CHRG seminar: Linda Wells, 31 March, 11am

Pushing the boundaries of Australian history writing through a creative, post-colonial telling of the story of the Bungalow Alice Springs, 1914 – 1929.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abstract: Colonial narratives, that took hold from the earliest days of colonisation, have been fundamental in shaping Australia’s sense of history and self. Such narratives saw the presentation of the land’s first people as hostile and barbaric and denied the possibility of positive intercultural relations. Our national history has been reduced to simple binary categories: native and newcomer, victim and victor, us and them, to which we all feel pressured to align in order to belong. This doctoral project, underpinned by a methodology of practice-led research, is an attempt to both respond to and disrupt traditional colonial discourses and their effects, to inspire new ways for the telling of our national stories and the shaping of our responses to them. History research methods including archival research, ethnography and oral histories have been combined with the critical and literary techniques of fictocriticism, speculative biography, autoethnography and poetics to explore a story that comes from Central Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The story, that revolves around a tin shed institution for Aboriginal children who had been fathered by white men, is fundamental to intercultural relations and the social development of Alice Springs. The result is a work of creative, historic non-fiction and accompanying exegesis. 

You can join the seminar on Zoom via this link on Wednesday 31st March at 11am.