Making Public Histories - Institute for Public History

Thursday 8 October 2009

History Online

How is history being made and contested online, and how are historians responding to online histories? Using a sample of websites and discussion forums, Megan Blair (a lecturer in International Studies at Monash University) will explore the example of the current state of American Civil War history online, and discuss how professional and popular historians do - and might - use the Internet to engage not only with the past, but with each other. Megan Sheehy (a public historian with SHP, a heritage production house based in Port Melbourne) will draw on her research into the use of Web 2.0 technologies for public history, and discuss new approaches to using the web to make public histories.

Thursday 12 November 2009

Recovering and remembering the Australian war dead at Fromelles

Mike O'Brien was a Major General in the Australian infantry who left full-time service in 2001. He has written a history of his battalion in Vietnam and was in charge of the reburial of five First World War Australian soldiers found in Westhoek Belgium in 2007, and more recently of the trial excavation, exhumation, identification and re-burial of the remains of several hundred Australian soldiers at Fromelles, France. He will outline the origins, process and outcomes of the Fromelles’ exhumation, and will consider developments leading to the opening of the new cemetery in July 2010.

Bruce Scates (Professor of History and Australian Studies, Director of the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University, and author of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Victoria's Shrine of Remembrance) served on the National Committee which confirmed the existence of mass graves at Fromelles, and will reflect on the significance of these events for Australian history and memory.