is one of Australia's most popular stage and screen actors and the author of A Man's Got to Have a Hobby (2005), Cricket Kings (2006) and That'd Be Right (2008).  His fourth book, The Making of Modern Asutralia, combines McInnes's laconic skills wih anecdotes and Australians.  It accompanies the television documentary series of the same name, narrated by McInnes and screened early in 2010 on the ABC.

2009

A Tasmanian in Victoria 

Martin Flanagan

Tasm

Tasmania and Victoria: two different states; two different histories; two very different psyches. Martin Flanagan was born in Tasmania in 1955 and graduated in law from the University of Tasmania in 1975. In 1985, he settled in Melbourne to work at the Age (where he has been ever since). Growing up in Tasmania, Flanagan was acutely aware of the great absences that define so much of the island state’s history—of histories buried, denied and hidden. On the mainland, by contrast, Victoria’s history seemed populated by great, grand narratives. Learn how, ultimately, Flanagan’s origins and his time in Melbourne came to influence and inform his view of contemporary Australia—and even his sports writing.

Paul Bateman is a freelance writer, former State Library Journalist, and Communications and Media Coordinator at the Victoria Law Foundation. His work has appeared on the ABC, in the Age and in various other publications and outlets.

2008

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'.

2007

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 colonisation.

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.