Professor Bruce Scates
Director, National Australian Studies Centre
B.A.(hons), Ph.D. (Mon); Dip.Ed. (Melb)
Contact details | Research interests | Research supervision | Publications
Latest work
Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War
Every year tens of thousands of Australians make their pilgrimages to Gallipoli, France and other killing fields of the Great War. It is a journey steeped in history. Some go in search of family memory, seeking the grave of a soldier lost a lifetime ago. For others, Anzac pilgrimage has become a rite of passage, a statement of what it means to be Australian. This book explores the memory of the Great War through the historical experience of pilgrimage. View details and purchase book on Amazon.
Bruce Scates is a graduate of Monash University and the University of Melbourne. He has taught Australian History and Australian Studies in universities across Australasia, including the University of New South Wales, Murdoch University and the University of Auckland. Professor Scates is the recipient of National, State and Faculty awards for excellence in teaching, sharing several of these achievements with his colleague, Professor Rae Frances.
Professor Scates has served on a number of state and national committees including reviews of the West Australian History syllabus, the NSW History Awards, the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, the Executive Committee of the History Council of NSW and the Australian Army History Unit. In 2005-6, he was a member of an expert panel convened to recover the bodies of men missing from the Great War and he is the author of a submission to the Senate Inquiry into controversial road works at Gallipoli. He has also led several historical tours of the battlefields and commemorative sites of the Great War.
His many public presentations include key-note addresses to conferences in Australia and abroad, funded participation to symposiums in Canada and the Netherlands, a host of papers to learned societies and the opening address to the National Conference of the History Teacher’s Association of Australia. In 2005, Professor Scates delivered the Tenth Annual History Lecture at Government House, Sydney, marking the 90th anniversary of the Gallipoli Landing; his work on Anzac Pilgrimage has also been broadcast on national radio and television in both Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Bruce Scates’ work on Indigenous Australia and the memory of the frontier received special commendation in the first report of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. He has organised a number of scholarly forums including (with A/Professor Melanie Oppenheimer) a Round Table discussion of the memory of the Great War at the International Congress of Historical Sciences, the Inaugural Monash Arts Public Lecture and the National Conversation Series convened by the National Centre for Australian Studies. In 2002, Professor Scates chaired the Young People’s History Forum at the State Library of NSW in association with the Ministry for the Arts and the History Council of NSW. The proceedings were published by the History Council and have informed moves towards a National History Syllabus.
Professor Scates has been awarded a series of competitive research grants from a number of national agencies including:
- Two Discovery Grants from the Australian Research Council
- An Australian Research Council Linkage Grant
- Two John Treloar Research Grants from the Australian War Memorial
- Two grants for historical research from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs
- Two Army History Unit grants
Research interests
Bruce Scates was appointed the Director of the National Centre for Australian Studies in 2008. His Ph.D. was awarded in the field of Australian history and he holds the Chair of History and Australian Studies at Monash University.
Research supervision
His areas of expertise and supervision include:
- War and society
- Anzac and commemoration
- The cultural history of grief and mourning
- Labour history
- Environmental history
- Life stories and biography
- The cultural history of the book and communities of readers
- Trans Tasman relationships
- Australian history generally
Publications
Bruce Scates is a prolific contributor to leading scholarly journals in Australia and overseas and the author of opinion columns in both the state and national press. Amongst his current projects are a history of Victoria’s Shrine of Remembrance (also to be published by Cambridge University Press), a study of pilgrimages to the traumascapes of World War Two and a history of the NSW Soldier Settlement Scheme. He is also engaged on an innovative biography of Dr Mary Booth, founder of the Anzac Fellowship of Women. In 1997, he was awarded a NSW History Fellowship in recognition of this work and his most recent project is an ‘Imagined History’ reconstructing the search for the missing across the killing fields of Gallipoli.
He is the author/co-author of four titles with Cambridge University Press, including Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War, A New Australia, and the recently republished Women and the Great War. The last of these won the coveted NSW Premier’s History Award in 1997.
