Bulletin

Issue: August 2005

News

La Trobe at History 'Olympics'

La Trobe University was strongly represented at the recent 'Olympics of History' – the largest group of historians and scholars from related disciplines ever assembled in the Southern Hemisphere.

Held in Sydney and opened by the then NSW Premier, Bob Carr, the 20th International Congress of Historical Sciences drew 1,500 delegates from more than 70 countries. The five-yearly event had previously always been held in Europe or America.

La Trobe participants included University Vice-Chancellor and classical scholar, Michael Osborne; Head of Historical and European Studies, archaeologist Tim Murray; historians Marilyn Lake and Angus McGillivery; classicist Sean Byrne and philosopher, Behan McCullagh.

Sponsored session

La Trobe University also sponsored the major congress session on Ancient History: The Foreigner in Antiquity. It was led by Professor Michael Osborne and included leading scholars from the UK, USA, Belgium, Greece and Denmark as well as Sean Byrne from La Trobe University.

Professor Osborne is a well-known classical scholar specialising in Greek history and epigraphy and he was most recently honoured in Australia by the prestigious NIKE Award for services to Hellenic Studies.

His work, Naturalisation in Athens, published by the Belgian Royal Academy, deals with the problems of integrating foreigners into the State in antiquity. It is regarded as the definitive work of scholarship in its field.

Professor Osborne with Sean Byrne has also carried out a comprehensive study of the inhabitants of ancient Athens, in two volumes, published as A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names Volume II Attica (Oxford) and The Foreign Residents of Athens (Leuven).

Professor Osborne is a foundation member of the International Advisory Committee for a project publishing all the known inscriptions of ancient Athens and with Sean Byrne is currently producing the two volumes encompassing the third century BC.

Milestones in archaeology

Professor Tim Murray addressed a session, History, Anthropology and Archaeology, convened by Alain Schnapp. Director of the National Institute for the History of Art in Paris, Professor Schnapp, was awarded an honorary doctorate by La Trobe after the congress (see next page).

Professor Murray's primary research is in the history and philosophy of archaeology, and he is editor of the multi award-winning five-volume Encyclopedia of the History of Archaeology. His new history of archaeology, Milestones in Archaeology is to be published late this year. One of his research projects in urban archaeology was recently selected as one of seven from throughout Australia by the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences for its report on commercialisation for Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, (see previous issue of the Bulletin). Professor Murray spoke to the conference about the relationship between archaeology, history and anthropology.

Citizenship and gender

Professor Marilyn Lake – whose research interests include the historical and trans-national representation of race and gender – was invited to join an international panel of historians to discuss the theme 'Civil Society: Citizenship, Gender and the Public Sphere'. Her most recent book was the prize-winning biography FAITH Faith Bandler Gentle Activist.

Professor Lake currently holds an Australian Professorial Fellowship and is writing three books: A New World for White Men; Special Friends: Fraternal Yearning Across the Pacific; and Mr Deakin's Tragedy. She is also editing a collection of papers for the Australian Academy of the Humanities called Memory, Monuments and Museums, based on the Academy's last annual symposium the Narrative Constraints on Historical Understanding at a session titled Between Social Science and Literature: the Changing Place of History. He argued that simple historical narratives must be augmented by psychological, ideological, structural and other contrastive explanations if the importance of the events they describe are to be fully understood.

Soils and fields

Associate Lecturer in History, Angus McGillivery, gave a paper titled, Soils and Fields: Material Culture and the Spacial Patterning of the British Settlement of New South Wales, providing a new perspective on early agriculture and land settlement. A Western District farmer and passionate historian, Mr McGillivery is completing a PhD on 'Agricultural Imperialism in the Antipodes: Convicts, Cultivation, and Transference of Civil Society' under the supervision of La Trobe Professor of History, Alan Frost.

Book launch

The conference also provided an international platform to launch a new book by La Trobe historian, Dr Jim Hammerton. Titled Ten Pound Poms: Australia's Invisible Migrants, it was launched by Michelle Rayner from the ABC History Unit. The book is based on a five-year, two-nation research project into post-war British migrants in Australia, and was co-authored with Dr Alistair Thompson from Sussex University.

Previous launches of the book were at Australia House, London, and at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, where it was launched by Shadow Immigration Minister, Julia Gillard.