'To Imagine an Australian Museum'
Berndt Research Foundation Biennial Lecture - Prof John Carty
Presented by The Berndt Research Foundation in partnership with the Berndt Museum of Anthropology

The Professor Ronald M and Dr Catherine H Berndt Research Foundation and Berndt Museum, invite you to the 2018 Ronald M and Catherine H Berndt Biennial Lecture with Guest Speaker Professor John Carty.

The address will be followed by a reception at the University Club, Hosted by the Berndt Research Foundation Members.

'To Imagine an Australian Museum'

Museums are our memory banks. They tell us where we have come from. They also allow us to imagine where we are heading. Which is why it should trouble us that there has never been a truly Australian museum. Each of our state and federal museums has been built on Aboriginal collections, and each has been built on distinctly Western or European concepts, values, categories and practices. Some of these are unavoidable, but are they all? Are we too far down the path to restump the foundations of our institutions and the narratives they perpetuate in public life?

The South Australian Museum holds one of the most important collections of Aboriginal material culture in the world. It is therefore, given the story it can tell about ancient and enduring cultures, one of the most important collections of human heritage on our planet. What we do with such collections, and what we don’t, defines us. This is the great challenge of contemporary custodianship. These collections are calling us out.

In this lecture I examine the South Australian Museum’s response to this challenge. Over the past two years our Museum has undertaken a comprehensive rethink of our policies and practices and the politics of both. We are also transforming the way we work with Aboriginal communities and custodians. This is not simply a question of how collections are displayed or exhibitions are developed. We are rethinking the terms of our custodianship, and the kind of truly Australian Museum that could evolve around those new foundations.

About Professor John Carty

John Carty is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide, the Head of Humanities at the South Australian Museum, and is on the Australian National Commission for UNESCO. He is the author and editor of numerous books including Ngaanyatjarra: Art of the Lands (2012, UWAP), Ngurra Kuju Walyja: the Canning Stock Route Project (2011, Palgrave Macmillan) and Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route (2010, National Museum of Australia), amongst others. John has been integrally involved in many projects including the Canning Stock Route project (as anthropologist and curator) and the CSIRO’s Desert Lake project, and is currently involved in an ARC funded project called Aboriginal Art History: new approaches to Western Desert Art, which involves working in collaboration with Aboriginal artists to document their understandings of recent developments in Aboriginal art.

Event details

Date:

Wednesday 4 July 2018

Time:

6:00 - 7:00 pm (lecture); 7:00 to 8:00 pm (reception)

Venue:

Auditorium, The University Club of WA

Details:

Parking is available in Carpark 3 via the Hackett Drive Entrance 1

RSVP:

Register online by 2 July or call 08 6488 4785

https://alumni.uwa.edu.au/berndt-lecture-carty?erid=1957083&trid=bb0cd49a-f714-4333-a8d4-aec6011a1f21&efndnum=000034877381

by Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery

View the exhibition FLORA with Andrea Gaynor and join a discussion about the relationships between emotion and conservation, and how they have been expressed over time.

Andrea Gaynor is an Associate Investigator with the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and an Associate Professor in History at The University of Western Australia. Her research seeks to use the contextualising and narrative power of environmental history to solve real world problems.

Campus Partner: ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions

Enquiries: lwag@uwa.edu.au or 08 6488 3707

Image credit: Ellis Rowan, Monotora Myristica, n.d. Gouache on Cream Paper, 61 x 40.5cm, CCWA 759, Cruthers Collection of Women's Art, The University of Western Australia.

Join us as Associate Professor Jacqueline Van Gent examines and reflects on Julie Dowling’s artwork, The Seven Deadly Sins, which is currently on show in the exhibition Country & Colony. Comprised of a series of small canvases, this work exhibits images of exploitation of the environment, disregard for sacred sites of First Nation people, and disrespect for country and humanity in the pursuit of wealth.

Jacqueline Van Gent is an early modern historian at the University of Western Australia and Chief Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (1100-1800). Her current research concerns emotions, materiality and colonial encounters in the early modern period.

Campus Partner: Centre for Western Australian History

• Date: 3 November 2017, 1-2pm
• Venue: Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery
• Register: FREE event | Register online
• Enquiries: (08) 6488 3707 or lwag@uwa.edu.au

Artwork: Julie Dowling, The Seven Deadly Sins (detail, Pride & Sorry), 2000, acrylic and red ochre on canvas, eight parts, 60 x 50 cm each, CCWA 683. Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, The University of Western Australia. © The artist.

Public Lecture with Verne Harris

Tim Winton Lecture Theatre, Building 213:101, Curtin University, Bentley

Time: 3:45pm for a 4:00pm start

RSVP: MCCAAdmin@curtin.edu.au by Wednesday 13 September

The Centre for Human Rights Education and the Department of Information Studies at Curtin University would like to invite you to a public lecture by award-winning South African archivist and scholar, Verne Harris. This lecture will explore the role of archive and memory work in struggles for social justice within a frame set up by these questions:

• What does Nelson Mandela’s legacy mean in South Africa today?
• Is democracy an oppressive apparatus?
• Does whiteness still exercise hegemony globally?
• Is there hope for the human project?

About Verne Harris

Director of Archive and Dialogue at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Verne Harris was Mandela’s archivist from 2004 to 2013. He is an honorary research fellow with the University of Cape Town, participated in a range of structures which transformed South Africa’s apartheid archival landscape, including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and is a former Deputy Director of the National Archives. Widely published, he is probably best-known for leading the editorial team on the best-seller Nelson Mandela: Conversations with Myself. He is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of Cordoba in Argentina (2014), archival publication awards from Australia, Canada and South Africa, and both his novels were short-listed for South Africa’s M-Net Book Prize. He has served on the Boards of Archival Science, the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, the Freedom of Expression Institute, and the South African History Archive.

A public lecture by Tony Ballantyne, Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture, University of Otago.

The links between British empire building and its shifting relationships with Europe have frequently been overlooked by historians, in part because they have been seen as two fundamentally distinct fields of inquiry.

Using the debates around Brexit as it departure point, this talk explores some of the key connections between the project of empire building and Britain’s engagements with Europe, tracing some key points of convergence from the 1760s on. But it will also explore the shifting terrain of recent historiography, tracing the ways in which Europe and empire have figured within British historical writing since the 1970s and how those relationships have also figured in important work from the former settler colonies.

Tony Ballantyne is a Professor of History and Pro-Vice Chancellor Humanities at the University of Otago, where he is also a Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture. He has published widely on the cultural history of the British Empire and his most recent sole-authored book is the award-winning Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori and the Question of the Body (Duke University Press, 2015).

Fox Lecture Theatre, Arts, UWA

Reserve your seat: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/ballantyne

Professor Alistair Paterson will present new research on the history of the Northwest and explore what the colonial coastal frontier was like for Aboriginal communities facing the extreme challenges of European settlement. Bringing together archival sources, collected objects held in museums with historical archaeological fieldwork, a new regional analysis will be revealed producing a new history of the Northwest, 100 years since J.S. Battye’s History of the Northwest.

Venue

Great Southern Room, SLWA

image: Alistair Paterson

A film screening followed by a panel discussion with Professor Andrea Witcomb, Deakin University; Professor Ben Smith, UWA; Dr John Taylor, UWA; Rebecca Repper, Oxford University and UWA.

Join us for this powerful award-winning film on the war against culture, and the battle to save it.

Theatre Auditorium, The University Club of Western Australia

Cost: Free

Audience: General Public, Faculty/Staff, Students, Alumni

Book: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/the-destruction-of-memory-film-screening-tickets-35854968175