School of History Seminar Series

Wednesday 6 August 2014, 4:15-5:30pm

McDonald Room, Menzies Library, ANU

Rebecca Jones, Karen Downing and Blake Singley will pull the curtain on their recent forays into an interesting mix of methods and sources that together, they hope, will add new dimensions to the long history of government drought assistance in Australia. We have begun to chart monetary assistance through financial records in official year Books; visualise the language of legislation and newspaper commentary; and correlate these findings with firsthand accounts of drought in personal writings and oral history interviews. Each of these approaches has its challenges and opportunities and these will be the focus of this presentation. This is very much a work-in-progress seminar where critique of our methods and discussion of our tentative conclusions will be very welcome.

Feature image: Dried up water ways, North Eastern Australia. Source: Hellsgeriatric (CC)