2025 Book + Author
COMING UP
PAST EVENTS - catch up on our Book+Author events by checking out the blog below
27 February 2025
On Thursday 27 February, our first Book+Author event of the year was held in the downstairs salon of Bard's Apothecary, with Dr Geraldine Fela joining convener Dr Yves Rees in conversation about her 2024 publication, Critical Care.
The art-filled walls and low ceilings made for an intimate feel as our convener Dr Yves Rees took us on a journey into the role of nurses in the 1980s AIDS crisis.
We started the conversation with a discussion of what motivated the research; Geraldine explaining that within the queer community, the AIDS epidemic is present as "a very dark time thats always hovering in your community, that you dont always know a heap about."
Geraldine decided to interview nurses because she noticed a notable gap in the research - there are many studies and memoirs about the role of doctors, but nurses had been left out of the picture: "I want to give a voice to those who havent had one." Nurses, Geraldine told the audience, were often on the front line of extrememly punitive policies, for example detaining people the Department of Health had determined as dangerous to public health.
Looking at the role of nurses in the AIDS epidemic, discovered Geraldine, somewhat problematised the narrative of world-leading best practice that has been circulated about Australia's response to AIDS.
The conversation moved on to methodology, particularly Geraldine's use of oral history, an emotionally demanding mode of research. "I really hated it in the end... it was quite intense," said Geraldine. But, it is important, because you can "use it to breathe life into documentalry evidence."
We ended the conversation by drawing paralells to the recent COVID-19 epidemic and other public health crises. The AIDS epidemic highlighted how community led responses are the most effective - "giving people the tools they needed to fight disease" - a lesson that, sadly, wasnt consistently carried into the COVID pandemic, said Geraldine.
By HCV Publicity Officer, Molly Mckew
Dr Yves Rees and Dr Geraldine Fela
Taking an audience question
Our wonderful audience arriving for the event
31 October 2024 - Cruel Care: A History of Children at Our Borders
“How can we make people see state-sanctioned violence against children?”
That was just one of the incisive questions posed to Dr Jordana Silverstein by a highly engaged audience at our recent Book+Author event, the last for the year. As the author of Cruel Care: A History of Children at Our Borders, Jordana spent years interviewing those who develop, promote and implement repressive policies in the name of child protection. Her insights were striking.
Jordana’s answer to that question was perhaps startling but certainly clarifying. She suggested we expand our political imaginations, and start by not separating out children in our discourse. “Exceptionalising children serves to demonise parents,” she noted, emphasising links to other policies devised by white authorities, from the “Children Overboard” scandal to the Northern Territory Intervention.
As always, it was a broad sweep of ideas and conversation at Book+Author. These conversations, guided by Yves Rees, are always engrossing, shedding new light on history and how historians work, and even finding some humour in unlikely places. (As Yves noted, “children and disturbing things” was perhaps an apt theme for our Halloween gathering, while Jordana got a wry laugh when she noted the “bonkers rationalising” she heard from those in power.)
Jordana shared her own path, from the granddaughter of Holocaust refugees to a historian exploring refugees, delving into child protection, and now focussing on statelessness, informed particularly by Patrick Wolfe’s development of settler-colonial theory. It was their focus on refugee children that made archived social-worker case files from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s open for scrutiny. Jordana shared her discomfort with this “rich but complicated” source. While so valuable to her research, she noted that equivalent files for non-refugee children would not have been publicly available, given privacy protection for Australian citizens.
Beyond archival material, Jordana undertook extensive interviews with the policymakers and bureaucrats associated with these policies. These formed the core of Cruel Care.
While some people refused interview requests, others agreed, albeit sometimes requiring approval over final use. Inevitably, some of the most revealing slips and observations didn’t make it into the book. Many interviewees were “surprisingly forthcoming”, according to Jordana, which led to interesting speculation on what motivates such candour. There are true believers justifying their actions and those who respect the need to create a full record. There are those wishing to spin the record and others perhaps just wanting to be heard.
As Yves prompted, it must be challenging to sit with people who have been “reprehensible in their public life”, especially those being generous with their time and hospitality. While Jordana acknowledged these sessions could be difficult, she emphasised that the task of the oral historian requires a professional respect. As she put it, “The task of the oral historian is to sit and listen … to support the person to tell their story.” Nonetheless, she left us pondering “the utility of what we [oral historians] do”.
For those wanting to explore these ideas further, Cruel Care is a powerful and highly readable book. Jordana’s current work is also available on the podcast “Being Stateless: An Oral History Podcast”.
This was the last Book+Author for the year. We have been lucky to enjoy such a diverse and stimulating range of conversations and highlighted books for our return to in-person events. The 2025 series is now being planned – we look forward to sharing details with HCV friends and followers in due course.
By HCV executive officer Stephanie Holt
Dr Yves Rees and Dr Jordana Silverstein
Dr Jordana Silverstein
29 August 2024 - The Floating University: Experience, Empire & The Politics of Knowledge
On Thursday, 29 August the HCV was lucky to host historian and author Dr Tamson Pietsch at our fourth Book+Author event for the year. Tamson spoke about her fascinating book The Floating University with convener Dr Yves Rees.
