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.

Join us to celebrate the publication of Old North Melbourne, the first comprehensive book on the nineteenth-century history of Hotham/North Melbourne, by Dr Fiona Gatt. 'Like Janet McCalman's Struggletown this book is destined
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Join Jillian Hiscock, the RHSV Collections Manager, each month in this informative and easy-going Zoom forum on all aspects of cataloguing collections for historical societies. Jillian has a different topic
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Join us to celebrate the publication of Love, Class and Empire by A. James Hammerton. Early twentieth-century Persia and the Persian Gulf presented a largely blank slate to the British,
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The La Trobe Society and freelance historian Susan Priestley FRHSV invite you to join them for the lecture, "The Sound of Music at Port Phillip 1840 to 1842: featuring M.
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