Sub sections:
John Ferry Lecture
The John Ferry Lecture is an annual public lecture which honours the memory and work of UNE's Dr John Ferry (1949-2004).
After a successful career in primary education, John Ferry was appointed to the Armidale College of Advanced Education in 1986 and, following the amalgamation of the CAE with the University of New England, he joined the UNE School of Classics, History and Religion (now the School of Humanities) in 1995. Throughout his working life, Dr Ferry was a committed and exceptional historian in his chosen areas of local, family and applied history. He created and taught, among others, units on heritage conservation and architectural history in which he drew upon his own experience as a published local and public historian. He wrote books for use in schools, produced an impressive raft of heritage conservation studies and reports, and was in constant demand to assist local councils and community groups to increase their awareness and use of local heritage assets. His prize winning book, Colonial Armidale, is regarded by many leading Australian historians as the best and most innovative local
history written in Australia.
The mixing of history and heritage, of people and the built environment, of analysis and description were key elements of Dr Ferry’s scholarship and practice as an historian. He also believed in the important contributions made by family and community members and the need to ensure their ownership of their history and heritage. He brought these concerns and experience to his involvement with the Heritage Futures Research Centre and it is fitting that the Centre’s annual public lecture should be given in his memory.
Past Speakers:
2005: Sharon Sullivan
2006: Professor Graeme Davison (King's College, London), 'Heritage in Retreat?' (4 April 2006)
2007: Mike Smith (National Museum of Australia and the Australian National University), ‘People and Place on a Desert Frontier: Aboriginal History in Western Central Australia, 1850-1980’ (25 October 2007)
2008: Dr Denis Byrne, Department of Environment and Climate Change, 'Divine Heritage: the Place of the Supernatural in the Popular Valuation and Conservation of Thailand’s Religious Heritage' (17 April 2008)
2010: Dr Neville Ritchie, Department of Conservation, Waikato Conservancy, 'Frozen Heritage: Antarctic History, Archaeology and Conservation Work' (28 September 2010).
2006
Professor Graeme Davison (King's College, London), 'Heritage in Retreat?'
ABSTRACT: The 1970s and 80s were a golden era for the built heritage in Australia. The creation of the Australian Heritage Commission, the passage of state legislation to protect historic sites and buildings and the growth of the heritage profession were outward signs of its prosperity. Since the 1990s, however, the heritage movement has entered more troubled waters. The peak heritage organisations, such as the National Trust, have lost membership and influence, while both state and federal governments, bowing to neo-liberal economic doctrines, have become more reluctant to use coercive state power to protect the heritage. Yet, whether it is mountain cattlemen protesting their exclusion from alpine national parks, or suburban residents railing against 'inappropriate development', 'heritage' remains a popular ideal.
The Australian Government's new Heritage Council, with its proposed elite register of national heritage sites, and the Productivity's Commission's recent report on the costs and benefits of heritage are two recent indications of the shifting grounds of heritage debate in Australia. What do they presage for the future of the built environment in Australia? Is heritage in retreat or just adapting to new circumstances?
Graeme Davison is a Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor at Monash University. He recently retired from the School of Historical Studies and is now Director of the Monash University Centre at King's College London. He has published widely in Australian History where his publications include The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (1978, revised edition 2004), The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time (1994) and Car Wars: How the Car Won Our Hearts and Conquered our Cities (2004) which was awarded the Nettie Palmer Prize for non-fiction in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. He has been prominent for many years as a teacher, advisor and commentator on heritage, museums, archives and other aspects of public history. He initiate d the Monash Master's program in Public History and was the founding director of the Monash Institute for Public History. His books A Heritage Handbook (coedited, 1991) and The Use and Abuse of Australian History (2000) draw upon his experience as a former chair of the Heritage Council of Victoria, councillor of the National Trust and advisor to the Commonwealth on World Heritage. He has been a member of the advisory council of the National Archives of Australia and an historical advisor to the National Museum of Australia. He recently co-edited Yesterday's Tomorrow's: The Powerhouse Museum and its precursors (2005).
