An exciting evening of conversation between two highly-distinguished history makers who have dedicated their careers to collaborating with others. Join ARC Laureate Fellow Lynette Russell and the new Director of SA Museum Dr David Gaimster as they reflect upon wrestling with the past and wrangling it into compelling stories for general audiences. Facilitated by South Australia’s History Advocate, Dr Kiera Lindsey. Ticket includes drink upon entry.

Bookings required online:  https://events.humanitix.com/sprigg-salon-the-power-of-the-story-a-night-at-the-museum
Cost (Per Person): $12, Concession: $10, Member: $7

Caption & Cite: Director of the South Australian Museum, Dr David Gaimster, 2024, Sia Duff
Presented by the South Australian Museum & the History Trust of South Australia

Day trip from Adelaide to Mid-North to visit Wilkins’ childhood home in Mount Bryan East and view the exhibition in Burra. Hear of the amazing exploits of this South Australian explorer with commentary from a knowledgeable Wilkins tour guide and local Wilkins experts. Price includes return airconditioned bus travel from Adelaide, tour guide, morning tea, lunch, tea & coffee and water, and all entry tickets.

Sun 19 May, 8am – 6pm
Cost (Per Person): $95, Concession: $70

Bookings required online: https://www.trybooking.com/CPHCM

Presented by the History Trust of South Australia
Caption & Cite: Sir Hubert Wilkins Cottage, Goyder Regional Council

Inciting protest, driving innovation, and catapulting South Australia onto the world stage, all while delighting the senses – beer is a humble, yet powerful draught! Join Dr Adam Paterson and a panel of historians, brewers, and a cicerone to partake in some history and your tipple of choice. Discover the power of beer!

Bookings required online: https://www.trybooking.com/CPEHQ

Presented by the History Trust of South Australia & Wheatsheaf Hotel
Caption & Cite: A friendly drink, Oodnadatta, 1912, State Library of South Australia

Join History Trust CEO Greg Mackie and a panel of eminent Masons as they explore the mysteries and histories of this ancient fraternity whose members built South Australia while supporting many local charities. As custodians of dozens of heritage lodge buildings in South Australia, the Freemasons are again proudly partnering in this year’s History Festival. Bar service available onsite.

Bookings required online: https://www.trybooking.com/CPSFR

Presented by Freemasons South Australia and the Northern Territory & History Trust of South Australia

In this lecture, the fourth in a series on South Australia’s Premiers, Professor Alan Reid will explore the big changes in democratic practice that occurred between 1885-1900 in South Australia. He will focus particularly on Charles Kingston, the controversial character who bestrode the political scene in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Book Here

Speakers: Professor Emeritus Alan Reid AM and MC Greg Mackie OAM, History Trust of South Australia CEO

Presented by the History Trust of South Australia & the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion (CRESI), University of South Australia

Caption & Cite: Charles Cameron Kingston, c1890, State Library of South Australia

Birdwood Primary School Farm Day — enjoyment for the whole family! Farm Day has attracted thousands of families since the 1970s to experience a taste of Hills and country living with animal exhibitions, farm demonstrations of milking, sheep shearing, and sheep dog mustering. Held at the National Motor Museum, tickets include entry to the museum.

Sun 19 May, 10am – 4pm
Entry cost (per person): $20, Children 12 & under: Free
Pre-purchase tickets here

Presented by the History Trust of South Australia & Birdwood Primary School
Caption & Cite: Birdwood Farm Day, 2021, Birdwood Primary School

Join former SA Premier Hon Lynn Arnold AO for the launch of Dunstan era Attorney-General Peter Duncan’s memoir. These two political contemporaries will turn back the clock and consider the nature of political power in SA in the 1970s and 1980s. Published by Wakefield Press. Drinks and nibbles provided.

Book Here
RSVP by 3 May 2024.

Speakers: Former SA Premier Hon Lynn Arnold AO and Former Attorney-General Peter Duncan

Peter Duncan

Peter Duncan was the reforming Attorney-General to the South Australian Premier, Don Dunstan. He was a Minister in the Hawke government and Parliamentary Secretary to the Attorney-General in the Keating Government, making him one of the very few in Australian history to successfully move from the State legislature to Federal Parliament and to occupy Ministerial positions in both jurisdictions. 

