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Lorena Allam, Dirk Moses and Ümit Kurt reflect on what can be learned from histories of genocide, and locate their discussion between journalism, history and processes of truth-telling.

This History Now session, chaired by Associate Professor Nancy Cushing, is a compelling exploration of truth-telling and genocide, featuring insights from award-winning journalist Lorena Allam, and renowned genocide scholars Dr Umut Kurt and Professor Dirk Moses. What responsibilities do historians have in addressing the harsh realities of genocide and colonisation, and how does this impact First Nations people in Australia and other global communities? We tackle these challenging questions and more, examining the interconnectedness of past atrocities with current conflicts, such as the ongoing violence in Palestine, through diverse perspectives.

Lorena Allam is a multiple Walkley award winning journalist, descended from the Gamilaraay and Yawalaraay nations of north west NSW . Lorena is the Guardian's Indigenous affairs editor.

She was awarded a 2023 Churchill fellow to investigate the role of the media in Indigenous truth telling.

Professor Dirk Moses teaches international relations at the City College of New York. He is the author and editor of books on genocide and memory. Two anthologies appearing this year are The Holocaust Museum and Human Rights: Transnational Perspectives on Contemporary Memorials (University of Pennsylvania Press) and The Russian Invasion of Ukraine Victims Perpetrators Justice and the Question of Genocide (Routledge). He edits the Journal of Genocide Research.

Dr. Ümit Kurt is an historian and award-winning researcher at the University of Newcastle, digging into hidden stories to better understand the transformations of imperial structures in the Modern Middle East and late Ottoman Empire – and their role in constituting the republican regime. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is the author of The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province (Harvard University Press) and coauthor of The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide (Berghahn).

Chair: Associate Professor Nancy Cushing
Nancy Cushing is Associate Professor in History, Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Deputy President of Academic Senate (Research) at the University of Newcastle on Awabakal and Worimi country. An environmental historian whose interests range from coal mining to human-other animal relations, she is co-editor of Animals Count: How Population Size Matters in Animal-Human Relations (Routledge 2018) and author of A History of Crime in Australia: Australian Underworlds. Current projects are a New History of Australia in 15 Animals (for Bloomsbury) and a history of humans and other animals in the urban area of Sydney, Australia funded by the Coral Thomas Fellowship (2024 - 25) at the State Library of New South Wales. Nancy is on the executives of the Australian Aotearoa NZ Environmental History Network and the Australian Historical Association and on the NSW Working Party for the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

This session of History Now was produced as an online special event, by the History Council of NSW in partnership with the Centre for the Study of Violence, University of Newcastle.

History Now 2024 is programmed by Dr Jesse Adams Stein (Vice President of HCNSW / Member of ACPH).

Recorded on 31 July 2024.

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Can crime narratives truly be told without causing harm or voyeurism? Join us for a compelling discussion as we bring together the insights of Dr. Meg Foster and Dr. Rachel Franks, led by chair, Nerida Campbell. With their extensive expertise in crime-related history and collections, we navigate the ethical tightrope historians must walk when recounting crime stories. Learn how these experts balance the need for intellectual integrity with the empathy and respect owed to those whose stories they tell. What does the selective heroism historically granted to figures like Ned Kelly, and not to Sam Poo ('Australia's Only Chinese Bushranger') tell us about Australian crime history?

What are the ethical implications of the ubiquitous presence of crime in media? And what about the implications of histories that exclude crime? There's much to learn and to think with in crime history, as Meg, Rachel and Nerida will explore.

Nerida Campbell is a curator with over 20 years experience working in collections, sites and stories related to crime, policing and the courts. She has a particular interest in the historical experience of female criminals within the New South Wales justice system. Campbell is currently working with the Harbour Trust on a series of interpretation projects for Cockatoo Island, which, as we know, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that has a complex past that includes convict, juvenile justice and prison histories.

