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Dr Shannyn Palmer, 'Unmaking Angas Downs: listening, unlearning and potential history in a settler colonial nation'2024 Ernest Scott Lecture
Angas Downs is a pastoral station in Central Australia, but pastoralism is only a fraction of the story of this place. Like all places, it has accrued people and stories, in multiple layers, over time. Listening to Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack and Sandra Armstrong, two Anangu with deep and abiding connections to the station, a very different kind of place emerges from that conjured in myths and histories of pioneers and pastoralists that have shaped understandings of the past in Australia.
Over a period of four years, Dr Shannyn Palmer travelled all over Angas Downs station with Tjuki Pumpjack and Sandra Armstrong, listening deeply as they shared their stories and Country with her. In doing so, she practised the potential of community-engaged history making and, unwittingly, set in motion a process of unlearning settler colonial ways of ordering time, space and people.
Reflecting upon her approach to the research, and drawing from the experiences and perspectives shared by Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack and Sandra Armstrong in Unmaking Angas Downs: myth and history on a Central Australian pastoral station, this lecture will explore the transformative power of deep listening and unlearning for historical research and writing in a settler colonial nation.
Dr. Shannyn Palmer is a community-engaged practitioner, facilitator, historian and award-winning writer living and working as a guest on the Ancestral lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. She is particularly interested in community-engaged research and practice as a methodology for disrupting settler colonial systems and knowledge. She has a PhD in History from the Australian National University and her first book, Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station, won the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History, the 2023 Northern Territory Chief Minister’s History Book Award and the 2024 Ernest Scott Prize.
The prestigious Ernest Scott Prize is awarded annually to the book judged to be the most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand or to the history of colonisation published in the previous year.
The prize is proudly supported by the history program in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.
This is a free public lecture. To book your seat, register via the link:
https://events.unimelb.edu.au/historical-and-philosophical-studies/event/38019-unmaking-angas-downs-listening-unlearning-and-potentia
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Forum Theatre, Arts West, University of Melbourne Parkville campus, Forum Theatre, Medical Rd, Parkville VIC 3052, Australia,Melbourne, Victoria, Australia