Dr Tanja Luckins

Biography

Dr Tanja Luckins, BA (Hons) Melb, PhD La Trobe, is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, researching a history of cosmopolitanism in Australia, 1850-2000.

Her books include The Gates of Memory: Australian People’s Experiences and Memories of Loss and the Great War (2004), GO! Melbourne in the Sixties (2005), and Dining on Turtles: Food Feasts and Drinking in History, (2007). Highly commended in the 2004 Fellowship of Australian Writers/National Literary Awards, Melbourne University Publishing Award (non-fiction), The Gates of Memory is based on Tanja’s PhD, which was co-winner of the 2002 Australian Historical Association Serle Award for best postgraduate thesis in Australian History. GO! Melbourne in the Sixties was highly commended in the 2007 Victorian Community History Awards, Collaborative/Community Work Award. GO! Melbourne in the Sixties and Dining on Turtles are based on conferences Tanja co-convened.

She often receives invitations to speak at conferences including the 20th International Congress of Historical Sciences held in Sydney in 2005, and public forums including the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, the National Museum of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria.

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Research

Tanja's research interests are broadly in Australian History. She has published on cultural history and popular culture; myth, memory and history; material culture; the pub; World War I and II; the 1960s; cosmopolitanism. Her postgraduate research was a study of loss and memory and the Great War in Australia, a thesis which sought to move beyond prevailing understandings of the Great War typically represented in national identity and the ‘nation’. It was also methodologically wide-ranging, exploring material hitherto ignored such as asylum admission records and mourning black in order to analyse the gendered expectations associated with loss and memory. Subsequent research has looked at the history of the pub in Australia, a project that stimulated further work on food and drink and cosmopolitanism in Australian history. Tanja's current project is an Australian Research Council funded project on the history of cosmopolitanism in Australia, 1850-2000.

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Select Publications

Books

• Tanja Luckins and Diane Kirkby (eds), Dining on Turtles: Food Feasts and Drinking in History, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007
• Tanja Luckins and Seamus O’Hanlon (eds), GO! Melbourne in the Sixties, Circa Books, Melbourne, 2005
• Tanja Luckins, The Gates of Memory: Australian People’s Experiences and Memories of Loss and the Great War, Curtin University Books, Fremantle, 2004

Articles and Chapters

• Tanja Luckins, ‘Collecting Women’s Memories: The Australian War Memorial, the next-of-kin and Great War soldiers’ diaries and letters as objects of memory in the 1920s and 1930s’, Women’s History Review (forthcoming)
• Tanja Luckins, ‘Satan Finds Some Mischief?: Drinkers’ responses to the six o’clock closing of pubs in Australia, 1910s-1930s’, Journal of Australian Studies, (forthcoming)
• Tanja Luckins, ‘Their Family Histories Liveth For Evermore: Remembering the Great War dead’, in Don Grant Lectures, 10 Years, Victorian Association of Family History Organisations, Melbourne, 2008
• Tanja Luckins, ‘Competing for Cultural Honours: Cosmopolitanism, food, drink and the 1956 Olympics, Melbourne’, in Diane Kirkby and Tanja Luckins (eds), Dining on Turtles: Food Feasts and Drinking in History, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007
• Tanja Luckins, Diane Kirkby and Barbara Santich, ‘Of Dining, Turtles and the Importance of History in Food, Food in History’, in Diane Kirkby and Tanja Luckins (eds), Dining on Turtles: Food Feasts and Drinking in History, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007
• Tanja Luckins, ‘Pigs, Hogs and Aussie Blokes: The emergence of the term “six o’clock swill”’, History Australia, vol. 4, no. 1, June 2007
• Tanja Luckins and Diane Kirkby, ‘”The Winnies and Pats … Brighten our Pubs”: Transforming the gendered spatial economy in the Australian pub, 1920-1970’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 87, 2006
• Tanja Luckins, ‘”Time, Gentlemen, Please”: The end of six o'clock closing and the post-swill pub’, in Tanja Luckins and Seamus O'Hanlon (eds), GO! Melbourne in the Sixties, Circa Books, Melbourne, 2005
• Tanja Luckins and Seamus O'Hanlon, ‘Setting the Scene: The idea of the “Sixties”’, in Tanja Luckins and Seamus O'Hanlon (eds), GO! Melbourne in the Sixties, Circa Books, Melbourne, 2005
• Tanja Luckins, ‘Crazed With Grief?: The asylum and the Great War in Australia’, in Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (eds), 'Madness' in Australia: Histories, Heritage and the Asylum, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2003

Conference Presentations and Public Lectures

• Tanja Luckins, ‘The Woman in Black: Mourning Black and the Great War in Australia’, Public Lecture, Black in Fashion: Mourning to Night exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, April 2008
• Tanja Luckins, ‘1968: Local and Global’, Keynote Address, 1968: Forty Years On symposium, University of Melbourne, February 2008
• Tanja Luckins, ‘History, Memory and Methodology: Recent Debates on Anzac and “Sentimental Nationalism”’: When the Soldiers Return conference, University of Queensland, St Lucia, November 2007
• Tanja Luckins, ‘Collecting Women’s Memories’, British Women’s History Network 16th Annual Conference, University of Winchester, England, September 2007
• Tanja Luckins, ‘The Melbourne Pub and Leisure in the 1960s and 1970s’, Globalisation, Gentrification and the Reinvention of the Inner City symposium, Monash University/Kings College, Prato/London, September 2007
• Tanja Luckins, ‘GO! Melbourne in the Sixties’, Lyceum Club, Melbourne, October 2006
• Tanja Luckins, ‘A Time, A Place, An Idea: Melbourne in the Sixties’, Royal Historical Society of Victoria, Melbourne, October 2006
• Tanja Luckins, ‘The Australian War Memorial: The People and the Curators’, Latrobe Probus Club, Melbourne, June 2006
• Tanja Luckins, ‘Their Family Histories Liveth For Evermore: Remembering the Great War Dead’, Don Grant Lecture, Victorian Association Family History Organisations, Melbourne, October 2005
• Tanja Luckins, ‘Gendering Great War Loss’, 20th International Congress of Historical Sciences, Sydney, July 2005
• Tanja Luckins, ‘Mourning Black in a Comparative Context: A Response to Keith Jeffery’, 20th International Congress of Historical Sciences, Sydney, July 2005
• Tanja Luckins, ‘Researching Women’s Memories’, Family History forum, Monash University, Melbourne, April 2005
• Tanja Luckins, ‘Collective Lamentations and National Sorrow: Mourning the Anzacs’, National Museum of Australia forum, ‘The Anzac Legend: What it Means to Me’, Canberra, April 2005
• Tanja Luckins, ‘The Gates of Memory: Woolloomooloo and the Great War’, Feast by the Murray, Australian Historical Association Regional conference, Mildura, September 2003
• Tanja Luckins, ‘Time Gentlemen, Please: The End of Six O'clock Closing and the “New” Pub’, GO! Melbourne in the Sixties conference, La Trobe and Monash universities, Melbourne, October 2002
• Tanja Luckins, ‘Mourning, Women and the Great War in Australia’, Frontlines: Gender, Identity and War conference, Monash University, Melbourne, July 2002
• Tanja Luckins, ‘Crazed Grief?: The Asylum, Loss, Memory and the Great War in Australia’, Lives, Stories, Narratives International conference, Monash University, Clayton, July 2000

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