Program

Program booklet – digital download (coming soon)

Download the program to support your professional learning application

Download the Session Descriptions and
Presenter Biographies:

• Thursday 7 August
• Friday 8 August

Download the Subject Streams:

• Thursday 7 August
• Friday 8 August

KEYNOTE SESSION: Shutting Up and Listening!
Professor Clare Wright OAM, La Trobe University

The Uluru Statement from the Heart encourages us to engage as a nation in acts of truth-telling. Politically and historically, it’s time. But how do we learn to shut up and listen to the truths that are being told, and what are the barriers that have prevented Australians from hearing these truths before? Historian, author, broadcaster, podcaster and public commentator Professor Clare Wright has been grappling with this question: on country, in archives, in classrooms, in museums and in her latest book, Ṉäku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions, the third instalment of her acclaimed Democracy Trilogy, which is based on a decade of research and community consultation in North-East Arnhem Land.

In this ‘in-conversation’ style presentation with HTAV’s Executive Officer Dr Deb Hull, Clare will also respond to questions from the HTAV community.

Following the presentation, Clare will be available for book signing. Clare’s books will also be available for purchase throughout the conference at the HTAV Publishing exhibition table.

Professor Clare Wright OAM is an
award-winning historian, author, broadcaster, podcaster and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media. Clare is currently Professor of History and Professor of Public Engagement at La Trobe University. She has written five works of history, including the best-selling The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (winner of the 2014 Stella Prize) and You Daughters of Freedom. Her latest book, and the final instalment in her Democracy Trilogy, is the highly acclaimed Ṉäku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions.
Clare has written and presented history documentaries for the ABC and is Associate Producer of the feature film One Mind, One Heart, written and directed by Larissa Behrendt. She also hosts the ABC Radio National history podcast, Shooting the Past, co-hosts the La Trobe University podcast Archive Fever (with Yves Rees), and is Executive Producer of Hey History! the first Australian history podcast designed for use in the classroom. In 2020, Clare was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours list for ‘services to literature and to historical research’. Clare is Chair of the National Museum of Australia Council and was Board Director of the Wheeler Centre.

SOCIAL HOUR
NETWORKING DRINKS FOR CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS

Join colleagues, catch up with old friends, meet new people, harvest good ideas, and enjoy a complimentary drink and a selection of canapés at the HTAV Social Hour.

Social Hour will take place at the Hawthorn Arts Centre conference venue.

Sponsored by The Premier’s Spirit of Anzac Prize.

KEYNOTE SESSION: ‘The Most Beautiful Lies’? Australian History for Australia
The Governor of Victoria, Her Excellency Professor the Honourable Margaret Gardner AC and Emeritus Professor Peter McPhee AM, The University of Melbourne

In 1897 Mark Twain famously opined, ‘Australian history … does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies … all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. Full of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities.’
Yet the current low involvement in Australian history in our high schools and universities is such that Twain’s words seem today an incredible description of the appeal of understanding our history.
Without general, as well as deep, understanding of our history we impoverish our ability to tell our story to ourselves and others in ways that help frame the hopes and responses of our polity and society.
We must ask ourselves what are the best paths to telling our beautiful, surprising, incongruous, incredible, and sometimes mouldy, story.

Her Excellency Professor the
Honourable Margaret Gardner AC is the 30th Governor of Victoria and the second woman to hold the office. Prior to her appointment in August 2023, she was the 9th and first woman President and Vice-Chancellor of Monash University from September 2014 until August 2023.

Prior to joining Monash, the Governor was Vice-Chancellor and President of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) from April 2005 until August 2014. She has extensive academic experience, having held various leadership positions in Australian universities throughout her career, including as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at The University of Queensland and Pro Vice-Chancellor at Griffith University in Queensland.

She attained a first-class honours degree in Economics and a PhD from the University of Sydney. In 1988, she was a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow, spending time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University, New York, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2018, she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

The Governor was Chair of the Group of Eight Universities in Australia from 2020 to 2023. She was also a Director of Infrastructure Victoria from 2015 to 2023, the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) from 2015 to 2023 and Chair of CASE Asia-Pacific Regional Council from 2019 to 2023.

The Governor was Chair of Universities Australia from 2017 to 2019 and Museum Victoria from 2008 to 2016 and chaired the Strategic Advisory Committee and the Expert Panel of the Office of Learning and Teaching (Federal Government Department of Education and Training). She has also been a member of various other boards and committees, including the Australian-American Fulbright Commission, the ANZAC Centenary Advisory Board and the International Education Advisory Committee, which led to the Chaney Report.

In 2007, the Governor was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in recognition of service to tertiary education, particularly in the areas of university governance and gender equity, and to industrial relations. Subsequently in January 2020, the Governor was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for her eminent service to tertiary education through leadership and innovation in teaching and learning, research and financial sustainability.

In her inauguration speech, the Governor expressed a desire to listen to the voices of all Victorians, and to support and preserve the State’s democratic institutions.

Emeritus Professor Peter McPhee AM
was appointed to a Personal Chair in History at the University of Melbourne in 1993. He was the university’s first Provost in 2007–2009 and is now an Emeritus Professor. Peter has published widely on the history of France since 1770, most recently Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (Yale University Press, 2016) and An Environmental History of France: Making the Landscape 1770 – 2020 (Bloomsbury, 2024). He is currently the Chair of the History Council of Victoria, the state’s peak body for History, and Patron of the HTAV.

Peter has been a supporter of History teachers and their students since travelling on one of the first History Safaris through regional Victoria as a PhD student in the 1970s. Since then, he has often spoken at HTAV conferences and at HTAV student lectures. His view is that we cannot overestimate the civic and workplace importance of an education in History, which emphasises careful use of evidence, cultural understanding, flexibility of outlook, and respect for difference. He argues that our History teachers deserve the place in the school curriculum that the HTAV advocates.

SOCIAL HOUR
NETWORKING DRINKS FOR CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS

Join colleagues, catch up with old friends, meet new people, harvest good ideas, and enjoy a complimentary drink and a selection of canapés at the HTAV Social Hour.

Social Hour will take place at the Hawthorn Arts Centre conference venue.

Sponsored by Jacaranda.