Australian Women’s History Network Travel Bursary recipient Natasha Szuhan reflects on her experience of the 2024 Australian Historical Association Conference.
The Australian Historical Association’s 2024 conference was held on the beautiful Bedford Park Campus of Flinders University, Adelaide. The theme of ‘Home Truths’ – which sought to elevate the historian’s duty to uncover and reveal truths and dispel falsehoods – felt both urgent and grounded on the unceded lands of the Kaurna people.
This was my first AHA conference. It feels mildly outrageous to admit that although I have been working as a historian in Australia since 2013, I had not yet availed myself of the dynamic, supportive and, quite frankly, inspiring community of historians of which I am a part.
I was equal parts galvanised and exhausted by the end of the conference – the vast array of interests and expertise demanded that I not allow my brain to switch off for a minute, but also, I just didn’t want to. There were over 100 sessions covering 12 streams of history – all packed to the brim with enthusiastic speakers and listeners. I must say that there was some relief when it came to my own presentation as I didn’t have to make any tough decisions about what to attend and what to, reluctantly, miss.
I was very happy to discover that feminist, gender, and women’s history were thoroughly represented but by no means confined to the Australian Women’s History Network stream. Women’s issues and history were excitingly – but also frustratingly – everywhere. As they should be! I also attended Digital History, Public History, Law and History, Oral History, History of Medicine, and History of Violence panels and found fascinating and brain tickling intersections with my own ‘Oral History of Oral Contraceptives’ in each. The only downside being that I know I have so much more work to do… So, thanks AHA!?
The keynote presentations were all really inspiring as examples of how doing history is both a personal and a public practice. The historian is not and cannot be removed from the process – we can strive for objectivity but only through knowing ourselves and what shapes us and our interests.
Dr Vannessa Hearman’s (Curtin University) keynote, ‘Not-Quite-Australian: Working with people, communities, and organisations marginalised from national histories,’ provoked attendees to consider how the parameters of national inclusion and exclusion (through the example of East Timorese asylum seekers and imperialisms) shape the historical imaginary. Who and what is and isn’t Australian? And why? I was fortunate enough to travel to the conference one morning with Dr Hearman and she suggested that these tensions also apply within university disciplines. Where, for example, should the line be drawn between Asian studies of the past and history? Is there a universally applicable line?
Such provocations were also evident in Professor Julia Laite’s (Birkbeck, University of London) keynote, ‘The Trouble of Damaged Worlds: Telling Home Truths in Britain’s Oldest Overseas Colony’. In discussing the imperial and extractive history of Britain’s oldest overseas colony – Newfoundland – she relayed an evocative history of cobbled together stories about people, races, environmental extremes and adaptations, and ongoing exploration, exploitation and extraction from her transdisciplinary efforts to reckon with the historical truths of her ‘home’. I must admit that her talk brought a tear to my eye – there was something both universal and personal to this history that resonated deeply.
The AWHN stream was awesome. The talks that I attended were those that resonated with and seemed to relate to my own work on the history of hetero-sexuality, reproductive technology, science and medicine, and the patriarchy. It was so exciting to see the history of coercive control being tackled in such diverse ways. Talks from Dr Zora Simic (UNSW), Dr Catherine Kevin (Flinders), and Dr Cassandra Byrnes (UQ) were of particular interest to me, especially as related to the question of reproductive coercion – a prescient topic in the era of women’s supposed reproductive autonomy.
The fact that the feminist project of women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy is not won is further evidenced by the panel on the history of the anti-abortion movement in Australia. Talks from Dr Timothy Jones (La Trobe), Dr Prudence Flowers (Flinders), and Dr Leigh Boucher (Macquarie) – as well as those by Associate Professor Jane Carey (UOW) and Dr Paige Donaghy (Melbourne) – covered the 1700s to the present to jointly demonstrate the complexity of the deeply gendered questions that perpetuate around sex and pregnancy, from contraception conception, birth, loss or termination.
I’m very grateful to the AWHN for helping me to attend this wonderful conference. And I very much look forward to next year’s at James Cook University in Townsville – which I hope will be a bit warmer than Adelaide.
Natasha Szuhan is a Lecturer in history at the Australian National University. Her most recent book, The Family Planning Association and Contraceptive Science and Technology in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain (Palgrave Macmillan), was released in 2022. Her research focuses on contraceptive and reproductive technologies at the intersection of feminism(s), autonomy, socio-cultural history, and science and medicine in the twentieth century.
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