Friday 15 November, 11.00am-12.30pm
Australians of The Lucky Country era were beginning to reimagine their place in the world, and even in the cosmos, in the era of space travel. This session will explore the ways available for Australians to think about environment, space and place today and their historical background; examining space, the planet, the Asia-Pacific region, and the nation as four interconnected levels of engagement. As Australia confronts the challenges of climate change, bushfires, floods and pandemics, how can the humanities inform solutions to our most pressing problems?
Chaired by Professor Julia Horne
Julia Horne is Professor of History and University Historian at the University of Sydney. She works and writes on the history and politics of Australian higher education. Her books include Australian Universities—A conversation about public good, (Public and Social Policy Series, Sydney University Press, 2022, co-edited with Matthew A.M. Thomas), Preserving the past: the University of Sydney and the Unified National System of Higher Education 1987–96 (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017, co-authored with Stephen Garton), and Sydney: the making of a public university (Miegunyah Press, 2012, co-authored with Geoffrey Sherington). She is currently working on the post-war Curtin-Chifley higher education reforms which reimagined Australian higher education as a national sector. The research project is funded by the Australian Research Council and is in collaboration with chief investigators from the Universities of Sydney, Tasmania and Melbourne.
Speakers
Associate Professor Alice Gorman FAHA [online]
Paper title: Beyond the Dish: Australian national identity in the Space Age
After the development of rocket technology in the Second World War, Australia was at the forefront of global space technology for decades. Despite this impressive record, many people are under the impression that Australian space industry started with the establishment of the Space Agency in 2018. Why don’t Australians embrace space as part of their national identity in the way that other nations have? I argue that it’s not from lack of trying. My hypothesis is that while Government support for space has been sporadic, politicised and timid, the Australian public enthusiastically engaged with space in a variety of ways from the 1940s onwards. In this paper I look at how Australians imagined space travel and the future, through music, theatre, television, and literature, to seek common factors that might account for Australia’s complicated relationship to outer space.
Dr Alice Gorman is an internationally recognised leader in the field of space archaeology and author of the award-winning book Dr Space Junk vs the Universe: Archaeology and the Future (MIT Press, 2019). Her research focuses on the archaeology and heritage of space exploration, including space junk, planetary landing sites, off-earth mining, and space habitats. In 2022, she co-directed (with Justin Walsh) an archaeological survey on the International Space Station, which was the first archaeological fieldwork ever to take place outside Earth. She is an Associate Professor at Flinders University in Adelaide and a heritage consultant with over 30 years’ experience working with Indigenous communities in Australia. Gorman is also a Vice-Chair of the Global Expert Group on Sustainable Lunar Activities, a member of the Advisory Council of the Space Industry Association of Australia, a Senior Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and an expert member of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee for Aerospace Heritage.
She is a regular contributor to national and international space policy, particularly focusing on issues of equity, social justice and rights of nature. She was part of a collective that drafted the first Declaration of the Rights of the Moon in 2021. She also contributed to the Vancouver Recommendations on Space Mining. Asteroid 551014 Gorman is named after her in recognition of her work in establishing space archaeology as a field.
Emeritus Professor Tom Griffiths AO FAHA
Paper title: The ecological revolution
Since the 1960s the ecological revolution has gathered such powerful momentum that it has transformed the way we understand the world and Australia’s place in it. In many cultures the peril of the planet was barely on the horizon in 1964. In The Lucky Country, fire, air and water were configured as sun, freedom and the beach, and ‘the bush’ was a social setting, an inspiration for literary and artistic expression, and a subject of national myth-making. The true power of the elements was yet to be realised. ‘The environment’ soon announced itself as a ubiquitous term, an ecological concept and a political force. The idea re-emerged that the planet is alive, that there are limits to economic growth, and that humanity’s future depends on the destiny of all life. Australia’s predicament became a question of fate rather than luck.
Tom Griffiths AO FAHA is Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University and Chair of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. His books and essays have won prizes in history, science, literature, politics and journalism including the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, the Ernest Scott Prize for History, the Eureka Science Book Prize and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. His books include Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Forests of Ash: An Environmental History, Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica, Living with Fire (with Christine Hansen), and The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft. He was foundation Director of the Centre for Environmental History at the ANU.
Dr Sarah Pinto [online]
Paper title: Thinking about place in so-called Australia
When I want to think about place in what is now known as Australia, I tend to think first of the often lyrical writings of Australian scholars of place. I think of Paul Carter’s (1987, 1992) spatial histories of naming, mapping and colonising. Or of Ross Gibson’s (2002) description of what he calls the badlands of Central Queensland as a crime scene. Or I think of the Wurundjeri artist and scholar Mandy Nicholson’s (2020) explanation of Narrm (or Melbourne) as her Country rather than as a (settler) city. More often than not, though, I find myself returning to a reminder from the historians Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds (2010) that settler colonialism is ‘starkly visible’ in the kind of landscapes it produces in places like Australia. Taking this reminder as my starting point, this paper explores some of the ways that I have come to think about place as a settler historian in so-called Australia today.
