Courses

MicroCerts in Urban and Cultural Heritage, Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage. ACAHUCH has another Microcert coming up, focussing on an Introduction to Value-Based Heritage. The Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage (ACAHUCH) at the University of Melbourne is excited to announce the launch of a comprehensive suite of professional development short courses. The ACAHUCH MicroCerts are designed for professionals of diverse backgrounds seeking to acquire and expand their applied skills in Urban and Cultural Heritage.
Our next lunchtime information session will be held on Wednesday, 10 February 2021.
Our four online short courses draw upon the world-leading research, teaching and industry expertise within ACAHUCH:
Introduction to Values-Based Heritage (April 2021)
Gain an understanding of the leading approach to heritage management.
New Approaches to Heritage Significance (June 2021)
Learn cutting-edge techniques for assessing the cultural significance of heritage places.
New Tools for Documenting Heritage Fabric (July 2021)
Discover the technologies changing the ways that historic buildings, structures and materials are documented.
Statutory Heritage (September 2021)
An ideal introduction to urban and cultural heritage practice, statutory heritage schemes, and the key players in the field.

Kinship Module: Learn about Aboriginal Kinship systems, The University of Sydney. This online learning module covers the systems of social organisation that traditionally govern Aboriginal societies and explains this significant cultural difference.

Cataloguing Clinic, Royal Historical Society of Victoria. Jillian Hiscock, the RHSV Collections Manager, started these cataloguing clinics during the early days of COVID and they suit Zoom very well. They are a relaxed gathering of people finding their way through the intricacies of cataloguing material in historical collections which, as we all know, fall somewhere between a library and a museum with sometimes a bit of art gallery thrown in. Questions are encouraged and the style is conversational. If you are new to cataloguing or an old hand you will find plenty to interest you in these sessions. 4th Thursday of each month. Email Address: office@historyvictoria.org.au, Phone: 03 9326 9288.

Writers Victoria Writing Workshops Writers Victoria runs a year-round program of writing workshops and literary events in Melbourne, regional Victoria and online.

Kill Your Darlings Writing Workshops Learn from experienced and talented practitioners across all genres. All online workshops can be completed in your own time, at your own pace, anywhere with an internet connection.

Marsden Szwarcbord Foundation project Make history at home, is a free ‘how to do your own history’ series presented by historians Susan Marsden and Sandra Kearney. Through the COVID-19 lockdown they’ve posted videos, photos and advice, so you can use the time at home to arrange your records and photos, and share your own histories. Watch Make history at home in 5 sessions on YouTube (Marsden Szwarcbord Foundation), with photos and history links on Facebook (@MSzFoundation) and Instagram at #mszfMakeHistoryAtHome. You’re invited to add this hashtag to your stories, or links to history sites, and share them on Facebook. To learn more about Make history at home or the Foundation, or make a tax deductible donation, contact smarsden@mszfhistory.org.au.

Creative Exchange is a long running professional development and networking event program available to anyone working in the creative industries who wants access to the most up-to-date information across the sector.

Udemy How to Start a Podcast - Podcasting Made Easy.

Rachel Corbett’s PodSchool online podcasting course.

FutureLearn Learn 100% online with world class universities and industry experts. Develop hobbies, new skills and career-changing expertise with their flexible courses.

Coursera Build skills with courses, certificates, and degrees online from world-class universities and companies.

Open Culture is an online repository of free online courses, audiobooks, ebooks, movies.  

edX is a non-for profit online platform for education and learning founded by Harvard and MIT. It provides access to courses for curious minds on topics including history, communications, humanities and social sciences among many others.

Online events

Writing Slavery into Australian History Seminar Series. This seminar series aims to explore the life stories of Australian colonists and their networks, and produce new sources and methods for writing biographies that include slavery. The Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery project, in collaboration with the National Centre for Biography, explores links between the abolition of slavery in the British empire and settler colonialism, building on the Legacies of British Slave-ownership (LBS) project database, hosted by the Centre for the Study. Various dates from February to April.

The Proud Partnerships in Place: 2021 ANZSOG First Peoples Public Administration Virtual Conference will unpack and celebrate the successes we are already seeing across Australia, Aotearoa-New Zealand and internationally. It will also challenge participants to think beyond the way things have always operated, to consider how First Peoples knowledge, local community decision-making and new relationships with government and the public purpose sector can be mobilised to meet the needs of communities. 7 February to 10 March 2021, across four consecutive Wednesdays 11.30am - 2.30pm AEDT.

