Victorian Archives Centre, 99 Shiel Street
North Melbourne, VIC 3051 Australia + Google Map

Following the 1938 annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, many members of Vienna’s vibrant Jewish community sought safe havens overseas to escape growing persecution. Amongst them were Michael and Regine Weiss and their family. Their story, as told through records held by the National Archives of Australia and other information provided by their descendants, reveals much about Australia’s attitudes towards Jewish refugees during these dark days.

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Christina Browning, our new RHSV Marketing Manager, brings a wealth of experience to the RHSV - and not just in social media. Christina started her working life as a journalist before seguing into marketing. The forums are low-key and they not recorded. You can bring your questions and problems and you can also ask Christina to tackle some specific issue in a future forum. They will be held on the 2nd Monday of each month from 12pm - 1pm. Zoom…

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Free monthly cataloguing clinics via Zoom. The clinics run for an hour from 11am – 12noon on the 4th Thursday of each month. It is a relaxed gathering of people who are finding their way through the intricacies of cataloguing material in historical collections which, as we all know, fall between a library and a museum with sometimes a bit of art gallery thrown in.

RHSV Gallery Downstairs, 239 A'Beckett St
Melbourne, Victoria 3000 Australia + Google Map

In June we are thrilled that Miles Lewis will be returning to the RHSV, in partnership with Engineering Heritage Victoria to talk about Iron Bridges. The earliest cast iron bridges imitated those in timber or stone, because there was no established idea of what an iron bridge should be like, and most of them were simple arches. But over the next century wrought iron, and then steel, became important bridge-building materials.  The arch bridge was joined by the suspension bridge, the box girder, the parallel-chorded girder, and even more elaborate forms.  And bridges fabricated in Europe were sent across the world to places like Latin America, Japan, and India.  Exported bridges faced special problems - the cost and difficulty of transporting the components, the lack of skilled labour at the site, and unexpected foundation problems and hydrological conditions. These prefabricated bridges will be the main focus of the presentation.

RHSV Gallery Downstairs, 239 A'Beckett St
Melbourne, Victoria 3000 Australia + Google Map

We are thrilled that Joan Beaumont, Professor Emerita of History at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, will deliver our July lecture on her profound history of Australia’s Great Depression. Beaumont says, ‘The pandemic has much common with the Great Depression. Australians today have confronted external threats, that neither they nor their governments could control. Everyone has had to dig deep for resilience. The pandemic like the Depression confirmed how important local and state loyalties are. Voters…

RHSV, Gallery Downstairs, 239 A'Beckett Street
Melbourne, VIC 3000 Australia + Google Map

We are delighted that Professor Frank Bongiorno will be delivering the inaugural RHSV Hugh Anderson Lecture, a new addition to our Distinguished Lecturer series. "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…

RHSV Gallery Downstairs, 239 A'Beckett St
Melbourne, Victoria 3000 Australia + Google Map

This talk explores the devastating infectious diseases introduced into the Indigenous populations of Australia after the arrival of the British colonists in 1788. Epidemics of smallpox, tuberculosis, influenza, measles and sexually transmitted diseases swept through the indigenous populations of the continent well into the twentieth century.