Website

Plenary Speakers

Emeritus Professor John Maynard | University of Newcastle

John Maynard is Emeritus Professor of Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Newcastle. His research has concentrated on the intersections of Aboriginal political and social history and made significant contributions to the research fields of Aboriginal, race relations and sports history both nationally and internationally. His books have received high acclaim and include: Socceroos: A World Cup Journey, vols 1 and 2 (2023); The Aboriginal Soccer Tribe (2019), which was a highly commended finalist for the prestigious Walkley Award; Living with the Locals: Early Europeans' Experience of Indigenous Life (2016), co-authored with Victoria Haskins; Fight for Liberty and Freedom (2007), which was shortlisted for the Victorian Premiers History Award; and Aboriginal Stars of the Turf (2002), among others. He has served on numerous prominent organizations and committees including Director of the Wollotuka Institute of Aboriginal Studies at the University of Newcastle, Deputy Chairperson of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), Executive Committee of the Australian Historical Association, New South Wales History Council, Indigenous Higher Education Advisory Council (IHEAC), Australian Research Council College of Experts – Deputy Chair Humanities, National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network (NIRAKN) and the NSW Fulbright Selection Committee.

Keynote title:
Across Koori Time and Space

What is the truth of Aboriginal people and time? Today science has had a great impact on the understanding of our long connection to this continent, now said to be upward of sixty-five thousand years. In understanding time, we are also recognized as carrying the longest memory known to humankind. Of course, according to an Aboriginal sense of time, we have always been here. We came directly out of the Dreamtime of the creative Ancestors and lived and cared for Country as it was on the very first day. This discussion focuses on an Aboriginal perspective and understanding of time and history.

Associate Professor Nancy Cushing | University of Newcastle

Nancy Cushing is Associate Professor of History at the University of Newcastle on Awabakal and Worimi country. An environmental historian whose interests range from coal mining to statues, Nancy is the 2024-25 Coral Thomas Fellow at the State Library of NSW where she is working on the entangled histories of humans and other animals in Sydney. Recent publications include Animals Count (Routledge 2018, co-edited with Jodie Frawley) and A History of Crime in Australia (Routledge 2023). Her current book project is A New History of Australia in 15 Animals (Bloomsbury). Nancy is the Deputy President of Academic Senate (Research) at the University of Newcastle, Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence and a member of the executive of the Australian Historical Association.

Keynote title:
Why Look at Whales?

The more-than-human concept has been interpreted in many ways since it was introduced by David Abram in 1996. In general, it refers to approaches to thinking that decentre humans by recognising that we are just one component of the webs of relationships between organisms, elements and forces that operate in our shared world (O’Gorman and Gaynor 2020). When considering whales as part of Sydney’s multispecies history, this definition can be rather playfully extended to encompass scale. In body length, weight, gestation, capacity for self-propelled mobility and many other traits, whales are very literally more than human. Whales’ greatness, even grandeur, has drawn the human attention over time and around the world, including amongst both the Eora Nation and settler colonists in what became Sydney.

This lecture will take up John Berger’s now often answered question “Why Look at Animals?” (1980) with a focus on visual interactions between whales and the people of Sydney in the latter half of the nineteenth century. During a temporary lull in the extractive whaling industry, Sydneysiders were drawn to look at whales spouting in the harbour, washed up on beaches or put on display as skeletons. Being so very much more than human, whales commanded a regard rarely accorded to native species at the time, evoking an awe and wonder uncomfortably entwined with violence. As they drew the eyes of Sydneysiders, whales educated their land-bound distant relatives about the rewards of paying attention to a world greater than their own.

Gerard Krefft, “Notice of a New Species of Sperm-Whale belonging to the Genus Euphysetes of MacLeay”, 28 November 1865, Reprints from the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, [London] : The Society, 1865-1868, Figure 1.

Professor Joseph Pugliese | Macquarie University

Joseph Pugliese is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature, Macquarie University. His books include Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics (Routledge, 2010), shortlisted for the International Surveillance Studies Book Prize 2010; State Violence and the Execution of Law: Torture, Black Sites, Drones (Routledge, 2012), nominated for the UK’s Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize 2014 and the US’ Law and Society Herbert Jacob Book Prize 2014; and Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence (Duke University Press, 2020), awarded the Humanities Institute Book Award 2022, the Institute for Humanities Research, Arizona State University, USA. With Suvendrini Perera and a team of international collaborators, he established Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States; the Deathscapes project was shortlisted for the Council of the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Distinctive Work Prize 2019. With Suvendrini Perera, he is co-editor of Mapping Deathscapes: Digital Geographies of Racial and Border Violence (Routledge, 2022). His forthcoming book is More-Than-Human Diasporas: Topologies of Empire, Settler Colonialism, Slavery (2025).

