Notes on contributors

Darryn Ansted is a Lecturer in Painting in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University. He studied Fine Arts at the University of Western Australia and Royal Academy, Antwerp, and is the author of The Artwork of Gerhard Richter: Painting, Critical Theory and Cultural Transformation (London: Routledge, 2017).

Kate Bagnall’s research focuses on the history of Chinese migrants, their families and descendants in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand. She is particularly interested in histories of women, children and the family, and in legal histories of migration and citizenship. From 2016 to 2019 Kate was an ARC DECRA Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong, and she has recently taken up a position as Senior Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Tasmania.

Jennifer Bird has a BA (Hons) in Australian History and Writing from the University of New England. She has a strong interest in Australian convict history, colonial history, Indigenous history, oral history and biography. She is currently a PhD candidate with the National Centre of Biography in the School of History at The Australian National University (ANU). She is researching an individual experience of the colonial penal system during the years 1829 to 1869, that of recidivist convict, Robert Edward Knox, who was incarcerated for around 30 of his 40 years in the New South Wales colony.

Joshua Black is a postgraduate student in political history at the National Centre for Biography at ANU. He completed his BA (Hons) at the University of Wollongong in 2018; his thesis was entitled ‘For What Purpose?: The Political Memoirs and Diaries of the Rudd–Gillard Labor Cabinet’, and it examined the authorial intent and historiographical construction of the previous Labor Cabinet’s political memoir output. He continues to expand this field of research in his doctoral thesis, ‘Inside the Recent Political Past: Memoirs, Autobiographies and Diaries in Australian Political History’. In 2019 he was awarded the Research School of Social Science (RSSS), ANU Director’s Award for Higher Degree Research.

Pat Buckridge retired as professor of literary studies at Griffith University in 2013 after teaching there for over thirty years. Among his publications are a biography of Brian Penton (The Scandalous Penton, 1994) and (with Belinda McKay) By the Book: A Literary History of Queensland (2007). He has contributed 10 articles to the Australian Dictionary of Biography on Australian writers, journalists and others, and has also published widely on Australian literature and the history of reading in Australia. His other research interests include Renaissance English literature and the Shakespeare authorship debate.

Margy Burn has held senior positions at the State Libraries of New South Wales and South Australia and recently retired from the position of Assistant Director-General, Australian Collections & Readers Services, at the National Library of Australia. She has been involved with the Australian Women’s Archives Project since its inception nearly 20 years ago.

Peter Crabb is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Fenner School of Environment and Society at ANU. His main area of research has long been water resources management, with a particular interest in the Murray-Darling Basin. More recently, he has been investigating some of the newspaper reporters who worked on the goldfields in nineteenth century New South Wales and Victoria. Of particular interest is Charles de Boos, who worked for The Argus and the Sydney Morning Herald. The story of John Hux, a relative of de Boos through marriage, is one outcome of the on-going research.

Jackie Dickenson completed a PhD in labour history at the University of Melbourne in 2005 after a career in the advertising industry. Her doctoral thesis was published as Renegades and Rats: Betrayal and the Remaking of Radical Organisations in Britain and Australia (2006). She has subsequently published on Australian history, labour history, political history, and advertising history, including Trust Me: Australians and their Politicians (2013) and, with Robert Crawford, Behind Glass Doors: The World of Australian Advertising Agencies 1959–1989 (2016). Her 2016 publication Australian Women in Advertising in the Twentieth Century includes a chapter on the advertising achievements of Elma Kelly.

Nichola Garvey is a PhD candidate at the National Centre of Biography, ANU. She has a Masters in Creative Writing and combines the disciplines of biography and creative writing to produce vivid portraiture.  Her PhD thesis is entitled ‘Second Fleet Women: First Rate Survivors’ and is due for submission in 2021.

Alexandra McKinnon is an MPhil candidate at ANU, exploring memory, commemoration and loss in the aftermath of World War I. She has worked with a range of cultural institutions as an interpreter, including the Canadian National Vimy Memorial and the Australian War Memorial. She holds a BA (Hons) in History and Material Culture from the University of Toronto (2017), and graduated with High Distinction (First Class Honours). She was a recipient of the Summer Vacation Scholarship Scheme at the Australian War Memorial (2019).

Anne Pender was Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of New England from 2016 to 2019, and has recently taken up the Kidman Chair in Australian Studies at the University of Adelaide. She has taught Australian literature at King’s College London and at the University of Copenhagen. Anne’s books include Seven Big Australians: Adventures with Comic Actors (2019) and From a Distant Shore: Australian Writers in Britain 1820–2012 (2013). Anne held a prestigious Fulbright Senior Scholarship at Harvard University in 2018 and is currently working on an analysis of Australian writers and performers residing in the United States.

Susan Priestley has been for many years a freelance historian. She served for 20 years on the Council of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria from 1991 and was President 1999–2004. She is a contributor to the Australian Dictionary of Biography and her many published works include Victorian local and institutional histories and Making Their Mark (volume 3 of The Victorians). A biography of the activist Henrietta Augusta Dugdale was published in 2011. She is currently enrolled in a PhD in the School of History, ANU, to write a thesis on ‘Threads in the tapestry: Federation-era migrants and Australian identity’.

Suzanne Robinson’s biography of the Australian-born composer and critic Peggy Glanville-Hicks was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2019. She is the editor or co-editor of five other books, including Grainger the Modernist (Ashgate, 2015) and Marshall-Hall’s Melbourne (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012), and is currently Series Editor at Lyrebird Press, based at the University of Melbourne. Her ABC Radio interview about the biography can be heard at www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/musicshow/suzanne-robinson-on-peggy-glanville-hicks-biography/11504616.

Sophie Scott-Brown is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of East Anglia, UK, with research interests in modern intellectual history, life writing and performance theory. Her book, The Histories of Raphael Samuel: A Portrait of a People’s Historian (2017) addressed the poetics of pluralism in modern British historiography. She is currently working on a biography of Colin Ward, the most prominent British anarchist writer of the twentieth century.

Kim Sterelny is Professor of Philosophy at ANU and Chief Investigator and leader of the Language Evolution program at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. He was an ARC Laureate Professor of Philosophy 2014–19. His research in the last decade and a half has been particularly interested in human evolution, and in understanding the evolution of the distinctive features of human social life, and of the cognitive capacities that make that life possible.

Chris Wallace works in modern and contemporary political and international history with special reference to leadership, transnational lives, gender and social change. She is a former member of the Canberra Press Gallery and the author of Hewson: A Portrait (1993), Greer, Untamed Shrew (1997) and The Private Don (2004); and co-author of Megalomania: 33 Years of Posters Made at Megalo Print Studio 1980–2013 (2013). She is currently an ARC DECRA Fellow at the School of History, ANU, reworking her doctoral thesis as a book titled, ‘The Silken Cord: Australia’s 20th Century Prime Ministers & Their Biographers’, and researching towards a monograph on Australian Minister Richard Gardiner ‘Dick’ Casey, his wife Maie Casey and their press aide Patricia ‘Pat’ Jarrett.

Wilbert Wong Wei Wen has a BA (Hons) from the University of Otago, was a research fellow at the Singapore National Library for the first half of 2016, and has tutored courses in world history at the University of Waikato and, later, at ANU. Wilbert has a strong interest in world history particularly the history of ideas, focusing on cross-cultural encounters between Asia and the West. He is currently a PhD candidate with the School of History, ANU, researching British productions of knowledge on the Malay Peninsula.