This is a four part seminar series taking place online via Zoom. Each seminar will be approximately 90 minutes and will take place over two consecutive weeks: Thursday and Friday 15 and 16 October and Wednesday and Thursday October 21 and 22.

Please look over the schedule below and register for as many or as few seminars as you like using the registration link. Closer to the days, we will send out the Zoom meeting links to the sessions you signed up for.

These seminars are intended to initiate a critically important conversation about the possibilities and challenges of truth-telling in Australia. Historian Mark McKenna has recently argued that Australia stands at ‘a crossroads-a moment of truth’ where we ‘either reckon honestly with the past or unmake the nation’.

A seminal moment in relation to truth-telling was the release of the Uluru Statement in 2017 which called for Voice, Treaty and Truth. However, thus far there has been limited discussion about the form and character of a truth-telling process in Australia and how it would relate to Voice and Treaty.

Globally, truth-telling has been linked to discourses of recognition and reconciliation within a multicultural project. This symposium will explore what truth-telling with an explicitly decolonial agenda might look like. Decolonisation is understood loosely as a process that concerns not only structural changes in power relations but also undoing the enduring discursive regimes that continue to underpin settler colonial domination in countries such as Australia.

Transitional justice scholars in Australia, North America and Canada have noted the significant absence of attention in the field to the question of ‘truth’ in settler-colonial societies such as Australia who are dealing with a relatively distant colonial past. This symposium will provide an opportunity to foreground this developing discussion about the appropriate terms of truth, reconciliation, reparation and decolonisation in the wake of colonial harms.

For any enquiries please contact Vanessa Barolsky at vanessa.barolsky@deakin.edu.au or Melinda Hinkson at melinda.hinkson@deakin.edu.au

This is a four part seminar series taking place online via Zoom. Each seminar will be approximately 90 minutes and will take place over two consecutive weeks: Thursday and Friday 15 and 16 October and Wednesday and Thursday October 21 and 22.

Please look over the schedule below and register for as many or as few seminars as you like using the registration link. Closer to the days, we will send out the Zoom meeting links to the sessions you signed up for.

These seminars are intended to initiate a critically important conversation about the possibilities and challenges of truth-telling in Australia. Historian Mark McKenna has recently argued that Australia stands at ‘a crossroads-a moment of truth’ where we ‘either reckon honestly with the past or unmake the nation’.

A seminal moment in relation to truth-telling was the release of the Uluru Statement in 2017 which called for Voice, Treaty and Truth. However, thus far there has been limited discussion about the form and character of a truth-telling process in Australia and how it would relate to Voice and Treaty.

Globally, truth-telling has been linked to discourses of recognition and reconciliation within a multicultural project. This symposium will explore what truth-telling with an explicitly decolonial agenda might look like. Decolonisation is understood loosely as a process that concerns not only structural changes in power relations but also undoing the enduring discursive regimes that continue to underpin settler colonial domination in countries such as Australia.

Transitional justice scholars in Australia, North America and Canada have noted the significant absence of attention in the field to the question of ‘truth’ in settler-colonial societies such as Australia who are dealing with a relatively distant colonial past. This symposium will provide an opportunity to foreground this developing discussion about the appropriate terms of truth, reconciliation, reparation and decolonisation in the wake of colonial harms.

For any enquiries please contact Vanessa Barolsky at vanessa.barolsky@deakin.edu.au or Melinda Hinkson at melinda.hinkson@deakin.edu.au

Dr Jeff Corntassel (keynote)

Dr. Jeff Corntassel is a writer, teacher and father from the Cherokee Nation. He is currently Associate Professor in the Indigenous Studies Department at the University of Victoria and Acting Director of the Centre for Indigenous Research and Community-Led Engagement (CIRCLE). His research and teaching interests focus on “Everyday Acts of Resurgence” and the intersections between Indigenous resurgence, climate change, gender, and community well-being. He is currently completing work for his forthcoming book on Sustainable Self-Determination, which examines Indigenous climate justice, food security, and gender-based resurgence.

