Aftermaths Book Launch and Author Talk

Aftermaths explores the life-changing intergenerational effects of colonial violence in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific. The settings of these accessible, illustrated short essays range from Ōrākau pā in the Waikato to the Kimberleys in northwest Australia, from orphanages in Fiji to the ancestral lands of the Wiyot Tribe in Northern California. Story by story, this collection powerfully reveals the living legacy of historical events, showing how they have been remembered (and misremembered) within families and communities into the present day.

Editors Angela Wanhalla, Lyndall Ryan and Camille Nurka have invited a group of prominent scholars to write about colonial histories by reflecting on a range of events through a variety of perspectives, including personal experiences, family stories, collaborative research, oral and literary histories, commemoration activities and contemporary artworks.

The result is a readable, informative and often extremely moving book that makes an essential contribution to our knowledge of the effects of colonial violence and dispossession.

Celebrations will be followed by a discussion on the book with editor, Professor Emerita Lyndall Ryan, and contributor, Professor Victoria Haskins. This discussion will be led by Associate Professor Nancy Cushing from the University of Newcastle. There will be an opportunity for questions from the audience at the end of this session and to purchase a signed copy of the book.

Professor Emerita Lyndall Ryan AM, FAHA, University of Newcastle is the lead Chief Investigator in the ground-breaking digital map project, colonial frontier massacres in Australia 1788-1930. https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres.  She is the author of 3 books on the history of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people and co-editor of 2 books on frontier violence. In 2023 she is Australia’s leading expert on colonial frontier massacres and their significance in understanding frontier violence in Australia’s colonial history.

Victoria Haskins FAHA is a professor of history and former founding director of the Purai Global Indigenous History Centre at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She works on histories of gender, labour and colonialism in Australia, the USA, and India. Her publications include Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific (Bloomsbury, 2018), with Julia Martinez, Claire Lowrie and Frances Steel; Living with the Locals (National Library of Australia, 2017), with John Maynard; and One Bright Spot (Palgrave 2005). Victoria is lead series editor for the Bloomsbury Academic series, Empire’s Other Histories, and is currently leading an Australian Research Council project on the history of transcolonial Asian nursemaids known as ‘ayahs’ and ‘amahs’: see www.ayahsandamahs.com.

Nancy Cushing is Associate Professor in History and Group Leader for Historical, Cultural and Critical Inquiry at the University of Newcastle on beautiful Awabakal and Worimi country. An environmental historian whose interests range from coal mining to human-other animal relations, she was co-editor of Animals Count: How Population Size Matters in Animal-Human Relations (Routledge 2018) and recently took a slight diversion by writing a book on the history of crime in Australia (A History of Crime in Australia, Australian Underworlds, 2023). Her current project is A New History of Australia in 15 Animals, under contract with Bloomsbury. Nancy is on the executives of the Australian Aotearoa NZ Environmental History Network and the Australian Historical Association; a member of the NSW Working Party for the Australian Dictionary of Biography; and on the NSW History Council’s Grants Committee.