Royal Society of NSW News & Events

Royal Society of NSW News & Events

Great Australians you’ve never heard of

  Bashford 
   Lecture 4

   “A geologist, geographer and anthropologist”

    Professor Alison Bashford FRSN
    School of Humanities & Languages
    UNSW

Monday 12 November 2018
Mitchell Theatre, Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts, 280 Pitt St, Sydney

This is the final in a series of four talks co-hosted by the SMSA and the Royal Society of NSW on the topic “Great Australians You’ve Never Heard Of”.  Our speakers reveal the stories of remarkable Australians who have not received the recognition they deserve.

Our final Great Australian was a geologist, geographer, and anthropologist.  His travels took him from Scott’s final expedition in Antarctica to every continent on Earth, in a life that stretched from the South African War to the Cold War.  Highly controversial in 1920s Australia, he relocated to the University of Toronto, pursuing a stellar career.  Yet this Great Australian has been both acclaimed and derided as one of the twentieth century’s most insistent environmental determinists.  Join Alison Bashford to learn this Great Australian’s identity and to hear about his remarkable life.

Alison Bashford is Research Professor in History.  Her work connects the history of science, global history, and environmental history into new assessments of the modern world, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.  She has recently focused on the geopolitics of world population, presented in two books: The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Re-reading the Principle of Population, with Joyce E. Chaplin (Princeton University Press, 2016) and Global Population: History, Geopolitics and Life on Earth (Columbia University Press, 2014).  Before taking up her Research Chair at UNSW, Alison Bashford was the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and Trustee of Royal Museums, Greenwich, UK.  In 2009-10, she was the Whitlam and Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science.  She has researched and taught at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University.  Alison Bashford is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Australian Academy of Humanities.  In May 2018, she presented the Wiles Lectures at Queen’s University, Belfast.

Other lectures in the series
22 June 2018 — Thomas Keneally AO DistFRSN ‒ A Tasmanian convict who went from an Irish Rebel to Governor.
23 July 2018 — The Hon Em Prof Peter Baume AC DistFRSN ‒ A Victorian scientist who once injected himself with the myxoma virus.
6 September 2018 — Emeritus Professor Brynn Hibbert AM FRSN ‒Three great Australians and the horse racing industry.

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