A/Prof Frank Bongiorno, Australian National University presents: History Public Lecture on Writing Australia’s 1980s
Event Details
- Date:
- Thursday, 10 September 2015
- Time:
- 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
- Room:
- Room E302 Forgan Smith Building
- UQ Location:
- Forgan Smith Building (St Lucia)
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Serena Bagley
- Phone:
- 3365 2795
- Email:
- s.bagley@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- Historical and Philosophical Inquiry
Event Description
- Full Description:
- The journalist and historian Paul Kelly characterised Australia’s 1980s as ‘the end of certainty’; for George Megalogenis, it was the beginning and foundation of ‘The Australian Moment’, the quarter of a century of prosperity that followed the recession of the early 1990s and survived even the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. In some recent Australian political discourse, the decade has taken on many of the features of a golden age. This lecture, which emerges from research for my book The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia (Black Inc., November 2015), will challenge these ideas in exploring some key themes in the period in the context of recent cultural and historical representations of the decade in Australia. It will not treat the period as one in which far-sighted politicians saved the country from mediocrity, and Australians from themselves – a broad characterisation that has become almost an authorised version of decade’s meaning among Australian elites across much of the political spectrum. Instead, I present an era of considerable popular anxiety about rapid and far-reaching change, as well as sharply contested visions concerning Australia’s identity, economy and place in the world. Against this background, Australians grappled with the implications of the post-imperialism, the end of the cold war, Asian dynamism and globalisation.
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Frank Bongiorno is Associate Professor of History at the Australian National University. He previously held a teaching position at King’s College London, and was Smuts Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge and Mellon Visiting Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an Australian labour, political and cultural historian, and author or co-author of three books and many scholarly articles and book chapters on Australian history. His most recent book, The Sex Lives of Australians: A History (2012), won the ACT Book of the Year and was shortlisted in the Australian History category of the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the New South Wales Premier’s History Award. He is a regular contributor to the media, especially Inside Story, for which he was London correspondent from 2008 until 2011. He has also written for Australian Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, the Monthly, The Australian and the Fairfax Media. He is co-editor of History Australia.
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
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- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
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