Keynote title:
Settler Aquacide and Mnemonic Bodies of Water

Over the decades, a number of Indigenous scholars and activists—including Uncle Ray Jackson, Tony Birch and Bronwyn Carlson—have called for settlers to engage with processes of truth-telling about settler colonial Australia’s genocidal history. In this paper, as a diasporic settler I attempt to call to account how the very ground I occupy has been predicated on largely disavowed histories of settler massacres of Indigenous people across this continent and its islands.

I focus on one aspect of settler eliminatory violence: aquacide, an eco-genocidal modality that entails both the death of water—through its poisoning—and the death of the Indigenous people and their more-than-human relations due to the settler weaponisation of this aqueous element. I coin the term “aquacide” to materialise lethal forms of settler water governance. Aquacide, as tributary of aquapolitics, operates along two intersecting axes: the arrogation of Indigenous bodies of water and their channelling to colonial settlements to enable the flourishing of settler life and, conversely, the withholding of water sources from Indigenous people and their more-than-human relations to facilitate their elimination.

Aquacide, I argue, is constituted by the interlinked form of a triple enunciation: death in water, death of water and death by water. In the course of the paper, my concern will be to revisit Indigenous testimonies and histories and the settler archive to evidence the operations of aquacide. My focus will be on bodies of water—rivers, creeks and waterholes—that attest to the aquacidal acts of the settler state.

Water, as a more-than-human agent, operates in these contexts of aquacidal massacres of Indigenous people in a double register: it is at once an agent that facilitates the killing of Indigenous people and a more-than-human archive that mnemonically records and attests to these same massacres. By focusing on an historical massacre of Wiradjuri people at Poisoned Waterhole Creek, I suggest that such aquacidal sites evidence those more-than-human entities that cannot be captured or sequestered within the epistemic apparatuses of the settler state, including its archives, libraries, books or manuscripts. In the context of settler aquacidal sites, rivers, creeks and waterholes operate as mnemonic, and thus as graphic and historicising, bodies of water.

Professor Anita Heiss

Keynote title:
Wiradyuri Dreams of Heart and Home: In Conversation with Anita Heiss

Professor Anita Heiss is an internationally published, award-winning author of 23 books. She created the transformative and activist “Koori Lit” genre with her five bestselling novels, Not Meeting Mr Right (2007), Avoiding Mr Right (2008), Manhattan Dreaming (2010), Paris Dreaming (2011), and Tiddas (2014). Her historical fiction broke new ground in recounting Wiradyuri history and challenging white narratives about colonial Australia. Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms (2016), about the Cowra Breakout in 1944, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2018. Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (River of Dreams, 2021), about the 1852 Great Flood of Gundagai, won the 2022 NSW Premier’s Indigenous Writers' Prize. Her latest historical epic, Dirrayawadha (Rise Up, 2024), imagines the life of Wiradyuri resistance leader Windradyne, his family, and the community and Country into which their lives are tightly interwoven. She uses different genres of writing to reach diverse audiences, and to re-people the Australian literary and historical canvas with Wiradyuri individuals whose lives on unceded lands are inextricably entangled with community, culture, and the moods, actions and spirit of Country. Her fiction demonstrates what Martina Horokova calls “artivism” (“art and activism”), where discourses of creativity are also discourses of citizenship: historical suffering and the struggle for citizenship rights, the assertion of citizen-belonging, and the cosmopolitan vision of a future in which Indigenous sovereignty and achievements are globally acknowledged. In this session, Anita talks to Hsu-Ming Teo about writing Wiradyuri stories about history, Country and culture; art and activism; sovereignty and citizenship; love, land and loss; and above all, the celebration of First Nations achievements.

Hsu-Ming Teo is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Macquarie University. Her publications include Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (2012), the edited book The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia (2017), and the co-edited volumes Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Exotic Journeys, Reparative Histories? (co-edited with Paloma Fresno-Calleja, 2025), Conflict and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Repairing the Past, Repurposing History (co-edited with Paloma Fresno-Calleja, 2024), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (co-edited with Jayashree Kamblé and Eric Murphy Selinger, 2020), and Cultural History in Australia (co-edited with Richard White, 2003). Her first novel Love and Vertigo (2000) won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. Her second novel Behind the Moon (2005) was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. She is serving as a judge of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award and writing a book about Anita Heiss’s fiction.

Main campus

Wallumattagal Campus
Balaclava Road
Macquarie University NSW 2109

City campus

Angel Place
Level 24, 123 Pitt Street
Sydney NSW 2000

Event Contact

events@mq.edu.au

Acknowledgement of Country

We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which Macquarie University stands - the Wallumattagal Clan of the Dharug Nation - whose cultures and customs have nurtured, and continue to nurture, this land since time immemorial. We pay our respects to the Elders, past and present.