History Seminars

This paper conducts an experiment in reading Australia’s first scientific journal, taking seriously recent challenges to decolonise archives, including those of natural science.

On March 1944 seventy-six Allied prisoners of war (POWs) escaped from their German prison camp, Stalag Luft III. Nearly all were recaptured; fifty were later shot on Hitler's express order. In this paper, I focus on what happened in the period between the recapture of the POWs and the interment of their remains at Stalag Luft III. I will discuss the treatment of the escaper's bodies by German authorities, the dual narrative the grieving POW camp community composed to make sense of their comrades’ deaths, and their construction of a memorial vault to house the dead prisoner's remains. The paper reveals the deep emotional resonance of what came to be known as ‘the Great Escape’. It addresses a long-neglected aspect of the history of this infamous event of the Second World War and provides an example of some of the broader themes I am exploring in my ARC DECRA project: “Between Death and Commemoration: An Australian History of the War Corpse”.

This paper explores historical narratives of the metaphysics of evolutionary science, as advanced by researchers in the biological sciences in mid-twentieth-century Australia. As the historian of medicine Adrian Wilson has argued, from the scale of the literature review upwards, doing science entails writing history. Scientists construct ‘imagined pasts’ that frame the work they are engaged in, shaping the meanings embedded within it. Historical narratives implicitly or explicitly form part of the motivating and legitimating intellectual architecture of scientific practice.

HPI Student Milestone, Frédéric Barthet

Sushma Griffin, IASH

Presented by Martin Crotty

Professor David Ip

Presented by Andrew Bonnell

"History Speaks: Humanity’s Challenges” Public Lecture Series Presents:
Professor John Maynard (University of Newcastle), introduced by Michael Aird (University of Queensland)

Confirmation milestone seminar presented by Ann Paterson