XIIth DAVID NICHOL SMITH CONFERENCE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES: New Voyagings on Old Seas: Performances in Honour of Professor Greg Dening

Conveners: Dr Paul Pickering (HRC, ANU), Professor Paul Turnbull (James Cook University; Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, ANU)

Venue: the National Library of Australia

Dates: 19-22 July 2004

Goals, Proceedings and Outcomes

In this conference, scholars from Oceania, Britain and the United States came together for four days. They met to celebrate the achievements of Greg Dening and to speak about their research on various aspects of the history of cross-cultural encounters in the Pacific and other parts of the world. For most it was an opportunity to speak of engagements with the past that owe much to Greg Dening’s writings on history and the making of history. It was also a wonderful opportunity for younger scholars to spend time talking about their research ambitions with Greg and with Donna Merwick.

The opening event of the conference was a public lecture by Greg Dening at the National Library, entitled, ‘Living with Deep Time’. This was followed by the launch of Greg’s Beach Crossings, a remarkable book weaving personal reflection with social history and ethnography.

The following three days of the conference were organized into three themes: the first, ‘Re-enactment’, explored the ways in which history and collective memory are evoked through re-enacting events such as Cook’s voyaging of eastern Australia and the Vinegar Hill uprising. Several speakers considered how extremity and sentiment have been integral to contemporary historical re-enactments, while other speakers considered re-enactment in historical perspective and the use of digital media in representing the past.

The theme of the second day was ‘Performances’. Younger scholars from Australia and the Pacific Islands presented research in progress that seeks to illuminate how the lives of indigenous peoples and Europeans were changed through the play of complex, fluid and sometimes extremely localised cultural forces. During the course of the day we learnt much about that was new and remarkable about how indigenous agency shaped European perceptions and subsequent discourses on the life-ways and cultures of the peoples of Oceania.

Importantly, much of the day was given over to performances transcended the conceptual and ethical limitations of relying solely on the printed word to explain the actions and intentions of Indigenous peoples. Visual media were creatively used so as to give oral, visual and kinaesthetic modes of communication the cognitive weight they have within Oceanic cultures in representing the past.

The program for the final day - ‘Provocations’ – consisted of papers on various topics in eighteenth-century studies that were unified by their authors sharing Greg Dening’s concern that history be not something we learn, but rather something we must make, sensitive to the richness and cultural complexity of our own times. Noteworthy in this respect was the closing keynote address by Cassandra Pybus, on Black Refugees of the American Revolution.

List of Papers Presented:

Attendance: 59 Participants (includes Paper-Presenters)

Publications:

Two publications from the Conference are planned. One will be a special issue of the journal Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. The other will be a multimedia publication to be published in association with the National Library of Australia.