Friends, colleagues, please join us for the May instalment of our Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2018, presented by Dr Rosita Henry, of James Cook University. The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.

 

Date: Thursday 3 May
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122

(Also, by videoconference, at Deakin Burwood F2.009, Deakin Downtown, and VMP ARTSED SHSS 39354)

 

Reflections on Representation: Writing Maggie’s Memoir

 

Maggie’s Memoir is the story of a woman, whose mother was from the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea and whose biological father was the older brother of Mick and Dan Leahy, the first Australian explorers to venture into the Highlands.  Maggie’s life spanned the early years of the Australian administration in Papua New Guinea and the heady possibilities of the first three decades after Independence.  She spent her late teenage years at a Catholic boarding school in the far north of Australia where she met her friend and biographer, Rosita Henry. Maggie’s Memoir is autobiographical, biographical and ethnographical. The book portrays a complex entanglement of social worlds – a narrative involving an interplay of many life stories, not just Maggie’s, but those of numerous other people whose lives she touched. In this seminar, Rosita Henry reflects upon the complications of narration and representation that writing such an ‘ethnographic auto/biography’ raises.