Dr Sarah Pinto is a Senior Lecturer in History at Deakin University. She is an Australian historian with broad research interests, including in memory and commemoration, the history and politics of emotions, and the study of place. Sarah is the author of Places of Reconciliation: Commemorating Indigenous History in the Heart of Melbourne (Melbourne University Press, 2021), which won a Victorian Community History Award in 2021, and the lead editor of Interdisciplinary Unsettlings of Place and Space: Conversations, Investigations and Research (with Shelley Hannigan, Bernadette Walker-Gibbs and Emma Charlton, Springer, 2019).
Dr Lorina L. Barker and Dr Eliza Kent [online]
Paper title: The Lucky Country for Whom? Definitely, Not First Nations peoples
Donald Horne’s observations about Aboriginal prospect for inclusion as Australian in his book The Lucky Country now seem laughable. The VOICE, now a year ago, plainly demonstrated that Aboriginal sovereignty, even in its weakest, institutional form was unpalatable to the majority of the Australian people. First Nations people make up merely 3% of the Australian population: firstly because of the Frontier violence and massacres of the 19th and 20th centuries; secondly because of the enduring inequities in health, education, employment, and housing, and the consequences of over-incarceration. The Great Australian Dream is a nightmare for Aboriginal communities. In the 21st century we still live in impoverished enclaves within a colonial state, the most incarcerated people in the world, our children continue to be taken away at alarming rates. But the Country called ‘Australia’, is and always will be Aboriginal Land, we have been here for millennia as told by our Mura (Songlines) the lore of the land, the history of this Continent.
In 2024, Aboriginal people in the Corner Country (Northeast Flinders Ranges SA to far western NSW up to southwest QLD and over to the Baaka ‘Darling River’ in northwest NSW) communities with whom we work, are struggling to just stay alive. Over the past three months (July, August, September 2024) there have been multiple deaths in these Aboriginal communities, to the point where funerals are backed up. Aboriginal communities in this vast region are, once again, struggling to pay for funerals. At a cost of $10,000 per event, the cost of death runs into the tens of thousands of dollars for communities that can barely afford food, fuel and rent. Aboriginal life expectancy is officially estimated 8.8 years less than other Australians, but in our experience Aboriginal people are dying younger and younger from preventable causes. The grief is unbearable, the trauma continuing.
Of the many solutions offered by government and NGOs, none speak directly to Aboriginal culture or Country, both of which are equally under threat. In the Corner Country, mining and agriculture chews through sacred Country on a daily basis and Aboriginal voices, though required by Aboriginal Heritage Impact Statements (AHIPs) and legislation appear only on paper and rarely, if ever, produce the protections Aboriginal people so desperately desire.
In our work we give primacy to the cultural frameworks Aboriginal people have lived within for millennia. Our work is recording the oral histories of the continent-spanning Mura Tracks left by the Ancestors in Country, the stories, songs, dances and ceremonies remembered by Elders, who take us to sites on Country where the Ancestors created meaning for Aboriginal people. This knowledge is not legendary or mythical, it describes real events in deep time, from which Aboriginal people received Lore – the rules for living in and with Country, protecting her, and being protected by her. This is the Aboriginal world, the Aboriginal way of life, and for the first time in millennia it is severely threatened and being driven to the brink of extinction.
Our project Songlines of Country is an urgent project to record cultural knowledge from a generation of Elders and Knowledge Holders who had contact with grandparents who experienced traditional Aboriginal life. Once these Elders pass, the direct link will be broken. We undertake this work among communities torn apart and impoverished by the current death rate, trying to respect people’s grief while trying to get the opportunity to record this knowledge and history. We are very aware of historical continuities. From the Frontier massacres of the ‘contact period’, the forced removal from Country in the first half of 20th century, accompanied by the ‘detribalisation’ policies that further broke up communities and families in the 1960s and 1970s, and now the forced negotiation with pastoralists, mining companies and Aboriginal neighbours that is the Native Title process in the 1980s and 1990s. For Aboriginal people, ‘Australia’ has never been the ‘Lucky Country’.
Taragara Research Bios
Dr Lorina L. Barker is a Wangkumarra/Muruwari oral historian, filmmaker, storyteller, artist, theatre practitioner, poet and descendant of the Adnyamathanha (Flinders Rangers SA), Kooma and Kunja (southwest QLD), Barkindji (northwest NSW) and the Wiradjuri (Bogan River central west NSW). She uses multimedia as part of her research and creative projects to transfer knowledge, history and culture onto the next generation in mediums that they use and are familiar with such as film, short stories, spoken word and exhibitions. Lorina is guided by Cultural Knowledge Holders/Elders and works in partnership with community on Aboriginal-led, designed, managed and delivered research and creative projects, and define best practice for working with Aboriginal communities. Dr Barker is a founding member and director of Taragara Research at the University of New England.
Dr Eliza Kent is a researcher working with Taragara Aboriginal Corporation as part of Taragara Research at the University of New England. She has a PhD in History from the University of Melbourne and has published widely on early modern European history. Eliza has worked extensively with Aboriginal communities throughout her career, both in the University and Community sectors. Since 2017 Eliza has worked with Lorina on Aboriginal research programs at UNE, and since 2020 Eliza has worked as a Taragara Researcher.
