IATG Speaker Night
Guest Presenter Professor Grace Karskens
Date: Thursday, 5 November
Time: 5.30 pm for 6.15 pm presentation
Place: Level 1, Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts, 280 Pitt St, Sydney
Cost: $10 professional members; $25 affiliate members
** Cost includes light supper presentation and wine, juice & sparkling water
Topic: People of the River is a landmark history of Australia's first successful settler farming area, which was on the Hawkesbury-Nepean River. In it, award-winning historian Grace Karskens uncovers the everyday lives of ordinary people in the early colony, both Aboriginal and British.
Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River, is where the two early Australias - ancient and modern - first collided. People of the River journeys into the lost worlds of the Aboriginal people and the settlers of Dyarubbin, both complex worlds with ancient roots.
The settlers who took land on the river from the mid-1790s were there because of an extraordinary experiment devised half a world away. Modern Australia was not founded as a gaol, as we usually suppose, but as a colony. Britain's felons, transported to the other side of the world, were meant to become settlers in the new colony. They made history on the river: it was the first successful white farming frontier, a community that nurtured the earliest expressions of patriotism, and it became the last bastion of eighteenth-century ways of life.
The Aboriginal people had occupied Dyarubbin for at least 50,000 years. Their history, culture and spirituality were inseparable from this river Country. Colonisation kicked off a slow and cumulative process of violence, theft of Aboriginal children and ongoing annexation of the river lands. Yet despite that sorry history, Dyarubbin's Aboriginal people managed to remain on their Country, and they still live on the river today.
The Hawkesbury-Nepean was the seedbed for settler expansion and invasion of Aboriginal lands to the north, south and west. It was the crucible of the colony, and the nation that followed.
Presenter: Grace Karskens is Professor of History and Public Humanities at the University of New South Wales. She is a leading authority on early colonial Australia and cross-cultural history and her research and writing have transformed the way we understand this period of Australian history. Her books have won prestigious prizes, including the 2010 Prime Minister’s Award for Non-Fiction for The Colony: A History of Early Sydney. Her book People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia has just been published by Allen & Unwin.
Grace began her career as a freelance historian and has a lifelong commitment to bringing good history to wide audience through writing, speaking and teaching. She is an active contributor to several major cultural and government organisations, including Sydney Living Museums, the State Library of New South Wales and the online Dictionary of Sydney. Her work has informed films, television and radio programs, museum exhibitions and has inspired public art. Grace was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy for the Humanities in 2010.