Scholar Talk: Landscaping Eastern Australia through the Colonial Survey, State Library of New South Wales. Dr Jarrod Hore will be delivering a lecture at the State Library of NSW based on his research there as a research fellow. This talk addresses the development of colonial geology in eastern Australia and reveals how it eventually incorporated these challenges. Re-grounding a series of surveys, it shows that colonial geology was a compromised product of environmental agency, Indigenous knowledge, and settler adjustment. Dr Hore is an environmental historian with an interest in settler-colonial geologies and photographies. His book, Visions of Nature, is forthcoming with University of California Press. 11:00am, Tuesday 2 March 2021.

History Matters: Women’s History, State Library of New South Wales. Hosted by the Professional Historians Association NSW & ACT and Oral History NSW, this event with include speakers involved with projects on the history of women’s work, who will discuss the process of engaging with the public to gather women’s true stories. Filmmaker Martha Ansara will talk about the documentary film Women of Steel, which follows a group of women who fought for the right to work in Wollongong’s steel industry, and independent professional historian and curator Sophie Couchman will discuss her work on the Invisible Farmer Project. 5.30-6.30pm AEDT, 3 March 2021.

Making Public Histories: Teasing women’s stories from the archives. In March we celebrate Women’s History Month, part of the context for annual celebrations of International Women’s Day on 8 March. In this seminar, three historians share their experience of researching women’s lives, as biographical dictionaries strive to increase their representation of women. From a medieval countess to Victoria’s female criminals, the stories uncovered range widely in both time and place, pointing to the richness the archives can yield 'with a little more effort and research. Dr Kathleen Neal, Dr Alana Piper and Dr Carolyn Rasmussen will reflect on Teasing Women's Stories from the Archives for #WomensHistoryMonth2021, hosted by Margaret Anderson of Old Treasury Building. 5-6:30pm, Tuesday 4 March 2021.

Visual + Material Culture Seminar Series, The Palace of Diplomacy: 20th-Century Japan's Diplomatic World Presented in the State Guest House in Tokyo, Japan. Organized by the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. The Akasaka Palace, now more commonly called the State Guest House (Geihinkan), was built in the early 20th century in order to serve as the Imperial Palace for the Crown Prince in Akasaka, Tokyo. After its completion, the building, depending on the time period, was used for different purposes. Since the 1970s, it has been officially used as a space for the conclusion of treaties, as well as for receptions for foreign dignitaries. The feeling of Westernness provided by the State Guest House, which was opened to the public in April 2016, is considerably strong as its facade is modelled after the Palace of Versailles. 4:00pm (PST), Thursday 4 March 2021.

Women’s history beyond stereotypes: Celebrating International Women's Day 2021. Public Record Office Victoria and Her Place Women's Museum Australia present an International Women's Day talk discussing the surprising breadth and depth of women’s history in nursing and midwifery. Penelope Lee, Her Place Board Director and co-curator of 'Unmasked: celebrating Nursing and Midwifery, Victoria and beyond' will be joined by curator Dr Madonna Grehan from The University of Melbourne, a nurse, midwife, and historian, and contributor Professor Odette Best from the University of Southern Queensland, a nurse and historian. 2:00pm, Friday 5 March 2021.

'Maternalist Politics' seminar, Melbourne Feminist History Group. The speakers are:
Kate Laing (La Trobe): ‘Women’s vote must not be taken for granted as an influence for peace’: Maternalist politics in the Sisterhood of International Peace, Melbourne 1915-20.
James Keating (UNSW): ‘I am against “motherhood” … coming into our society’: Equal Rights International and wages for housewives in the 1930s.
Tuesday 9 March 2021. To RSVP and get zoom details, please email: melbfeminist@gmail.com

2021 International Online Workshop on Indigenous Heritage, ICOMOS Canada and the Indigenous Heritage Circle. The three-day workshop will consist of keynote speakers, panel discussions, breakout discussions, and artistic expressions / performances exploring important questions and themes surrounding Indigenous Heritage.
The goal of the workshop is to:
- Draft a work plan for the Working Group on Indigenous Heritage
- Review its mandate
- Develop an ICOMOS Declaration on Indigenous Values and Heritage
The workshop will be held from 10 - 12 March 2021.

