Australian Centre seminars
Semester 1, 2009 Program
All seminars are on a Wednesday in the First Floor seminar room, 149 Barry St Carlton.
Enquiries: jwag@unimelb.edu.au
Please note that this program is not complete - more seminars will be posted here as they are finalised.
The case for fuel reduction burning in Australia's forests
11th March 2009
Peter Attiwill
Australian Centre Senior Fellow
Editor-In-Chief, Forest Ecology and Management
Fire has been a major force in the evolution of Australia’s fauna and flora over tens of millions of year, and Victoria is one of the most fire-prone areas of the world. In the past 6 years, bushfires have burnt with high intensity over some 2.7 million hectares of public land in Victoria, and this is no way to manage the bush and its ecology. But these megafires — or feral fires — that we have seen in Victoria have also burned in other parts of the world. On a global scale, we are facing three major challenges: global warming and climate change, over-accumulation of forest fuels, and growth of populations in the interface between urban and forest areas (that is, more and more people wanting to live in the bush). While most fires are controlled, the few that burn out of control account for most of the area burned, and for most of the total cost of suppression. In meeting these challenges, should we reinforce current tactics with the emphasis on fire suppression, or should we redefine strategies?
The argument presented here is that megafires are emerging as more of a land management issue than the more commonly perceived fire issue. Forests that have been protected by minimum disturbance and by fire suppression over the years have built up huge fuel-loads that are now, together with increasingly hotter and drier conditions, fuelling the hottest fires. The very values that we set out to protect—species habitat, catchments for water supply, and many others—are being destroyed by land- and fire-management policies, the consequences of which are high-intensity bushfires.
Wednesday 11th March 1 - 2pm
First floor Seminar Room, 149 Barry Street
A People’s Revolution: Hispanic migrants and political activism in northern Australia
25th March 2009
Dr Robert Mason
Lecturer in History, University of Southern Queensland
Cultural landscapes of memory have become central to research of Australian migration, but there has been little exploration of how migrants’ political memories affected civic society. Many migrants had lived in areas where social support for a workers’ revolution frequently went unquestioned, and where inhabitants readily thought of themselves as members of the international proletariat. Anglo-Australian society however, thought of immigrants as an ethnic people who were expected to assume British norms of public and political behaviour. Migrants sought to reconcile these dual identities at sites of industrial dispute, where they contested patterns of cultural and economic dominance.
This paper investigates the Hispanic communities of northern Australia in the period from Federation to the Cold War. The groups never exceeded several thousand in number, and settled in the dispersed rural townships of Queensland and the Northern Territory. They were highly politicised members of their communities, engaging in industrial sabotage, violent strikes and revolutionary bodies. Erudite and literate, a significant proportion continued to participate in global networks of socialist discourse in Spain, Argentina, France and the United States. This paper analyses how Hispanic migrants engaged in political action to negotiate the constraints imposed by their identities as both an ethnic and revolutionary people in Australia.
Wednesday 25th March 1 - 2pm
Upstairs Seminar Room
The Australian Centre
149 Barry Street