The Menzies Australia Institute Early Career Researcher Panel, EASA 2019
The European Association of Studies in Australia (EASA) 2019 Conference starts today at the Universite de Toulon, France. I have convened this multidisciplinary panel with art historian and curator Helen Idle, historian Meg Foster and creative writer - me! Our abstracts and blogs are below.
ALTER/NATIVE APPROACHES TO INDIGENOUS HISTORIES, REPRESENTATION AND CREATIVE PRACTICE
The Menzies Australia Institute Early Career Researcher Panel
EASA 2019, Universite de Toulon, France
Sheridan Humphreys, PhD Candidate, Menzies Australia Institute, King’s College London (Convenor)
Dr Helen Idle, Associate Fellow, Menzies Australian Institute, King’s College London
Meg Foster, PhD Candidate, UNSW and Visiting Researcher, Cambridge
ABSTRACTS
Helen Idle
Helen.idle@kcl.ac.uk | hidle@mac.com
THEORY INTO PRACTICE: OUTSIDE IN
In a Manchester library a story of James Cook is locked behind glass; it is a first edition of Hawkesworth’s 1777 account of the voyage that came to shore at what is now Australia. The journal recounts the British voyage outwith the Pillars of Hercules and is held within the collection of The Portico Library, a purpose-built independent library established in 1806.
This paper outlines an intervention staged in that library to propose possible connections between ideas that led to Cook’s voyage and ideas encountered on that voyage, to challenge dominant narratives about James Cook’s voyages of ‘discovery’.
Ideas were exchanged locally, brought back to Europe and incorporated into existing knowledge systems. Or were overwritten or ignored.
The methodology of the intervention was cast as a decolonising manoeuvre to promote multiple knowledges that could be found in The Library. Holdings were linked to accounts of the voyage to trouble epistemological assumptions and so encourage alternative understandings of what knowledges were abroad at this time. Here we may approach and acknowledge indigenous knowledge systems that are beyond the edges of Europe but came to inform new meaning-making and ideas.
This contributes to the discourses generated by Brook Andrew’s upcoming Sydney Biennale 2020 Nirin (Wiradjuri word translates as ‘edges’) that places Indigenous languages and ontologies central to meaning-making within an established mode of exhibition. In both situations new space is created in an existing space whereby the dominant ecology can be challenged physically and intellectually.
Helen Idle
Dr Helen Idle: PhD (Australian Studies) King’s College London 2017; MA Visual Culture, University of Westminster 2005. Helen is a Project Curator and Research Associate at Menzies Australia Institute, King’s College London. Helen produced Entwined: Knowledge and Power in the Age of Cook (2018) for The Portico Library. She contributed a chapter to Castejon, etal, Ngapartji, Ngapartji. In turn, In turn: Ego-histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia (ANU Press, 2014); published in Meanjin (73:3, 2014) and was co-editor of Australian Studies Journal on Australian Art (7, 2015). She ison the Editorial Advisory Board for Australian Studies Journal (Zeitschrift für Australienstudien).
Meg Foster | meg.foster@unsw.edu.au
MARY ANN BUGG: AN INTERSECTIONAL LIFE
In the mid-nineteenth century, colonial Australians were presented with a problem in the form of Mary Ann Bugg. The Aboriginal ‘wife’ of famous bushranger Captain Thunderbolt threatened white properties and lives when she helped her spouse in his daring escapades. She rode and dressed like a man, butchered cattle and undertook strenuous physical labour, but no one could deny that she was still very much a woman. Her feminine beauty did not escape the attention of contemporaries, her children accompanied her and Thunderbolt through the bush and colonial newspapers referred to Mary Ann the way that she described herself; as ‘the Captain’s Lady’.
How then, did white Australians deal with such a troublesome woman? How did they approach a person who challenged, conformed and complicated their beliefs about race, womanhood and masculinity in almost equal measure?
These are the questions that this paper will answer. In doing so, it will reveal the messy, complex, yet very real way that action and imagination worked together to shape Aboriginal women’s lives in the nineteenth century.
Meg Foster
Meg is a PhD candidate in History at the University of New South Wales, Australia and is currently a Visiting Student at the University of Cambridge. Under the supervision of Professor Grace Karskens and Professor Lisa Ford, Meg is investigating the ‘other’ bushrangers (Australian outlaws who were not white men) in history and memory. After completing her honours-thesis on Indigenous-bushrangers-in-2013, Meg worked-as a researcher with the Australian Centre of Public History at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, such as the 2018 Aboriginal History Award from the History Council of NSW and a King’s College Bicentennial Scholarship in 2017. She was also the inaugural winner of the Deen De Bortoli Award in Applied History for her article, ‘Online and Plugged In?: Public history and historians in the digital age’ featured in the Public History Review (2014). As well as her PhD, Meg works as an historical consultant and has a particular interest in making connections between history and the contemporary world.
Sheridan Humphreys | sheridan.humphreys@kcl.ac.uk
“TWO WEALTHY EUROPEAN WOMEN TRAVEL FROM ENGLAND TO AUSTRALIA WITH THEIR YOUNG ABORIGINAL SERVANT SEATED ON THE GROUND BESIDE THEM IN THIS 19TH CENTURY ILLUSTRATION”
This paper will detail how research inspired by one picture impacted a multi-disciplinary approach to screenwriting scholarship, a historiographical and creative process that is also a way of confronting indigenous invisibility, and doing something about it.
In 2019, a beautifully illustrated book was published: Women: Our History, with a foreword by none other than Lucy Worsley and a few pages by Sheridan Humphreys (ie, me). On page 193, in the section about women emigrants to Australia and New Zealand during the settler colonial period, there was an intriguing picture with the above caption.
As a starting point to inspire a fictional story, this is a perfect image. The source is mysterious, the artist unknown, there is a huge question over the location and the destination, and the identities are unconfirmed or obscured. One woman is Black, two women are White. Perhaps it is 1888, perhaps not.
I wrote and researched these pages for Women: Our History, where the image with this caption appeared, but I did not choose the image. It became a starting point to develop a fictional story. Perhaps the image chose me.
Because it also revealed something troubling to my practice-led research: in my aim to try to write Indigenous Australian protagonists in a fictional historical drama set in Britain, in my obsession to write leading roles in historical drama for actors of colour, I forgot something. I made my character a young man. I forgot all about gender. This paper will explore how and why that mattered.
Sheridan Humphreys
I grew up in Sydney, Australia and Kundiawa, Papua New Guinea. Now I live on the edge of a farm in Surrey, England with my dog Shaz, a retired greyhound. I am a creative writer and researcher and my work includes plays and screenplays. I am currently a Visiting Lecturer in Screenwriting at the University of Greenwich and at Royal Holloway,University of London and working on a practice-led PhD in Screenwriting at the Menzies Australia Institute, King’s College London.
www.sheridanhumphreys.com
Meg Foster, Helen Idle and Sheridan Humphreys
