IPA Asia Pacific Pre-Conference Lecture & Cocktail Reception Wednesday 1st May 6pm

The sound of ‘silence’ in Australian history

Professor Anna Clark

Lecture & Reception at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

• 6pm Welcome to Country

• 6.30 - 7.30pm Lecture

• 7.30-9.30pm Cocktail reception

Lecture

In 1968, the Australian anthropologist, WEH Stanner, famously articulated that the nation’s history had been wracked by a ‘great Australian silence’ with regard to the recognition of Indigenous experience. Australia’s sense of its past, he argued, its very collective memory, had been built on a state of forgetting. Since Stanner’s powerful intervention, and prompted by a series of post-colonial critiques of the history discipline, the power of history to ‘white out’ Indigenous perspectives in the Australian historical archive has been studied in great detail. This talk considers the idea of silence in Australia’s national memory, and looks at how early colonial writings about frontier violence were slowly replaced by silence. It explores how forgotten narratives can powerfully challenge a nation’s collective memory, and the discipline of history itself. And it contemplates the need for history to construct disciplinary knowledge outside it its traditional archival domain. After all, if the archives are silent, how can historical knowledge be constructed?

Biography

Anna Clark is an award-winning historian, author and public commentator. An internationally recognised scholar in Australian history, history education and the role of history in everyday life, Anna’s most recent books are The Catch: Australia’s Love Affair with Fishing (Penguin 2023) and Making Australian History (Penguin 2022). She is currently Professor of History at the University of Technology Sydney.