Meg Foster is a historian of banditry, settler colonial, and public history. She is a Chancellor's Research Fellow at the University of Technology in Sydney and was recently an ABC Top 5 Media resident for the humanities and previously a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Meg has a passion for connecting academia with the contemporary world and has appeared in diverse outlets such as ABC, BBC and SBS, as well as Mianjin, Overland and the Australian Book Review. Her latest book, published by New South, is Boundary Crossers: the Hidden History of Australia's Other Bush Rangers.

Rachel Franks is the coordinator of scholarship at the State Library of New South Wales. She holds PhDs in Australian crime fiction and in true crime texts. A qualified educator and librarian, her extensive work on crime fiction, true crime, popular culture and information science has been presented at numerous conferences, as well as on radio and television. An award-winning writer, her research can be found in a wide variety of books, journals, magazines and online resources. She is the author of An Uncommon Hangman: the Life and Deaths of Robert Nosey Bob Howard, published in 2022.

History Now seminars explore current and compelling issues affecting the practice of contemporary history. It is a long-running series of public talks and discussions, bringing new perspectives to all aspects of historical practice.

This year History Now is a collaboration between the History Council of NSW (HCNSW), the State Library of NSW and the Australian Centre for Public History (ACPH) at UTS.

History Now 2024 is programmed by Jesse Adams Stein (Vice President of HCNSW / Member of ACPH).

History Now is short and sweet. The tone is conversational and the format is two speakers, each talking for 15-20 minutes, followed by a Q&A facilitated by a chairperson.

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In this episode of History Now, Emily O’Gorman and Taylor Coyne reflect on how history can be understood and written from more-than-human perspectives.

History Now seminars explore current and compelling issues affecting the practice of contemporary history. It is a long-running series of public talks and discussions, bringing new perspectives to all aspects of historical practice. This year History Now is a collaboration between the History Council of NSW (HCNSW), the State Library of NSW and the Australian Centre for Public History (ACPH) at UTS. History Now 2024 is programmed by Jesse Adams Stein (Vice President of HCNSW / Member of ACPH).

Associate Professor Emily O’Gorman is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow based at the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research is situated within environmental history and the interdisciplinary environmental humanities, and is primarily concerned with contested knowledges within broader cultural framings of authority, expertise, and landscapes with a focus on rivers and wetlands. She is the author of Flood Country: An Environmental History of the Murray-Darling Basin (CSIRO Publishing, 2012) and Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-than-human Histories of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin (University of Washington Press, 2021; MUP 2024).

Taylor Coyne is a PhD Candidate in urban and historical geography at UNSW, Sydney. He is also a Project Officer in the Connection with Country design team at the Sydney-based practice Yerrabingin. Taylor works in the space of creating meaningful, community-centric, culturally inclusive water sensitive urban design through ecologically and historically contextual storytelling. Taylor’s research focus is on the history, politics and design of eastern Sydney’s urban stormwater infrastructure. In particular, asking how and why Sydney’s waterscapes came to be the way they are today, and whose knowledges and experiences have been included and excluded in the way these spaces have been designed, planned, managed, and governed. All of Taylor’s research interests are threaded together by the overarching aim to address matters that are important to marginalised communities in Sydney, with a particular focus on bringing First Nations knowledges and histories to the fore. Taylor is working towards addressing how landscape architecture and environmental history might come together to incorporate Sydney’s swampy more-than-human histories.

Professor Warwick Anderson is the Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Discipline of Health and leader of the Politics, Governance and Ethics Theme with the Charles Perkins Centre. From 2012-17 he was ARC Laureate Fellow in the Department of History and the Center for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine. Additionally, he has an affiliation with History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney and is a Professorial Fellow of the School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. As an historian of science, medicine and public health, focusing on Australasia, the Pacific, Southeast Asia and the United States, Anderson is especially interested in ideas about race, human difference, and citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In recent years, his research has focussed on the conceptual development of disease ecology and planetary health, i.e., the population health impacts of climate change.

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