From the Horizon, volume one of Peter Duncan’s forthcoming frank, fearless and always entertaining political autobiography, gives us a ringside seat to politics as practised over decades of change. It takes us to the end of Duncan’s parliamentary career, illuminates what successive Premiers and Prime Ministers were really like and what happened behind closed doors. It is up front and personal, telling Peter Duncan’s own story from childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, to the defeat of the Keating Government. 

This is a brutally honest autobiography that paints a portrait of an imperfect man whose many achievements in the cause of a more progressive state and nation must be remembered. 

Peter Duncan’s Private Members Bill in the South Australian parliament (1973-1975) was the first in the Westminster system, world-wide, to treat homosexuals and heterosexuals equally, encouraging former High Court Judge, Justice Michael Kirby, to describe him as ‘the father of gay law reform in Australia’. 

He confronted Australia’s leading organised crime figure Abe Saffron and closed the Saffron empire in South Australia removing his corrupting influence from the State. 

He reformed not only laws but legal practice and agencies. An activist Minister and local member, Peter was involved in early environmental law reform including the victory over the damming of the Franklin River in Tasmania. A lawyer himself, he set up a successful legal practice in Adelaide that still bears his name. He played an important role in saving the youngest of the Bali Nine (the teenage drug mule Scott Rush) from the firing squad. 

With its broad canvas, attention to detail and insightful anecdotes, Peter Duncan’s no-holds-barred From the Horizon is funny, sad, informative, idiosyncratically Australian and unambiguously authentic. A gripping read!

Climate Change and Human Rights: Australia’s Next Big Challenge

Join Deputy Premier Hon. Dr Susan Close MP to explore how we can find a sustainable future together. This oration seeks to answer the many pressing climate change questions that are not aired in the mainstream. Will we let the last decades of our opportunity to make a difference slip through our fingers? 

Orator: Hon. Dr Susan Close MP, Deputy Premier, Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Minister for Defence and Space Industries, Minister for Climate, Environment and Water, Member for Port Adelaide. 

Date: 2 November 2023
Time: 6:00pm-7:00pm (including Q&A)
Address: Elder Hall, University of Adelaide, North Terrace, SA 5000 

Tickets

This event is presented in partnership with the University of Adelaide Law School and the Law Society of South Australia.

Dr Susan Close MP 

Susan Close is the State Member for Port Adelaide and was elected on the 11th of February 2012.  

Susan has lived on the LeFevre Peninsula for twenty years with Declan and their two children and is passionate about representing the people in her community. 

Before entering Parliament, Susan was an executive in the SA Environment Department.  She previously worked at the University of Adelaide running student services and holds a PhD from Flinders University. 

Susan held several portfolios during the Weatherill Labor Government, including Minister for Education and Minister for Innovation and Automotive Transformation. 

Abstract

The defining feature of this epoch is humanity. The Anthropocene is the era of our species dominating and shaping this planet, ushering in the sixth extinction event, changing our climate and putting ourselves ahead of all other species. The question of our time is what changes in how we conduct ourselves are needed to make this emerging epoch one in which we can continue to live and proper? Is our technology powerful enough, is our ingenuity at solving problems sufficient, and can strengthening environmental protections turn the tide? Or do we need a reconsideration of what matters to us, of what our modern culture values, and could a deeper understanding of how humans have lived in partnership with the Earth rather than in dominion over it be the missing ingredient? Why does a politician ask these questions? This oration will argue that if these questions are not aired in the mainstream, we will let the last decades of our opportunity to make a difference slip through our fingers. Drawing on examples of hope the Deputy Premier will discuss how we can find a sustainable future together.

While historians often talk about the ways that the unresolved past continues to influence the present, they rarely speculate about how spiritual experiences have shaped historical figures or events. Typically, historians are disciplined to deal in hard, cold empirical facts rather than subjective experiences and encounters.

