Scholar Talks online
Scholar Talks showcase the work of the Library's Fellows and other researchers.
Ted Farmer: Architect, Facilitator, Bureaucrat
Matt Devine discusses Edward (Ted) Herbert Farmer, Government Architect from 1958-73, during possibly the last Golden Age for public architecture in NSW.
"Here's To'ee": Tapping the Tooheys Collection
The Tooheys Limited collection has been an untapped resource, in the Mitchell stack, unnoticed by historians. Dr Lisa Murray – 2021 Hertzberg Fellow – has been exploring this special collection of business and industry records.
George Lambert’s The Convex Mirror
Art historian David Hansen makes a deep dive into a single (and singular) painting: George Lambert’s The Convex Mirror.
Australian Journalists in the 1911 Chinese Revolution
Tess Gardner tells the story of the Australian journalists who played a part in the end of the Qing Dynasty.
Lesbian Sydney in the 1990s
This talk explores the important role of Wicked Women and LOTL magazines in connecting and building lesbian communities in Sydney during the 1990s.
Working and Not: Life in an Economic Crisis
Dr Elizabeth Humphrys explores life for blue-collar workers in the economic crises from the 1970s to 1990s.
The spiritual is political: Magdalene Journal and Christian feminism
Associate Professor Clare Monagle — Australian Religious History Fellow, 2020 — explores the history of Christian feminism in Australia in the 1970s and 80s.
Doctored Uniforms
This talk and paper employs soldiers’ voices not only to highlight their reliance on vernacular medicine, but also to reformulate the boundaries of medical practice, and ask who can be considered a medical practitioner?
Natural curiosity: Unseen art of the First Fleet
Louise Anemaat – Executive Director, Library & Information Services and Dixson Librarian – talks about some of the extraordinary unseen art of the First Fleet.
Making Theatre that Matters
Dr Isobelle Barrett Meyering, the 2019 David Mitchell Memorial Fellow, discusses the background of Children’s Rights Activism in the 1970s and 1980s.
Landscaping Eastern Australia through the Colonial Survey
2020 Mitchell Fellow, Dr Jarrod Hore, re-grounds colonial surveying and explores the environmental prehistories of our settler colonial landscapes.
Searching for Charlotte: Australia’s First Children’s Writer
Australian writer Kate Forsyth, a descendant of Charlotte Waring Atkinson, has spent the past year investigating her ancestor’s astonishing true story of love, grief, and triumph in the face of overwhelming odds.
Visiting Mother: Australian soldiers in London during WWI
This talk explores London through the eyes of Australian soldiers and nurses on leave during the First World War.
Reimagining the Pacific, 1870 to 1970
This Scholar Talk looks at representations of the south and north-west Pacific in the writing of European Australians during the century that followed.
Sydney’s misremembered swamplands
This Scholar Talk presents an environmental history of Sydney’s freshwater swamplands.
Bungaree, Burigon and Aboriginal Newcastle
This talk takes a closer look at some of the more familiar Aboriginal residents and visitors to Newcastle, including Bungaree and Burigon.
Tracing Religious Education Across an Empire
Drawing on research undertaken at the Library, this talk explores parallels between religious education policy in Canada, Australia and New Zealand from the late 19th to the mid-20th century.
J.W. Lewin: Australia’s first free professional artist
Richard Neville, Mitchell Librarian discusses the incredible career of John William Lewin (1770–1819) who arrived in Sydney in 1800.