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 MelbourneAustralia – and even his sports writing. came to influence and inform his view of contemporary
Tasmania and Victoria: two different states;
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.
Annual Lecture 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'
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