2007
Mike Smith (National Museum of Australia and the Australian National University), ‘People and Place on a Desert Frontier: Aboriginal History in Western Central Australia, 1850-1980’
ABSTRACT: Heritage is a difficult concept, an unstable mix of history, community sentiment, identity and politics. A strong, nuanced, appreciation of local history can ground a community. Lose this and heritage easily slips sideways into nostalgia, sentimental nationalism, or a loose antiquarianism. But the nexus between place and identity is a perennial and very human concern. John Ferry appreciated this. His wonderful book ‘Colonial Armidale’ is a masterpiece, resonating with good humour and scholarship. In this lecture, I draw on my more modest book ‘Peopling the Cleland Hills’ to explore another colonial situation, another set of historically shifting relationships between people and place. Western Central Australia - where the long valleys of the McDonnell Ranges open out into sand hill and spinifex country - is one of those rare regions where documentary records provide a detailed picture of the dynamics of the desert frontier. The journals of explorers, police and government surveyors, as well as anthropological records and genealogies, allow us to follow the history of individual Kukatja families, to watch as historical processes on this frontier play out over a century, as desert people migrated into pastoral stations and ration depots on the frontier, and the colonial authorities attempted to stem this flow of people. My history - like that of John Ferry - is anchored deeply in place. My aim in writing ‘Peopling the Cleland Hills’ was to watch historical events play across the landscape, following the fortunes of Aboriginal people associated with the area on the one hand, and on the other exploring the broader historical forces shaping and re-shaping its cultural and natural landscapes.
|
|
Dr Mike Smith, an archaeologist, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Historical Research, National Museum of Australia, and Adjunct Professor, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University. In 1988, he was the first student to gain a PhD in prehistoric archaeology at UNE. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Society of Antiquaries (London). In 2006 the Australian Archaeological Association awarded Mike the Rhys Jones Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Australian Archaeology. 'Peopling’ the Cleland Hills: Aboriginal history in western Central Australia, 1850–1980, was published by Aboriginal History Monographs in 2005. |
2008
Dr Denis Byrne (Department of Environment and Climate Change), 'Divine Heritage: the Place of the Supernatural in the Popular Valuation and Conservation of Thailand’s Religious Heritage'
ABSTRACT: Popular religion, with its emphasis on the magic-supernatural, is a key factor in the way that archaeological objects and sites are contextualised within contemporary local culture in Thailand. The failure of most heritage practitioners to acknowledge this reality disenfranchises the majority of the population from having a meaningful voice in heritage conservation and is a major obstacle to conservation policies having real traction at a local level. An explanation for this situation is sought in the history of Asia’s modernising program and the campaigns against ‘superstition’ mounted by the region’s centralised nation states from the second half of the 19th century. Modern Asian states have attempted to operationalise a Western style secular-sacred binary. In Thailand this leads to Buddhist temples being assigned to the sphere of the sacred while other old or ancient structures are assigned to the fields of archaeology and art history. At an official level there is a presumption that the supernatural and rationalism are mutually incompatible. In the unruly world of popular practice, however, people happily deploy the discourses of archaeology, antiquarianism and the magical virtually simultaneously. By taking upon itself the responsibility of policing the meaning of objects and places, archaeological heritage practice risks becoming a stranger to the reality of local understandings of ‘place’. Alternatively, by opening its eyes to the prevalence of the magical supernatural in popular practice, it gains access to a materiality which is more complex, more alive, and ultimately more interesting
|
Denis Byrne leads the research program in culture and heritage at the Department of Environment and Climate Change NSW. He is also adjunct professor at the TransForming Cultures Centre, University of Technology Sydney. His research interests and publications cover the areas of intangible heritage, Aboriginal post-contact archaeology, the heritage of racial segregation in NSW, and the history heritage discourse in Australia. Following his PhD research at the Australian National University he has maintained an interest in the history and politics of heritage conservation in Southeast Asia. Current research includes a study of cultural diversity as a factor in the perception and use of parklands in southwest Sydney. His 2007 book, Surface Collection, consists of a set of archaeological travel essays set in Southeast Asia. |
|
Dr Neville Ritchie, Department of Conservation, Waikato Conservancy, 'Frozen Heritage: Antarctic History, Archaeology and Conservation Work'
ABSTRACT: Dr Neville Ritchie has been involved in archaeological and conservation work in Antarctica since 1986. He has made seven trips, totalling eight months, to the Ross Dependency, the New Zealand-administered part of Antarctica, to survey and work on the heritage sites associated with the Scott and Shackleton polar expeditions in the first decades of twentieth century. Dr Ritchie's presentation will outline the history of polar exploration, the surviving heritage sites of the so called 'Heroic Era', and the major and on-going archaeological and conservation project that is currently underway under the auspices of the Antarctic Heritage Trust.
Dr Neville Ritchie, a University of Otago graduate has been involved in archaeology since 1968 when he took part in excavations as a school boy. In 1977 he was appointed project archaeologist on the Clutha Power Project, a position he held for 10 years until the completion of the project in 1987. For the past two decades he has been employed as Regional Archaeologist (Waikato) by the Department of Conservation in New Zealand. His specialist research interests include the archaeology and history of the overseas Chinese in NZ; mining and industrial archaeology, archaeology and history associated with the Waikato campaign (1863-64) of the NZ Wars; and, the archaeology and conservation of the sites associated with the Scott and Shackleton polar expeditions in Antarctica. He was President of the Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology from 2001 to 2006 and has published widely on these and many other subjects. |
 |