Centre for 21st Century Humanities Newsletter - December

WEB VERSION

Welcome to our December newsletter

It's been a busy month for the University of Newcastle's Centre for 21st Century Humanities, read on to learn about our research and activities.

New Director for Centre in 2020

Professor Victoria Haskins has led the Centre for 21st Century Humanities during 2019 and is now moving into the role of President of the Academic Senate for 2020. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank Victoria for her guidance this year and welcome incoming Centre Director Dr Julie McIntyre.

Julie is a an environmental historian whose research focuses on how the growing, making, selling, drinking and export of Australian grape wine is a window to economic development, changing identities and landscapes. Stay tuned for more updates in 2020 as the Centre's research progresses.

Massacre Map Guardian partnership wins Walkley Award

The Killing Times, a collaboration between The Guardian Australia and the University of Newcastle’s Colonial Frontier Massacres research team has been awarded the 2019 Walkley Award for Coverage of Indigenous Affairs.

The project has revealed harrowing details of the true extent of massacres on the colonial frontier of Australia. Around 97 per cent of people killed in these massacres were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The research is an important ‘truth telling’ project, and the research team, led by Centre for 21st Century Humanities member, Professor Lyndall Ryan, are honoured to receive the recognition of a Walkley Award alongside The Guardian Australia, and hope it helps to put a spotlight on the truth, to bring about historical acceptance and in doing so contribute to a path towards reconciliation.

Discovery Project success - Ayahs and Amahs

Professor Victoria Haskins has been awarded $191,437 for her research project Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain 1780-1945.

The project will run 2020 – 2022 and looks at female domestic care workers from India and China who travelled to Australia and elsewhere during the period of British colonialism. Accompanying colonial families along circuits of empire between Australia, Asia, and the UK over two centuries, these were extraordinarily mobile women. By exploring the historical experiences and cultural memories of these earliest global domestic workers, the project aims to illuminate a broader transcolonial history of domestic work. Expected outcomes include a number of publications and a website; and the project offers the social and cultural benefits to be gained by advancing our historical understanding of the forgotten cross-cultural relationships that have shaped our world today.

Discovery Project success - Landscape, language and culture in Indigenous Australia

Associate Professor Bill Palmer has been awarded $455,000 for his research project Landscape, language and culture in Indigenous Australia.

This project aims to determine how culture and social diversity interact with landscape in representing physical space in the minds and grammars of speakers of Australian Indigenous languages. The project will conduct the first Australia-wide survey of Indigenous spatial description correlated with landscape, and the first large-scale investigation of diversity in spatial behaviour among individuals within communities. The findings are expected to
inform crucial debates on the formative role of landscape in language, and advance our knowledge of human spatial cognition. It will collect completely new experimental and natural data in six endangered languages, with significant benefits for the maintenance of Indigenous languages and cultures.

Waiting for Equality exhibition launch

The Waiting for Equality exhibition was officially opened over the weekend at Watt Space Gallery.

Waiting for Equality is an exhibition that brings together archival and contemporary material to focus on LGBTQI+ history, as it has emerged in the city of Newcastle. Until now, LGBTQI+ history and culture has yet to be the focus of a public exhibition and has received little attention through academic scholarship. The exhibition is an opportunity to reflect on and celebrate this history and culture, focusing on the development of LGBTQI+ rights and the historically significant moment in December 2017 when same sex marriage was legalised throughout Australia. The passing of the bill has been seen as a watershed moment for equal rights within Australia and was the outcome of decades of campaigning by the LGBTQI+ community.

The exhibition will run until 4 March 2020.

Digital Humanities Symposium

The ‘Digital research across the humanities’ symposium at NewSpace, on 28 to 30 November 2019, was highly successful and attracted scholars from different disciplines.

Professor Jan Rybicki, renowned scholar from Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, and one of the creators of the leading stylometry tool Stylo presented a beginners workshop on this package that humanists can easily use to perform advanced quantitative analyses of texts.

Scholars from UoN and other universities also presented current and exciting digital humanities projects. Emeritus Professor of English John Burrows (pictured sitting), now 90, for whom the Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing was established at UoN in 1989, made a special trip from Sydney to meet some of the scholars who got their inspiration from him and have been following his path in the area of computer-assisted text analysis.

Farmers face unexpected challenges as they navigate modern life on the land

As drought concerns farmers across the country, new research has shown Australian farmers are facing other unexpected challenges as regional Australia continues to evolve and more people from cities escape to a life in the country.

Researchers, led by the Centre's Dr Hedda Askland, gathered insights from more than 200 landowners and stakeholders in the increasingly popular Tweed and Cabonne shires, located in the Northern Rivers and Central West regions of New South Wales respectively, to understand rural land use practices and better ensure land productivity.

“The makeup of regional Australia is rapidly shifting, with an ageing population and an influx of new rural residents who often have limited experience of agriculture,” explained anthropologist Dr Hedda Askland.

“We have people coming from cities seeking to settle in the country for the lifestyle it offers, which often goes hand-in-hand with owning a small holding or hobby farm.

“However, this can pose an issue for long-standing landowners who rely on the productivity of their farms for their livelihood. For example, new landowners may not be fully aware of the importance of managing invasive species or they may leave their land for long periods, which can have an impact on neighbouring properties and cause conflict.

American Historical Press journal article by Prof Haskins

Professor Victoria Haskins’ research into the placement of Indigenous girls and women into white homes has been highlighted in a recent article published in the American Historical Review journal.

Domesticating Colonizers: Domesticity, Indigenous Domestic Labor, and the Modern Settler Colonial Nation examines how the state constructed and regulated relations between Indigenous and white women in the home through the outing program that ran between the 1880s and the Second World War in the US, and the various Aboriginal apprenticeship schemes in Australia.

In the article, Haskins says that “domesticity came to be regarded both as a force for civilizing and as a sign of civilization in the modern settler colonial nation through the very process of state intervention in the domestic arena.”

Haskins uncovers how concerns that those who would choose to employ Indigenous girls would not be motivated by altruism, nor indeed anything other than the urge to exploit and abuse them, were expressed from the outset.