Dr Karen Hughes
Lecturer
View contact details in Monash Staff Directory
My research is history based focusing on cross-cultural relations between settler and Aboriginal peoples and using anthropological methodologies to look at how history is remembered and imagined in the present.
It centres on three interconnected projects:
The first is a book titled My Grandmother On the Other Side of the Lake, which explores deep narratives in the interwoven histories of Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal and colonial settler-descended families around Lake Alexandrina in Southern Australia over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has a particular focus on women’s stories and cross-cultural exchanges in domestic spaces.
A second project sheds light on the story of Phyllis Flower, the first missionary nurse appointed to work with Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal people at the Point McLeay Mission (Raukkan) in South Australia in the 1920s. Pro-Aboriginal and active in trying to institute health reforms, she died there in 1926, reportedly the result of suicide. Her death came at a time when she was ardently expressing her concerns to the Protector of Aborigines regarding a string of injustices and moral transgressions perpetrated by a draconian mission superintendent. I investigate the circumstances around her death, which were swiftly and only partially dealt with and speculate on unresolved and unsettling aspects, drawing on archival documents and oral histories of the Ngarrindjeri community’s stories over time of the presence of Phyllis Flower’s ghost. The historical backdrop of the neglect and disinterest of the South Australian State in fostering the deplorable health and social conditions on the mission, which allowed such a tragedy to happen, is critically examined in light of this story’s significant intersections with Indigenous social justice issues, feminist historiography and current themes in Indigenous medical history.
Thirdly I am continuing a longstanding research relationship with the Ngukurr community of Roper River, Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, focusing on the biography of the late Rosalind Munur, a senior law woman and community historian. Her personal and ancestral histories intersect with some of the important grand narratives of Northern Australian contact history.