Professor Lyndall Ryan (keynote)

Professor Ryan taught Australian history in three Australian universities for more than 30 years and is best known as a historian of the Australian colonial frontier.  Her first book, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1981) broke new ground in arguing that contrary to widespread belief, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people did not die out in 1876 or at any period in history. Her most recent book on the history of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 (2012), focuses on settler policies to exterminate the Tasmanian Aboriginal people and the process of reconciliation in the 21st century. 

In the aftermath of the history wars and the debate about whether frontier massacres were widespread across Australia, Lyndall made a careful study of the practice of massacre in other parts of the world and developed a typology of massacre for application to the study of massacre on the colonial frontier in Australia. In 2014 she gained a major research grant from the Australian Research Council to prepare a digital map of massacre sites across the Australian frontier to 1960. 

As a new way of making Australian history visible, the map relies on a concise definition of frontier massacre and a rigorous methodology to investigate and verify the evidence.  Stage 3 of the map, containing more than 300 sites of frontier massacre, was launched in November 2019. 

Professor Jane Lydon

Professor Jane Lydon is the Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at The University of Western Australia. Her books include  Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians. (Duke, 2005), the edited Visualising Human Rights (Perth, 2018), Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire. (Bloomsbury, 2016). She led the Returning Photos project between 2011-2019 which can be accessed at: Returning Photographs https://ipp.arts.uwa.edu.au/ Her most recent book Imperial Emotions: The Politics of Empathy Across the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2019) examines the way that emotional narratives created relationships across the British empire, throughout the nineteenth century and into the present.

Professor Victoria Grieve Williams

Professor Grieve Williams is Warraimaay – an Aboriginal Australian historian who has published on Aboriginal family history, slavery, activism and the history wars in Australia. She works in interdisciplinary ways to progress the development of Indigenous knowledges, positioning Aboriginal spirituality /philosophy as the baseline for this development, with a focus on establishing the values and ethics inherent in what it means to be human in a changing world. She has published critiques of public policy for Aboriginal people, identifying homo sacer in Aboriginal camps and amongst displaced Aboriginal people and has thus argued for Aboriginal Sovereignty in a newly constituted Republic.

Victoria is in the process of establishing a Healing Histories Foundation in which she will apply the Aboriginal principles of healing the wounds of history through “truth telling” from research and reuniting families separated by the vagaries of war.

Professor Lorenzo Veracini

Lorenzo Veracini is Associate Professor of History at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. His research focuses on the comparative history of colonial systems and settler colonialism as a mode of domination. He has authored Israel and Settler Society (2006), Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010), and The Settler Colonial Present (2015). Lorenzo co-edited The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism (2016), manages the settler colonial studies blog, and is Founding Editor of Settler Colonial Studies. His next book, The World Turned Inside Out: Global History of a Political Idea, is forthcoming with Verso in 2021

Professor Yin Paradies

Professor Yin Paradies is a Wakaya man and an internationally recognised expert on the health, social and economic impacts of racism as well as anti-racism theory, policy and practice as relating to Indigenous people and other ethnic/racial groups. Professor Paradies is Chair in Race Relations at Deakin University and teaches Indigenous knowledges and conducts interdisciplinary research on the health, social and economic effects of racism as well as anti-racism theory, policy and practice across diverse settings, including workplaces, schools, universities, housing, the arts, and health.

Dr Shino Konishi

Dr Shino Konishi is a Chief Investigator at the Centre for the History of Emotions. As a descendant of the Yawuru people of Broome, Western Australia, she has long been interested in Aboriginal history. Her research has focused in particular on the early interactions between Indigenous people and European explorers, and the way in which early European observations and representations of Indigenous Australian people, bodies and cultural practices continue to shape broader understandings of Aboriginal politics and society

Aileen Walsh

Aileen Marwung Walsh is Noongar and Ngalia Anangu, and completing her doctoral thesis at the Australian National University, which directly addresses the current climate crisis and is entitled: ‘A cartography of caring for country: Rethinking whiteness through Aboriginal epistemologies and ontologies’. Aileen’s research is anti-colonial, primarily focusing on relations of power through language between the coloniser and the colonised, drawing on the work of  Norman Fairclough.