Yves introduced Tamson with the promise of a book that was both "intellectually sophisticated" and "a wonderful Jazz Age jaunt". Tamson added that this tale of a "floating university" of American students and educators was an authorial obsession that grew from a chance discovery.
The floating university began as the brainchild of Professor James Edwin Lough, a pioneer of experiential pedagogy, although its sponsoring university had pulled out before the ship set sail with its 500 passengers, 350 of them American university students. The project promised a shipboard education and enriching on-shore experiences, but as Dr Pietsch argued, served largely to reinforce a narrative of American progress and exceptionalism as it voyaged through Cuba, Panama and Hawaii, on to South East Asia and Japan, and finally to Europe. Even so, baseball and basketball losses to overseas teams shook national pride, and at least some of the students began challenging received wisdom during what Tamson dubbed their "Great Gatsby Gap Year".
Along the way, this lively conversation delved into the history of university credit courses, the changing economics of international shipping, and the impact of emerging US newspaper conglomerates, which were happy to elevate standard campus hijinks into scandalous national headlines.
If there was a key takeaway for the audience, Dr Pietsch suggested that those inside a university bubble might get better at listening to people unlike themselves to understand what knowledge might be - and that a history of ideas required thinking about and studying failure.
Dr Tamson Pietsch (l) and Dr Yves Rees (r) in conversation.
Tamson and Yves with the History Council of Victoria's intern Harper Hamilton-Grutzner, Communications Officer Molly McKew, and Chair Prof. Peter McPhee, preparing for the Book+Author event.
27 June 2024 - Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aeoearoa New Zealand
On Thursday night the Wheeler Centre debuted its new workshop space with our Books+Author conversation between Dr Yves Rees and Dr Alexandra Roginski. Our largest live audience to date heard a fascinating account of phrenology, its popularity and its popular manifestations in nineteenth century Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. As Alexandra Roginski pointed out, phrenology arose alongside popular fascination with new sciences such as evolution, and the public grappled with The Origin of Species, science became entertainment, and “scientist” emerged as a professional identity. We met a cast of “colourful, eccentric and disturbing” characters (in Yves’s pithy summary). We heard how they practised phrenology in arcades, packed lecture theatres and private studios, competing for audiences, and “quack-calling” each other, in Alexandra’s memorable phrase. Despite its apparently determinist foundations, Alexandra offered stories of people of colour for whom phrenology shows provided work, income and an opportunity to burlesque ideas of racial difference, and women who built careers and supported networks of kith and kin through work as popular phrenologists. In a reflection on the historian’s craft, Alexandra also shared that she loves “works that reflect on the practice, limitations and mysteries of what we do”.
By HCV Executive Officer, Stephanie Holt
Dr Alexandra Roginski, Dr Yves Rees, and HCV Book+Author attendees
Yves and Alexandra in conversation
18 April 2024 - Bennelong and Phillip: A History Unravelled
Our second Book+Author seminar of the year took place on Thursday 18 April at The Wheeler Centre, located within the State Library of Victoria. After an introduction and acknowledgement of country by HCV chair Peter McPhee, Dr Yves Rees spoke with author and historian Kate Fullagar, author of Bennelong & Phillip, about the inspiration behind her focus on these particular figures in Australian history and the challenges and benefits of "writing history backwards". Fullagar discussed considerations such as writing a history of Bennelong "without it being another form of cultural appropriation" and offered some reinterpretations of the lives of Bennelong and Phillip – presenting a new reading of Bennelong as a loyal and beloved leader of his community. The talk was concluded with an audience Q&A, where, among other things, Fullagar delved into Phillip's surprisingly unconventional relationships with women. Thank you to Dr Kate Fullagar, Dr Yves Rees and Dr Peter McPhee for a fascinating discussion of a colonial relationship that is much mythologised but little understood.
By HCV Publicity Officer, Molly Mckew
Emeritus Professor Peter McPhee AM with author Dr Kate Fullagar and convener Dr Yves Rees
Kate and Yves in conversation
29 February 2024 - Courting: An intimate history of love and the law
Our first Book+Author seminar of the year took place on Thursday, 29 February at The Wheeler Centre, in the State Library of Victoria. After an introduction and acknowledgement of country by HCV chair Peter McPhee, Dr Yves Rees spoke with Dr Alecia Simmonds, award-winning historian, about her book Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law (La Trobe University Press, 2023). Simmonds discussed the importance of personal letters in historical research, what drew her to the cases detailed in the book, and the class aspects of the ways in which we understand history. "Histories of love", said Simmonds, "have traditionally been told by the bourgeoisie". Simmonds went on to explore the ways in which histories of love and marriage in Australia are intertwined with settler colonialism and asked contentious questions about whether the decline of marriage really is a win for women in a society which, she suggested, does not "take seriously the ethics of love".
By HCV Publicity Officer, Molly Mckew
Emeritus Professor Peter McPhee AM with author Dr Alecia Simmonds and convener Dr Yves Rees