My first foray into the mainstream press was both stimulating and disconcerting. A version of the article appeared here in The Guardian on 8 July. But my original is pasted below... Bangarra’s current production Bennelong opened last week, and tells the first contact story of the Aboriginal warrior. It is exquisite, captivating, quick-paced and deeply moving. But … Continue reading Bennelong’s Contested History
Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspectives on Exploration Archives. Edited by Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent, and Tiffany Shellam. Canberra: ANU Press and Aboriginal History Inc., 2015. Pp. 205. A$33.00. This books ends with Len Collard and Dave Palmer discussing indigenous terms for ideal approaches to history-making. The Noongar’s sense of kanya and the Kimberley people’s notion of … Continue reading Review of Indigenous Intermediaries
Endeavouring Banks: Exploring Collections from the Endeavour Voyage. Edited by Neil Chambers. Sydney: New South Publishing, 2016. Pp. $69.99 hardcover. The catalogue to a major exhibition held in Lincoln, UK, this sumptuous publication about the Endeavour’s collections also serves as a valuable contribution to eighteenth-century Pacific history. The exhibition of the same title was held … Continue reading Review of Endeavouring Banks
Last year I was honored to launch the latest book by my friend and collaborator, Mike McDonnell. The transcript is below. You are all Mike’s friends and colleagues, so you probably know—or you should know—the basic gist of this book. If you don’t: it’s about the Native Americans who live at the top end of … Continue reading Masters of Empire
When I joined the Modern History Department at Macquarie University, I did not realize how many members were into swimming. By odd coincidence, I spent a good deal of my early years swimming at national competitions. My new colleagues spotted a vulnerability and soon I was also part of their Saturday morning racing down at … Continue reading Swimming
Until late 2021, I am the Lead Chief Investigator in a large collaborative project called "Facing New Worlds." This project is generously funded by the Australian Research Council's Linkage Scheme and housed in the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. It involves researchers from Macquarie University, the University of Sydney, and the Australian National University, and turns around … Continue reading Comparative Portrait Project
Growing up a land-locked swimmer: musings on oceans, pools and coaching [published in T. Evans, ed., Swimming with the Spit (Sydney: NewSouth Press, 2016). My mum was a poor swimmer. She had migrated to Australia from England in 1964, and remained permanently worried about being ‘out of her depth’. She had heard that all Australian … Continue reading My Spit Chapter
Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin. The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016. Pp. 353. $49.50. “For more than two hundred years,” the authors of this timely new book state, “people have loved to hate Thomas Robert Malthus” (1). The formulator of the bitterest … Continue reading Review of The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus
Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire. By Coll Thrush. The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016. 328 pages. Cloth. Like its cover image of three Cherokees traversing a London pedestrian crossing, this book is arresting and intriguing, and it successfully challenges ongoing assumptions about where and how … Continue reading Review of Indigenous London
Tanya's Spit book came out around the same time as the 2016 Summer Olympics. I joined the Olympic bandwagon and turned some of my musings into a piece for The Conversation: As we head into the summer Olympics in Rio, many Australians will be looking forward to the swimming events in particular. As they do they … Continue reading Conversational Swimming