FIRE: PAST | Present | Future: How world-first bushfire education by and for children supported community recovery from Black Saturday, Museums Victoria. Join us for the first in a three-part lecture series presenting the rich tapestry of knowledge within Museums Victoria’s networks giving context for understanding the complex experience of bushfire in southeastern Australia. The first instalment, FIRE | PAST brings together Curators of the Museums Victorian Bushfire Collection and a key community they worked with in the days following Black Saturday. In Strathewen, a tiny settlement that was gutted by the 2009 bushfires, Jane Hayward and her team at Strathewen Primary developed world-first programmes in bushfire education by and for children, from evacuation plans to environmental experiments to advanced fire mapping. Their students took lead roles as developers, investigators and presenters. Join Jane, former student Scarlett Harrison and bushfire historian Peg Fraser as they talk about the challenges of building resilience, inspiring confidence and looking to the future in an environment shaped by the destruction and loss of Black Saturday. Last year showed how vulnerable Australia is to catastrophic fire. This is an important conversation not only for parents and educators, but for all of us. Cost: $5 per household. 6:00pm, Wednesday 17 March 2021.

Decolonising Archives, Rethinking Canons: Writing Intellectual Histories of Global Entanglements, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. Intellectual history and political thought in recent times has taken a ‘global’ turn, in an attempt to move beyond the dominance of ‘nation’ and ‘modern’ in historical analysis. The most significant intellectual contribution of these works have been to question the ‘globality’ of intellectual history traditions, and in turn urge scholars to introduce spaces beyond the Anglophone world, within the realm of intellectual history, as fertile grounds of ideations. This has also brought to light the need to nuance several methodological tendencies in the historiography of intellectual history, which we intend to provide a platform for, in this conference. The conference will be hosted online, tentatively on the 26-27 March, 2021, between 9-6 PM GMT. 

Church and the Ancestors Virtual Tour, University of Cambridge Museums. Take a tour of the exhibition ‘Church and the Ancestors: Sacred pir mats from Asmat, Papua, Indonesia’, on display in the Andrews Gallery of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (3 December 2020 - March 2021). Guest curated by Tom Powell Davis and Sophie Hopmeier with the assistance of MAA Senior Curator Anita Herle.

4th International Conference of Contemporary Affairs in Architecture and Urbanism. The ICCAUA 2021 conference will be held online at Alanya HEP University, Alanya, Turkey, on 20-21 May 2021.
The general conference topics are listed below, with more information at the conference website.
– Architecture and Technology
– Sustainability and Urban Design
– Heritage and Cultural Landscapes
– Habitat Studies and Infra Habitation
– Civil engineering
Further Details: The publication opportunities can be explored here. Early Bird Registration Deadline is 20 March 2021.

2021 AIATSIS Summit. For the first time ever, the AIATSIS National Native Title Conference and the National Indigenous Research Conference will be held together over five days. The event will bring together Indigenous leaders, academics, and policy makers from around the country into one community of practice. Flexible registration packages will be offered, and there will be options for alternative modes of delivery. Monday, 31 May 2021 to Friday, 4 June 2021.

IN-PERSON EVENTS

Lecture: Writing Narratives, Writing Lives. Dr Naomi Parry is a white feminist historian who has been working on the biography of a male Aboriginal warrior for the better part of 20 years. Her work on the Gai-mariagal (Sydney) man Musquito has changed over time, as she has, but some elements have remained the same and in an age of pandemic, climate disaster and Black Lives Matter she has never been more convinced that the ways his life and his relationship with the palawa people have been written about reflect the political frameworks of the authors. In this paper she will discuss the challenges and gifts of writing the life of an Indigenous man and share some intriguing recent discoveries. Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, 91 Murray Street, Hobart, TAS. 1:00pm Thursday 4 March 2021.

You Are Cordially Invited: 150 years of Melbourne Town Hall, Art Exhibition. Curated by Andrew Stephens, You Are Cordially Invited explores 150 years of Melbourne Town Hall. This majestic building and surrounding spaces have hosted an extraordinary array of people and events since opening in August 1870. The Town Hall remains vital in shaping the city’s collective psyche – just as town halls around the world are centres for their own evolving cultures. Through the building’s corridors, glorious auditorium, council chambers and main frontages on Swanston and Collins streets, it has been the seat of governance, hot political debate and cultural activity. With newly commissioned artwork by Patrick Pound, plus archival film, photographs and ephemera from the City of Melbourne’s vast collection, this exhibition encompasses everything from the Queen and the Beatles to Aboriginal histories, war protests, parades and lavish festivities. A major music commission using the Town Hall Grand Organ has also been undertaken for the exhibition, premiering in March 2021. Closes March 2021.