Audio on demand

Oral historian Alistair Thomson explores the experience of migration to Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, through the eyes and life stories of four British women, during his time as a Director’s Fellow at the National Museum of Australia.

Curator Alison Mercieca tells the story of the Macassan trepang, or sea slug, industry. She considers the places connected by the Macassan voyagers from Indonesia and looks at the archaeological traces left on the Arnhem Land coast.

Curator Rebecca Nason discusses two Staffordshire figurines of nineteenth-century Irish nationalist, parliamentarian and convict William Smith O’Brien. His story is told in the Australian Journeys gallery.

Historian Darrell Lewis discusses his research on ‘the outback archive,’ unorthodox historical records from pre-European times to the present, concentrating on marked water tanks and trees along the Murranji Track in the Northern Territory.

Four National Museum of Australia curators provide examples of material culture research into a boomerang, tools used by Hmong gardeners, a dress worn at the opening of Parliament House in 1927 and objects from the Snowy Hydro-Electric Scheme.

Archaeologist Mike Smith, curator Guy Hansen, historian Margaret Anderson and anthropologist Fred Myers reflect on the way their four different disciplines have approached physical evidence at the 2008 National Museum Collections Symposium.

Leading historians reflect on the ways in which collections can be used to interpret the past, and the issues and problems faced in doing so, in wrapping up the National Museum’s Collections 2008 symposium on material histories and objects as sources.

Curators outline examples of material culture research in Australian museums through objects including a wall-hanging crafted in a refugee camp, a military jacket, a wool collection, mining models and Australian Inland Mission Frontier Fête material.

Historian Mickey Dewar talks about her research into Mindil Beach, Darwin and the ways in which a cultural site intersects with a complex community history and memory, as part of her time with the National Museum’s Centre for Historical Research.

American writer and scholar William Fox discusses his research into how humans transform land into landscape, terrain into territory, and space into place, during his time as a Visiting Fellow at the National Museum’s Centre for Historical Research.