Current projects

Places of the Heart: Post 1960 memorials in Australia

Paula Hamilton and Paul Ashton with Kate Waters and Rose Searby

This project has been funded by the Australian Research Council. It investigates the proliferation of non-war memorials in Australia within the framework of an emerging culture of commemoration from the mid twentieth century. It explores important shifts in the purpose of memorials and their role and meaning in Australian society, particularly the move towards a more democratic and personal expression of mourning in public arenas.

The project assesses the cultural significance of particular sites through a nationally devised schema which takes account of their place in the landscape, their form and materiality and will contribute to contemporary heritage conservation research, policy and practice.

A database including over 450 memorials will be publicly available in early 2008. A special issue of Public History Review will be published on memorials and memorialisation during 2008.

History at the Crossroads: Australians and the Past

Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton

This book, which will be published by Halstead Press in 2008, looks at the ways in which people interact with memory and the past in their everyday lives. It will compare the institutionalised formal historical knowledge available in schools and museums with the more popular, less formal engagement with the past on a personal or group level. It draws on the results of a national survey undertaken at UTS which asked respondents a series of questions about the histories they value and trust as well as what kind of past mattered to them. The survey revealed a wealth of material about Australian historical sensibilities that will contribute to the ongoing debates about nation and the responsibilities of citizenship.

Oral History and Public Memory

Edited by Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes (forthcoming Temple University Press, April 2008)

People and their Pasts: Public History Today

Edited by Paul Ashton and Hilda Kean (forthcoming Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2008)

Content

Introduction: People and their pasts and public history
Hilda Kean and Paul Ashton

Section one: The making of history

1. Connecting with history: Australians and their pasts
Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton

2. Usable pasts: Comparing approaches to popular and public history
Bernard Eric Jensen

3. The past as a public good: The US National Park Service and 'cultural repair' in postindustrial places
Cathy Stanton

4. Shades of grey: Public history and government in New Zealand
Bronwyn Dalley

Section two: Presenting the past in place and space

5. 'Garden of Gratitude': The National Memorial Arboretum and strategic remembering
Paul Gough

6. Re-enacting the Wars of the Roses: History and identity
Meghan Backhouse

7. Creating new pasts in museums: Planning the Museum of London’s Modern London Galleries Darryl McIntyre

8. Monument mania? Public space and the Black and Asian presence in London John Siblon

9. Museum Theatre: Children’s reading of 'first person interpretation' in museums Vasiliki Tzibazi

Section three: Material culture, memory and public history

10. A nation's moment and a teacher's mark book: Interconnecting personal and public histories
Hilda Kean and Brenda Kirsch

11. Absent fathers, present history: A continuum
Martin Bashforth

12. Memoryscape: Integrating oral history, memory and landscape on the river Thames
Toby Butler

13. Expanding the archive: Using family history to explore connections within a settler’s world
Mary Stewart

14. Harry Jacobs: The studio photographer and the visual archive
Jon Newman