CROUCHED in the red sand, handling a stone artefact with an arc of blue desert sky above him, Mike Smith is at home. This connoisseur of deserts, who revolutionised our understanding of the human history of Central Australia, has a discerning eye for the distinctive character of Australia’s Red Centre. His new book, The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts, published in March by Cambridge University Press, is the most important exploration of Australia’s ancient human history since John Mulvaney’s The Prehistory of Australia was published forty-four years ago . . .

Read the full article in Inside Story.

Photo by Stuart Grant.

Want to meet honours students from other universities and discuss how to research and write your thesis?

The School of History of the Australian National University invites you to an intensive History Honours Workshop in Canberra on the weekend of 24-26 May 2013 (it will start on Friday afternoon and finish noon Sunday).  Historians at ANU will lead discussions on various aspects of research and thesis writing, and will also provide you with the opportunity to join smaller groups focusing on historical issues of direct relevance to your own inquiry.  Students will be expected to participate by speaking and writing about their own research-in-progress.  Special tuition will be offered in the fields of Biography, Environmental History, Indigenous History, Legal History, and Political and Contemporary History.

Financial support will be available to participants from outside Canberra. This will consist of a return discount air or bus fare plus a contribution towards accommodation expenses in Canberra.

Course organisers and presenters will include Professor Tom Griffiths, Dr Carolyn Strange, Dr Nicholas Brown, Dr Rani Kerin and Dr Maria Nugent.

Application Process

The workshop will be restricted to honours students in History and related fields, currently enrolled at universities in Australia and New Zealand. The number of participants will be strictly limited (to facilitate discussion).  There is no registration fee. The deadline for applications is 24 April 2013.

Please provide the following:

• A brief curriculum vitae
• Two short statements together totalling no more than 500 words: one explaining the subject (or likely subject) of your honours thesis; and the other describing what you hope to gain from this workshop.  These statements will guide selection and also help us to design the event around your interests.

Please e-mail your application to Karen Smith, School of History Administrator: karen.smith@anu.edu.au.  Enquiries about the academic program of the workshop may be directed to Professor Tom Griffiths at tom.griffiths@anu.edu.au

We look forward to hearing from you!

Cambridge World Archaeology, ISBN-13: 9780521407458.

This is the first book-length study of the archaeology of Australia’s deserts, one of the world’s major habitats and the largest block of drylands in the southern hemisphere. Over the last few decades, a wealth of new environmental and archaeological data about this fascinating region has become available. Drawing on a wide range of sources, The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts explores the late Pleistocene settlement of Australia’s deserts, the formation of distinctive desert societies, and the origins and development of the hunter-gatherer societies documented in the classic nineteenth-century ethnographies of Spencer and Gillen. Written by one of Australia’s leading desert archaeologists, the book interweaves a lively history of research with archaeological data in a masterly survey of the field and a profoundly interdisciplinary study that forces archaeology into conversations with history and anthropology, economy and ecology, and geography and Earth sciences.

Photos from the launch

Held on Friday 22 March, Friends Lounge, NMA

Read a review by Nicolas Rothwell

Publisher’s website

Section
Curatorial and Research

Classification
EL2

Immediate Supervisor
Assistant Director of Collections, Content and Exhibitions

Status
Ongoing Fulltime

Location
Acton, Canberra

Application close date
5pm 24 March 2013

Position contact
Dr Mathew Trinca, Assistant Director of Collections, Content and Exhibitions. 02 6208 5362

If you are deaf, hearing or speech impaired, you can contact us through the

• National Relay Service TTY call 1800 555 677, or
• Speak & Listen call 1800 555 727, or
• Internet relay visit www.iprelay.com.au and ask for 1800 026 132

Previously known as the Student Prize for Australian Environmental History and the History of Australian Science.

The National Museum of Australia, in partnership with the Australian Academy of Science, awards the Mike Smith prize to a postgraduate or undergraduate student for an essay based on original research in the fields of environmental history of the history of science in Australia. The Museum and the Academy have awarded the prize annually since 2006, with the aim of nurturing young scholars and encouraging them to publish their research.

In 2013 the National Museum re-named the prize after Australian archaeologist and Museum Senior Research Fellow Mike Smith, in recognition of his contribution to mentoring young researchers. The prize, offering $3,000, will now be awarded every two years.

2013 prize winners announced

First prize: Christina Dyson, PhD candidate in the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, has been awarded the 2013 Mike Smith Prize for her essay, ‘Living fossils and mouth-watering stones: manipulating history in the post-WWII natural Australian plant garden’. Dyson’s essay traces how, between the mid-1940s and the early 1970s, changing perceptions of Australia’s natural landscape, and particularly its ancient character, intersected with a new focus on national identity to foster the idea of the native or ‘bush’ garden.

