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'Folk hero' unmasked for History Week

September 19, 2006

APiper.thumb.jpgSeveral public events at The University of New England during History Week (16-24 September) will celebrate the role of history and historians in Australian society and culture.

On Wednesday 20 September, eight Armidale-based historians will come together to explore some “Frontiers of Australian History”. One of these “frontier” studies will deal with the legendary Sammy Cox, the “2nd Earl of St Vincent”, who died in 1891 at the Invalid Depot in Launceston, Tasmania, at the age of 117.

UNE historian Dr Andrew Piper (pictured here) will explore the career of Sammy Cox, an historical figure of the northern Tasmanian town of Carrick, who, far from being an heroic survivor of disinheritance, abandonment, shipwreck, and Aboriginal adoption, was a fugitive from a past tainted with paedophilia.

Dr Piper will explain how Sammy Cox’s fabricated personal history is still uncritically accepted and celebrated in Tasmanian folklore and popular culture. “It’s perpetuated in book after book,” he said, “and names such as the ‘Sammy Cox Bistro’ crop up in Tasmanian pubs. My talk will be a kind of warning – a warning about the dangers of disseminating ‘historical facts’ without the backing of historical research.”

“Frontiers of Australian History II” will be in Lecture Theatre 111 in UNE’s Education Building from 2 pm to 5 pm on Wednesday 20 September. Each of the eight speakers will talk for 10-15 minutes, and there will be time for questions and a forum for the exchange of information and ideas. Some of the other topics include the recording of oral history, significant figures in the history of education, women in colonial history, and “archaeology, myth and history”. (“Frontiers of Australian History I”, held at UNE during History Week last year, attracted an enthusiastic audience of about 70 people.)

Everyone is welcome to this event, and to a lecture on Friday 22 September titled “Historians in the Court Room”. Ann Curthoys, Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University, will give this lecture at 9.15 am in Lecture Theatre A2 in UNE’s Arts Building.

“Mabo and Native Title legislation have led to an increased use of history – and, more specifically, of historians as expert witnesses – in the courts,” Professor Curthoys says. “Moreover, in the last 10 years history became crucial in a number of other cases involving Indigenous litigants. My paper reports on what happened when historians encountered the legal system.”

History Week is coordinated throughout the State by the History Council of NSW. (For a full program go to: http://www.historycouncilnsw.org.au.) The events described above are part of an Armidale-wide History Week program organised by UNE's School of Classics, History and Religion and the New England Writers' Centre. For more information on the UNE events, contact Dr Frank Bongiorno in the School of Classics, History and Religion on (02) 6773 2088.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at September 19, 2006 11:22 AM