Our panel of expert historians advocate for a more curious, critical, and creative way to respectfully research histories and biographies. But how do you do this in a primarily objective industry?

This tantalising talk will challenge and delight those seeking more creative and engaging histories. Hear historical stories of the unexplained, animate objects, uncanny experiences, spiritual forces, unique beliefs, and practices.

Panelists: Professor Penny Edmonds, Dr Jessica White, and Dr Peter Cahalan 
Chair: Dr Kiera Lindsey, History Trust of SA’s History Advocate 

Date: 17 October 2023 
Time: 6:20pm – 8:00pm
Refreshments available from 5:45pm to 6:15pm
Free event: bookings essential via Eventbrite
Location: UniSA City West Campus, Bradley Forum H 5-02, Hawke Building, 55 North Terrace, Adelaide 5000  

This is an interactive event with a Q&A at the end.  

City West Campus and Access Map 

Parking is available at the Wilson City West Carpark. 

SPEAKERS

Chair: Dr Kiera Lindsey  
Dr Kiera Lindsey is South Australia’s History Advocate & the History Trust of SA’s principal public spokesperson on South Australian history. In this capacity, Kiera undertakes research, advocacy and outreach to historical organisations, individual practitioners and the broader community while also working with urban and regional communities & other groups to increase appreciation of our distinctive history. Kiera is also an award-winning historian who has been enthusiastically exploring historical ideas and deepening our interest in and understandings of the past, via books and articles, radio and podcasts, film, and television, teaching and talking.  

Professor Penny Edmonds
Penny Edmonds is Matthew Flinders Professor in History at Flinders University. She is an award-winning historian, with a PhD History from University of Melbourne, which she combines with a professional background in museum and heritage studies. A former ARC Future Fellow, Penny’s research is distinguished by over two decades of creative and interdisciplinary work in the areas of Australian history, empire and postcolonialism, Indigenous and settler colonial histories, and on cultural history, performance, reconciliation and heritage. In the museums sector she has worked collaboratively with Indigenous staff and collections at the Australian Museum (3 years), and later at Museum Victoria (8 years), where she worked on the first Bunjilaka Aboriginal gallery. Penny was Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. 1991-1994 (3 years). Penny’s book Settler Colonialism and Reconciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings (Palgrave 2016) was shortlisted for the University of Melbourne’s Ernest Scott Prize for best book in Australian and New Zealand colonial history. Interested in awe, wonder, and the histories and the distinctive political ecologies of the Anthropocene in Australia, she published ‘Uncanny Objects in the Anthropocene’ (co-edited K. Schlunke) Australian Humanities Review, in 2018. 

Dr Jessica White
Dr Jessica White is the author of the award-winning A Curious Intimacy and Entitlement, and a hybrid memoir about deafness, Hearing Maud, which won the 2020 Michael Crouch Award for a debut work of biography and was shortlisted for four national awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. Jessica has received funding from the Australia Research Council, the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Queensland and Arts South Australia and has undertaken national and international residencies and fellowships. She was a 2020-2021 Juncture Fellow for the Sydney Review of Books and is a 2022-2023 Arts Leader for the Australia Council for the Arts. Jessica is currently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of South Australia. Her ecobiography of 19th century Western Australian botanist Georgiana Molloy will be published in January 2025. 

Dr Peter Cahalan
After initially training as a teacher, Peter Cahalan undertook a PhD in British history from a Canadian university, where he developed his life-long commitment to South Australian history He became founding director of the Constitutional Museum of SA in 1978 and the first CEO of the History Trust of SA in 1981. During his time at the History Trust he worked closely with a number of other agencies, particularly the SA Tourism Commission, to ensure that historical projects were to the fore in a range of major celebratory events ranging over the next two decades. He moved from the History Trust to the Tourism Commission in 2000 and there undertook a range of jobs from managing interpretive projects to serving as the regional manager for the State’s economically two largest regions, the Flinders Ranges and Outback and the Fleurieu Peninsula. He retired in 2021 but continues to work part-time and continues his involvement in history as a trustee of the National railway Museum and on the Advisory Board of the Mary MacKillop Museum in Kensington.