Fellows' Lecture Series 2007

In this series, a selection of the Library's Fellows will speak on their fellowship projects, how they have utilised the Library's collection and the results of their work.

Audio

Can't attend the lectures in person? Listen via our website instead. Talks will be recorded and the audio made available from this page.

Tuesday 27 November

Judy Horacek: The Quests and Questions of Home

Judy Horacek is known for her engaging and often hilarious cartoons, as well as children’s picture books, and her work is represented in the State Library's collection. Hear Judy discuss her research for a body of artwork about the concept of ‘home’. She is interested in 'ordinary lives, people whose lives have disappeared except for their presence in the Library’.

Thursday 22 November

Maria Tumarkin: Courage

Maria Tumarkin will discuss her new book, Courage (MUP), which explores the contradictory but essentially human nature of courage, drawing upon the author's own experiences as well as accounts from other cultures. She argues that courage is often ‘messy, explosive and morally ambivalent’, rather than inspirational or spectacular. Maria's book Traumascapes was shortlisted in the 2006 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

Tuesday 20 November

Elizabeth Willis: Gentlemen Amateur Collectors in Port Phillip

In the early years of European settlement in Port Phillip and Victoria (around 1835–55), a number of ‘gentlemen amateurs’ collected significant items of Victorian Aboriginal material culture, some of which remain in European museum collections. Hear writer Elizabeth Willis, a former Senior Curator at Museum Victoria, discuss her research into the activities and motivations of the collectors.

Thursday 8 November

Kirsty Murray: Escaping Lilliput

Hear award-winning children's author Kirsty Murray discuss her latest project Escaping Lilliput. Kirsty researched this new novel for younger readers during her Creative Fellowship at the Library. From the early 1880s, Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company recruited children from working-class Melbourne families and the Melbourne Orphan Asylum to perform in theatrical tours of Australia and New Zealand. Find out more about Kirsty's research into this, and her resulting book.

Thursday 13 September

Eileen Chanin: Modern women of the arts

Discover the stories of four remarkable Victorian-born women who took on war, modernity and the social mores of their time to become expatriate pioneers in the international arts world of the inter-war period. They were sculptor Dora Ohlfsen (b. Ballarat 1869), musicologist Louise Hanson-Dyer (b. Melbourne 1884), publicist Alleyne Clarice Zander (b. Coleraine 1892), and artist Mary Cecil Allen (b. Melbourne 1893). Eileen Chanin will discuss the project on the lives and works of these four remarkable women that she researched with fellow art historian and author Steven Miller during their 2006 joint Creative Fellowship at the State Library.

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Thursday 30 August

Lally Katz and Chris Kohn: Vaudeville in Melbourne between the wars

Hear playwright Lally Katz and director Chris Kohn discuss their new play, about Melbourne's lively vaudeville scene in the Edwardian era, which they researched during their 2006 joint Creative Fellowship at the State Library. Commissioned by the Malthouse Theatre, and intended for production in 2009, the play focuses on the theatres and artists of the city's 1913–14 Vaudeville milieu. During their research in the Library's collection, Katz and Kohn discovered fascinating original theatre programs, photographs, sound recordings and scrapbooks. Their previous collaborations include the award-winning The Black Swan of Trespass, based on the Ern Malley poetry hoax.

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Monday 16 July

Sarah Cathcart: Boat 2 - Australians at War

Dramaturg Sarah Cathcart will describe her research at the State Library during her Creative Fellowship, and the unexpected material she discovered in the Library's collection which will help to bring her new play to life. The play, Boat 2, is the second in a trilogy. The drama is set in Melbourne during World War ll, in a munitions factory in Footscray and on a naval destroyer in the Pacific. A young man from Kew has been called up to join the Navy, while on the other side of town, a young girl leaves school to make the bombs and bullets at the local factory. Sarah Cathcart is committed to making theatre that celebrates and reflects upon Australian identity. She performed her recent play, Cargo: The True Adventures of Mary Bryant, at the Malthouse Theatre earlier this year.

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Wednesday 11 July

Chloe Hooper: Western District Gothic

Writer Chloe Hooper will discuss her research for her Creative Fellowship project at the State Library, a novel based in Victoria's Western District. Chloe's debut novel, A Child’s Book of True Crime, was published in 2002. Since then, she has won the 2006 Walkley Award for Magazine Feature Writing, and the 2006 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award John Curtin Prize for Journalism for her essay The Tall Man: Palm Island’s heart of darkness. She is also working on a non-fiction book about the Palm Island death-in-custody case.

Thursday 14 June

Dr Kathy Fennessy: Learning the Land

Dr Kathleen Fennessy, the 2006 Redmond Barry Fellow, will discuss her Fellowship project ‘Ploughing with one heifer: Colonial Victorians Learning the Land’ and the research she has been undertaking at the Library. The Redmond Barry 1854 Fellowship is funded by the University of Melbourne and named in honour of Sir Redmond Barry (1813-80), a founder of the University and the State Library.

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Thursday 26 April

Caroline Clemente: Dr Howitt's Corner

Historian and art history scholar Caroline Clemente is currently undertaking a Creative Fellowship at the Library. She will discuss her Fellowship project, in which she is using original manuscripts to gain insight into colonial life in Melbourne in the 1840s and 1850s, particularly the cultural initiatives of the Howitt family, who established a civilised centre for the new colony at No.1 Collins Street.

Thursday 12 April

Bruno Leti: The Cross and the Matrix

Artist Bruno Leti has created many artist books, some of which are held in the Library's Rare Printed Collections. He is also currently undertaking a Creative Fellowship at the Library. He will discuss his Fellowship project, in which he is investigating the symbols of the cross and the matrix, not merely as shapes, but as a combination of forms in which meaning and feeling can be found and expressed within their historical boundaries.

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