W K Hancock Professor of History Inaugural Lecture

Tom Griffiths introduced by Emeritus Professor D.A. Low

Tuesday 20 September 2011 5pm, followed by a reception in the foyer

Hedley Bull Theatre ANU

Keith Hancock championed a rapprochement of science and the humanities and was a pioneering environmental historian of the Australian high country, the Monaro. He was also an eminent historian of the Commonwealth and applied his historical sensibility to global environmental and political questions. In the spirit of Hancock’s quest, this lecture makes a case for the role historians can play in understanding the great global environmental challenge of our own time, that of climate change. One way to make sense of our predicament is to look deeply into the ice we are losing.

Tom Griffiths is the W K Hancock Professor of History in the Research School of Social Sciences. His books and essays have won prizes in literature, history, science, politics and journalism, most recently the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History (2008) and the Alfred Deakin Prize (2009). His books includeHunters and Collectors (1996), Forests of Ash (2001) and Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica(2007). In 2008 he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen where he continues as an Adjunct Professor of Climate Research. He is Chair of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Director of the Centre for Environmental History and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities.

Professor Anthony Low is Former Vice-Chancellor of ANU and Smuts Professor of the History of the British Commonwealth and President of Clare Hall in the University of Cambridge.

In 1974 the University Council established the William Keith Hancock Chair of History to commemorate the first quarter century of the Research School of Social Sciences. It was named after Sir Keith Hancock, the first Director of RSSS, and its foundation professor of History.

Enquiries

E: Karen.Smith@anu.edu.au T: 6125 2354

This lecture is free and open to the public

John McNeill
Georgetown University

Public Lecture
Tuesday 26 October
5-6.30 pm
Venue: Hedley Bull Lecture Theatre 1, ANU

We live in an era of unprecedented human impact on earth systems and the biosphere, sometimes called the Anthropocene.  This lecture explores the ways in which international political conflict, specifically the pressures of the Cold War, lay behind the environmental tumult of the Anthropocene.  It considers the consequences of nuclear weapons programs in the USA and USSR, of transportation infrastructure programs mainly in the USA, China, and USSR, and of campaigns to boost agricultural production such as the Green Revolution in South and Southeast Asia and the Virgin Lands scheme in the USSR.

Listen to the lecture (MP3 31MB)

View the presentation slides.

Tuesday 29th June, 5-6pm

Lecture Theatre, Forestry Building (48) Linnaeus Way (comes off Daley Road)

Charles Lane Poole (1885-1970) and Edward Harold Swain (1883-1970) are perhaps the two most influential foresters in Australia’s history. Born in Britain and trained in France, Lane Poole served as the conservator of forests in Western Australia from 1916-1921 and as the principal of the Australian Forestry School and the inspector general of forests for the Commonwealth government from 1927-1945. A patriotic and idiosyncratic Australian, Swain served as the chairman of the forestry board in Queensland from 1924-1931 and as the forestry commissioner of New South Wales from 1935-1948. Both men had strong and often conflicting views about forestry education, silviculture, management, and economics.

Swain sought to make an Australian forestry suited to its unique climate, culture, and socio-economic conditions. Lane Poole tried to remake a continental European and British imperial forestry tradition in Australia that emphasized a strict professional training and a conservation program based upon the management of existing forests. In many ways, Lane Poole’s professionalism won out over Swain’s bold vision, but over time Swain’s assessments about Australian forestry proved to be a more accurate predictor of the direction that forestry and Australian society would take in the 1950s until the present day. But in spite of his professional success, Lane Poole failed to achieve his single goal to centralize research and forestry policy within the federal government. His failure and vision still reverberates with Australian forestry to this day.

I argue that we can use the historic examples of Lane Poole and Swain to better situate the present and future of Australian forestry. Many of the problems they identified still remain today, and their ideas can provide us new ways of thinking about old problems.

Brett Bennett is currently a PhD candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin and a visiting resident in the Centre for Environmental History at the Australian National University. In 2011 he will take up a position as lecturer in modern history at the University of Western Sydney. He has published widely on forestry history in Australia, India, South Africa, and Southeast Asia. His masters thesis and article in the May 2009 issue of Environment and History explored the founding of the Australian Forestry School. Most recently he wrote an editorial in the 28 April Canberra Times calling for the protection of the former school buildings.