Runner-up prizes: Alessandro Antonello and Sonya Duus, both from the Australian National University, were jointly awarded the 2013 runner-up prize. Antonello for his essay, ‘”Repelling the assault on the unknown”: Australia and the International Geophysical Year in Antarctica’; and Duus for ‘Contesting coal: echoes through time’.

The 2013 judging panel comprised Libby Robin, representing the Head of the National Museum’s Research Centre, Rachel Ankeny, Chair of the Academy’s National Committee for the History and Philosophy of Science, and Rod Home, representing the Academy’s journal, Historical Records of Australian Science.

Gallery

See Mike’s lecture series, ‘The Lost art of Stratigraphy‘.

Gallery

Further information: National Museum of Australia

See Mike’s lecture series, ‘The Lost art of Stratigraphy‘.

Australia Day Honours

Dr Mike Smith was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2013 Australia Day honours. The citation reads, ‘For significant service to archaeological scholarship, particularly of the Australian desert regions’. Few archaeologists have been recognised with an Order of Australia, and this is probably the first specifically for desert archaeology.

When I emerged for breakfast in my Venice hotel, a stylish establishment with fine furnishings and carpets, and a garden courtyard, there was a stench. Salt, sewage and seaweed had combined in a thick, rising miasma. The beautiful, ornate staircase led down to chaos. A round-faced, dark-haired boy aged about 10 stood at the top of the stairs, staring with some excitement down into the mess. He was a fellow guest and when he saw me about to descend, he pronounced solemnly: ‘Breakfast’s been cancelled. The kitchen’s flooded.’

Read the rest of Tom Griffiths’ essay ‘Queen of Tides’ in Aeon Magazine.

Photo by fotoviva

by Christine Hansen and Tom Griffiths (CSIRO Publishing, 2012). ISBN: 9780643104792

On 23 November 2012, a new book by Christine Hansen and Tom Griffiths was launched in one of the communities that suffered on Black Saturday.  Entitled Living with Fire: People, nature and history in Steels Creek (CSIRO Publishing), the book is the result of collaboration with people of the Yarra Valley who survived the firestorm and want to rebuild their lives and sense of community identity.

Eighty residents of Steels Creek and neighbouring areas gathered on a beautiful evening at the Steels Creek Community Centre, the former primary school, to celebrate the completion of the book.  Living with Fire is produced in full colour throughout and features local photography and art, historical photos, case studies of how families have rebuilt their homes to live with fire, and an analysis of controversial policy issues arising from the firestorm and the subsequent Royal Commission.  Christine and Tom have also written a micro-history of Australian settlement, exploring the deep social and environmental history of the valley over millennia.

View photos from the launch at Steels Creek, Victoria on Friday 23 November 2012.

Below is the back cover blurb from the book:

Living with Fire

Late on the afternoon of 7 February 2009, the day that came to be known as Black Saturday, the Kinglake plateau carried a massive conflagration down the fringing ranges into the Steels Creek community. Ten people perished and 67 dwellings were razed in the firestorm. In the wake of the fires, the devastated residents of the valley began the long task of grieving, repairing, rebuilding or moving on while redefining themselves and their community.

In Living with Fire, historians Tom Griffiths and Christine Hansen trace both the history of fire in the region and the human history of the Steels Creek valley in a series of essays which examine the relationship between people and place. These essays are interspersed with four interludes compiled from material produced by the community.

A deeply moving book, Living with Fire brings to life the stories of one community’s experience with fire, offering a way to understand the past, and in doing so, prepare for the future.

Read a fascinating edited extract in Inside Story.

View the research project page.

HALF a decade ago it became clear to Mike Smith, the bright star of Australian desert archaeology  that the time had come for him to pause, to rein in his unending field research in remote and windswept places.

It was time for him to retreat to his study in Canberra and set down a summary of his ideas and his life’s work: he needed to preserve a record of himself.

Since his early 20s Smith, long attached to the National Museum of Australia, had been out in the deserts of the inland every year: digging, excavating, finding clues to the deep past of the continent and threading them together. He had played a key part in one of the great intellectual adventures of our time: the unearthing of Australia’s prehistory.

What had been the exact course of the transformations in the landscape of the red centre, and what had driven them across the millennia? How could we know the precise time scale of such far-distant events?

Smith had built theories and carried through a long-term project of investigations: he had drawn a picture of the past worlds of Australia that lie buried in time. He had seen much and learned from many gifted scientists.

And now there was a shadow over him: he was barely 50 and cancer was pursuing him, hunting him down. A race began: it was a struggle to shape and order past time in its sequence, and a race with time itself.

Read the rest at The Australian.

Photo: Peter Eve.