‘Good history is a high-wire gravity-defying act of balance and grace,’ Tom Griffiths wrote recently, describing historians as writers who, ‘have to forsake their own world for a period – and then, somehow, find their way back.’ In our first session of Writers on Campus for 2023 we speak with two historians who are adept at walking that high-wire, and at time travel. Come hear two of La Trobe’s most acclaimed historians, Judith Brett and Katie Holmes, discuss why they do what they do, and how they approach the work and craft of making history, in conversation with Kelly Gardiner

Vera Deakin, daughter of former Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, rallied to the British imperial cause in 1915 by assuming a leadership role in the fledgling Australian Red Cross Society. Aged
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Tahbilk Winery has generously offered their Wetlands View Restaurant to host the launch of the Explorers Way tourist drive and brochure, a project of Nagambie Historical Society, in collaboration with the Strathbogie Shire. The Explorers Way revives the Major Mitchell Bicentennial Trail through the Shire, from Mitchellstown to Violet Town. It then travels, in reverse, the tracks of Hume and Hovell, returning through Euroa and Longwood to Avenel. The drive visits every cairn and memorial to the explorers in those areas, and the map brochure details other points of interest in each town. Roads less travelled have been used for the drive to highlight the beauty of the Shire, away from the freeways; long arching tunnels of eucalypts, golden pastures with stands of ancient trees, wooden bridges and tree-lined creeks, with the blue of the ranges always in the distance.

In 2014, Major-General Mike O’Brien gave us a list of men with a connection to East Melbourne who had volunteered for the 1st World War. As a result of enthusiastic
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