PHA and PHANZA will be presenting (remotely) a panel along with current president of the International Federation of Public History (and PHA member) Tanya Evans, at this years IFPH conference. The full conference program and further details can be found here: https://ifph2024.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/4

We are hopeful that a recording of our panel session will be available to members after the event.

Flinders University is proud to be hosting the annual conference of the Australian Historical Association in 2024.

The local organising committee of historians from the University’s College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences is excited to welcome historians from around Australia and the world to Adelaide on Kaurna Country to share their new research and to engage one another on the pressing questions facing our discipline and our communities.

Excitingly there is a GLAM and Public History Stream in which PHA members are encouraged to submit proposals.

What is the current state of public history in Australia? Have we reached a moment where notions of ‘public’ and ‘scholarly' history no longer describe an increasingly fluid world where historians with university training are employed throughout the public sector, while academics strive to make an impact with their research and engage meaningfully with communities? Is it time to develop more nuanced ways of understanding the work of the twenty-first century historian? If so, what ‘home truths’ must we wrestle with as we use our critical and creative faculties to ensure ‘history' maintains both its relevance and ‘reinventive doubleness’?

While the discipline of history was once the flagship of many ‘sandstone’ humanities offerings in the academy, the last two decades have witnessed such a contraction of history courses, tenured positions and student enrolments that Australians now consume most of their history via screen stories, museums, journalism, trade books, family history and heritage experiences. These circumstances, coupled with the democratising impulses of the so-called digital revolution, have done much to deepen public understandings of the past and history as a practice; however, they have also destabilised the ‘authority’ of the historian at a time when sensitive historical truths remain contested, and much careful reckoning is still required.

Within this GLAM & "Public” History stream of the 2024 ‘Home Truths’ conference we will take stock of the past, present and future of ‘history-making’ in Australia, wrestle with ‘home truths’ relating to AI and historical imagination, First-Nation history practices and funding, disciplinary ‘watch-dogs' and media debates, as we reach toward new understandings of our work as twenty-first century history-makers.

Sponsored by the History Trust of South Australia, whose tagline is ‘Giving the Past a Future Now’, we invite proposals which meditate upon the shifting intersections between ‘public’ and ‘scholarly’ practices’, the evolving nature of history-making and our increasingly diverse publics. Papers or panels which engage with the following themes or ideas are particularly welcome: Behind the Scenes - Screen Stories & Streaming histories?: How is history being ‘done’ on the big screen and various streaming services? How do those working in this area negotiate the demands of historical accuracy with the need to engage audiences with compelling characters and convincing narrative arcs? What sort of ‘truths’ about the past are being privileged, why and how?

‘GLAMorous HomeTruths?’: For several decades, Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums professionals have been reckoning with the complex legacies of their institutions, sources and cultural practices. Across Australia, institutions have been active in repatriation, reconciliation, recruitment, and reorienting their stories to shift power systems and public perception. But how successful has this been? And what must these institutions reckon with if they are to ‘house’ for contested historical truths?

Tangible and Intangible Heritage & History?: How are historical skills being used to deepen public understandings of heritage, be that the statues in our public squares, the rapidly disappearing artisan trades of the 19th and 20th centuries or the interplay between museum collections and First Nation and migrant songs and stories? What role could and should historians play in heritage debates - including those involving contested development initiatives? Should we foster more collaboration between and across the history and heritage worlds? If so, how might we do so in ways that best honours the important distinctions between these disciplines?

CALL FOR PAPERS due 23 February 2024

4-day online course, 19-20 April and 3-4 May 2024, offered by Oral History Victoria

Taught by Carla Pascoe Leahy, Sarah Rood and Alistair Thomson (for trainer profiles – see https://events.humanitix.com/graduate-oral-history-intensive)

Are you a PhD, Masters or Honours student, or a post-doc, about to start a research project using oral history – and need training to get you on the right track? Perhaps you’ve already started a graduate oral history project and want advice and support? You may be a historian, or you work in another social science or humanities discipline that uses life story interviews. This four-day, online training course could be just what you need.

In Autumn 2024, three of Australia’s leading oral historians, in partnership with Oral History Victoria, are pioneering an oral history intensive course aimed at university research students. We will teach you how to plan an oral history project and apply for ethics approval. You’ll learn how to create excellent interviews and document the recordings for use in research. We’ll explore approaches to analysing interviews and interpreting memories. And we’ll consider how to write a thesis using oral history as well as other types of oral history productions.

You will be active participants in the teaching and learning: reading a selection of key texts, bringing examples and issues from you own research, workshopping issues with the group, conducting practice interviews, discussing interview extracts from each participant, and developing a peer support group of graduate oral history researchers from around Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia. Each day school will be taught online via Zoom, from 9.30am-4pm Australian Eastern Standard time. The course will be limited to 18 participants.

Course outline

Day 1 Friday 19 April - Planning Your Oral History Project & Seeking Ethics Approval

Day 2 Saturday 20 April - Creating & Documenting Oral History Interviews

(fortnight break while participants conduct practice interviews)

Day 3 Friday 3 May - Interpreting Oral Histories

Day 4 Saturday 4 May - Making (Oral) Histories in Writing and other Media

Course fees:

$500 for Oral History Victoria and Oral History Australia members;

$750 non-members

We anticipate participants will draw on funds from their own or departmental graduate research budgets. For students without access to research funds, bursaries might be available from state and territory oral history associations or for PHA members through the PHA Bursary program.

Registration via https://events.humanitix.com/graduate-oral-history-intensive

Contact: for further information and to discuss the course, please contact: Alistair.Thomson@monash.edu

Join us in Adelaide, where professional historians from across Australia will be discussing, sharing and celebrating our work as professional historians.

PHA’s 2023 National Conference, Other Histories: Other Audiences is hosted by PHA (South Australia) and will be a hybrid conference, held both in person and streamed online.

Click here for registration details and the conference program.

Professional historians record the history of places with direct connections to the public: in parks, on monuments, at exhibitions, in archives and publications. 2018 is the culmination of the four-year long commemoration of World War I and therefore a fitting time to reflect on the challenges we face as professional historians interpreting sites, places and events that become surrounded by myth and emotion.

The conference will explore the changing ways we mark time and interpret events through traditional and new media in the 21st century.

Key note speaker: Bruce Scates  

Bruce Scates is an Associate Professor in the School of History, University of New South Wales and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. His publications include Return to Gallipoli, A New Australia, the Cambridge History of the Shrine of Remembrance and Women and the Great War (co authored with Raelene Frances). The last of these won the NSW Premier’s History Award.

A draft program is now available on the PHA NSW website:

http://www.phansw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/MARKING-TIME-conference-program-draft.pdf