We are delighted that eminent historian Marilyn Lake AO will deliver the 2025 Hugh Anderson Lecture.

In National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893), Charles Pearson, noting that China’s population had already surpassed 400 million, wrote presciently that with ‘civilisation equally diffused… the preponderance of China over any rival – even over the United States of America – is likely to be overwhelming’. The future would see China take ‘its inevitable place as one of the great powers of the world’.

Pearson’s influential forecast shaped our foundational policy of White Australia: the ‘great white walls’ were erected to keep the Asiatic threat at bay. From the 1960s, however, Australians began to forge new ties with China, forging wide-ranging cultural, educational, economic and trade relationships. Asian histories and languages began to be taught in universities. Future diplomats were trained in Asian languages. Under the Whitlam government full diplomatic relations were established with Beijing.

By the end of the 1970s, Hugh and Dawn Anderson had embarked on the first of their numerous trips to China. Hosted by the Chinese Writers Association, their deep cultural engagement with Chinese authors and literature was a key feature of Australian rapprochement with China.

Marilyn Lake   D.Litt, FAHA, FASSA, AO

Marilyn Lake is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne, where as an ARC Professorial Fellow between 2013 and 2016 she directed  the ‘Australia in the World’ series of seminars, lectures and symposia. Prior to this appointment she was Charles La Trobe Professor in History at La Trobe University. Professor Lake has held visiting appointments at ANU, the University of Sydney, Stockholm University, the University of Maryland and between 2001-2 she held the Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University. She has published locally and internationally, in academic presses and daily newspapers. Her fifteen books include the prize winning Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and TransPacific Exchange Shaped American Reform (Harvard University Press, 2019).

Hugh Anderson

“Hugh Anderson (1927-2017) was a scholar of formidable breadth, productivity and versatility. While it is as a folklorist that he is arguably best known both in Australia and abroad, Anderson’s prolific output also included biography, bibliography, history, school textbooks and documentary collections. His range of interests was very wide: Anderson seemed as comfortable in writing about John Pascoe Fawkner as Squizzy Taylor, as at home with an Aboriginal gumleaf player and a Sydney street poet as with the exquisite verse of John Shaw Neilson or the stately poetry of Bernard O’Dowd. This lecture will consider Anderson specifically as a historian and biographer. While it should not be pigeon-holed, Anderson’s historical and biographical writing incorporated many of the materials, perspectives and insights derived from folklore studies, and he treated literary creativity as central to telling the Melbourne, Victorian and Australian stories. Anderson’s boundary-riding between history, biography, folklore and literature was remarkably productive for him, and it was not unusual among writers with his radical-nationalist politics in the middle decades of the twentieth century. I argue in this lecture for the significance of Anderson as a historian and biographer working outside academia and across a diverse cultural domain, at a time when universities were moving toward a sharper focus on specialised research, theory and discipline-based knowledge – in ways that both deepened and limited understandings of Australian history and culture.” by Professor Frank Bongiorno AM

Housekeeping

This event will be offered both in person at the RHSV, 239 A’Beckett St Melbourne 3000, and on Zoom. At the RHSV refreshments are served from 5:30pm – 6pm and the Zoom session will start, as will the lecture, at 6pm.

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