'Having been accorded the honour of delivering the annual Greg Dening lecture, I sought guidance from Greg's abiding demeanour and ardour, to help me offer an account of an archive that I'm currently immersed in. The archive is a collection of films that have been compiled by three generations of a farming family in the Wimmera, which is the poet John Shaw Neilson's inspiring country, as well as Wotjobaluk ancestral country. The archive is a record of inter-generational and multi-modal investigation that leads us into history, into country, into relationships meshing people, things and the lively world. I think Greg would have loved the archive. My collaborators and I are trying to do it justice, to know the exact calibrations of its peculiar insights. Which is like trying to know the weather. I take this idea (and run with it) from one of Neilson's Wimmera poems, where he imagines old farmers encountering each other in town: 'Fill up! fill up! today we meet: / What of the wind? Who knows the weather?' These lines have always made me think of Greg, of the delicacy of his hermeneutics, the grounded quality of his research and the palpability of his insights.' (Publication abstract)
'Histories of the Great Barrier Reef have characterised the period between 1900 and 1939 as a creative prelude to modern Reef conservationism. These histories, however, have not given sufficient consideration to how perceptions of the Reef were entangled with evaluations of its economic potential. By examining the writings of Edmund Banfield, the intensification of tourism and science, and a collection of popular texts about the Reef, this paper argues that early twentieth-century perceptions of the Reef were entangled with an utilitarian ethos which leaned toward exploitation.' (Publication abstract)
'Publishing accounts of captivity in Australia in the wake of the First World War presented many aspiring memoirists with a significant challenge. The prisoner of war had an unconventional tale of war to tell, one that was fundamentally at odds with a dominant literary figure in the wake of the war—the Australian soldier hero. Those who did publish retrospective accounts of captivity framed their experience in a deliberate way—through the lens of both personal and public contemporary understandings of that experience—and used their accounts to both reflect and challenge assumptions about military captivity.' (Publication abstract)