Paul Warde’s public lecture ‘Figuring the Future: Forests and the Welfare of Posterity 1500-1850’ delivered at An Evening of Environmental History, Australian National University, 6 May 2010.

Download Paul Warde’s lecture (46 mins, MP3 44MB).

Sverker Sörlin’s lecture ‘Futures, Climate and Science from Charles Richet to the Anthropocene’ delivered at Expertise for the Future III: Canberra Workshop, National Museum of Australia, 7 May 2010.

Download Sverker Sörlin’s lecture (50 mins, MP3 47MB).

Paul Warde is a Reader in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. His books include Economy, Ecology and State Formation in Early Modern Germany (2006) and (co-edited with Sverker Sörlin) Nature’s End: History and the Environment (Palgrave, 2009). Paul runs the project History and Sustainability at the Centre for History and Economics, King’s College, Cambridge.

Sverker Sörlin is professor of Environmental History in the Division of History of Science and Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and he serves on the Advisory Board of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, where he is also senior researcher.

Part 1:

Presentation of the National Museum of Australia Student Prize for Australian Environmental History and History of Science 2010

by John Passioura, Fellow, Australian Academy of Science and Mathew Trinca, Acting Director National Museum of Australia

Part 2:

Public Lecture: ‘Figuring the Future: Forests and the Welfare of Posterity 1500-1850’

Paul Warde
Centre for Economic History, Cambridge University and
School of History University of East Anglia

Paul Warde works on the environmental, economic and social history of early modern Europe. His interests include the use of wood as a fundamental resource in pre-industrial society; the long-term history of energy use in relation to economic, environmental and social change; and the development of institutions for regulating resources and welfare support.

His books include Ecology, Economy and State Formation in Early Modern Germany, (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and (co-edited with Sverker Sörlin) Nature’s End. History and the Environment (Palgrave, 2009). Paul runs the project History and Sustainability at the Centre for History and Economics, King’s College, Cambridge. See the website http://www-histecon.kings.cam.ac.uk/envdoc/sustainability/index.html

Part 3:

Drinks and nibbles with our speaker, our student prizewinner and other environmental history networkers.

Please note that the Forestry Car park is now closed because of building works.

Event sponsored by National Museum of Australia, Australian Academy of Science and the Centre for Environmental History, Australian National University.

Elliott Sober, Hans Reichenbach Professor and Wiliam F. Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison will be working with members of The Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science, running a masterclass, and giving talks, in Semester 1, 2010. Professor Sober’s research is in the philosophy of science, especially in the philosophy of evolutionary biology. His books include: The Nature of Selection – Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus (1984), Reconstructing the Past – Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference (1988), Philosophy of Biology (1993), Unto Others – The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (1998, coauthored with David Sloan Wilson), and Evidence and Evolution – the Logic Behind the Science (2008).

• March 30: Masterclass
• March 31: Colloquium with University of Sydney Department of Philosophy
• April 15: Colloquium at Australian National University
• April 19: HPS seminar at University of Sydney
• April 22: Sydney Ideas Open public lecture

Further information: http://sydney.edu.au/foundations_of_science/people/sober_masterclass.shtml

“What is the point of old archaeological and anthropological collections in the 21st century?”

Dr Christopher Chippindale
Visiting curator from Cambridge Museum and Reader in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge England

Thursday 25th February
6.00 – 7.30 pm Friends Lounge
National Museum of Australia

The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) at the University of Cambridge is an old collection, founded in 1883 and incorporating older accumulations. Its original mission was the high Victorian idea of a combined ethnology-archaeology, studying the primitives in both their ancient and their modern variants. A new programme to modernise its buildings and re-shape its displays prompts it to ask fundamental questions about its collections and its mission. What are they for? Who is their audience today? Are they still of merit and value? Or should the MAA recognise its obsolescence and simply close?

Cost: $5 Friends, NMA & ANU Staff, $10 non members

Dr Christopher Chippindale is curator of the Cambridge Museum (MAA), also a field archaeologist and Reader in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge England, and a long term associate of the Centre for Archaeology Research at the ANU. He is a Visiting Fellow with the Department of Archaeology and Natural History ANU for February 2010.

Bookings are required for all Friends events. Please phone 02 6208 5048 or send an email to friends@nma.gov.au