UTAS English

This Friday! “Writing History After Mabo: Henry Reynolds and Geoff Rodoreda in Conversation with Anna Johnston”

Date and Time: 11:00 am – 12:00 pm, Friday 23 September 2022
Zoom: https://utas.zoom.us/j/83637403261

How has the writing of Australian history changed in the thirty years since the Mabo decision? How has the place of history—as a discipline and as a field of public discourse—been transformed in the decades since the recognition of native title? And how does history inform and interact with literature in Australia? Join Henry Reynolds and Geoff Rodoreda in conversation with Anna Johnston as they address the legacy of Mabo on the field of history in Australia.


Henry Reynolds is one of Australia's most influential historians. Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Tasmania, his work on colonial settler and Aboriginal relations, law, and frontier violence have shaped academic inquiry and public consciousness of the past in this country, since the publication of his first monograph The Other Side of the Frontier in 1981. The author and editor of nineteen works, Henry’s personal friendship with Eddie Koiki Mabo, and his scholarship on the legal basis of colonization in Australia were pivotal in laying the intellectual groundwork for the case for native title. Henry’s most recent work is Truth Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement (2021).


Geoff Rodoreda is a lecturer in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He did a BA (Communication) in Sydney and worked as a journalist at the ABC in Adelaide and Darwin before moving to Germany in 1996. He completed his PhD in the English Department in Stuttgart in 2016. The resulting monograph, The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction (Peter Lang, 2018), was awarded ASAL’s inaugural Alvie Egan Award. His new book, co-edited with Eva Bischoff, is Mabo’s Cultural Legacy: History, Literature, Film and Cultural Practice in Contemporary Australia (Anthem, 2021).


Anna Johnston is Associate Professor in Literature and co-lead of the Australian Studies Research Node at The University of Queensland, with wide-ranging interests in colonial writing and its aftermath. Her most recent book is Eliza Hamilton Dunlop: Writing from the Colonial Frontier (coedited with Elizabeth Webby, 2021) and her book The Antipodean Laboratory: Making Colonial Knowledge, 1770-1870 will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.

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