Keynote Address
‘Empire, Faith and Conflict: An Ancient Problem ofthe Modern Age’
Associate Professor Andrew May
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies
University of Melbourne
Andrew May lives with his family in Melbourne but had the good taste to be born in Western Australia. It is a pleasure
to welcome him back as our conference keynote speaker.
Andrew May is a social historian with broad interests in the intersection of colonial, imperial and urban
histories in the modern world. As a historian of imperialism, he also has a particular interest in imperial
networks of science, religion and governance. His book Welsh Missionaries and British imperialism: The
empire of clouds in north-east India has recently been published by the University of Manchester Press.
As a historian of urban Australia Andrew has also written widely on the social experience of the Australian
city, including its public spaces, community rituals, suburban qualities and cosmopolitan cultures. He was
the Director ofthe Encyclopaedia of Melbourne project, which was published by Cambridge University Press
in 2005. The following year he was awarded the ‘Individual Contribution to Profile’ Award in the ‘Melbourne
Awards’.
Andrew has served on numerous advisory committees, including the National Trust, City of Melbourne,
Public Records Office of Victoria, Heritage Victoria, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Immigration
Museum and the Royal Historical Society of Victoria. He is currently a member of the Australian Historical
Association Executive and a board member of the journal Australian Historical Studies.
Special Guest Speaker
‘Empires on the Waves’
Professor Michael (Mack) McCarthy
Maritime Museum of Western Australia
Mack McCarthy is the Senior Maritime Archaeologist at Western Australia’s prestigious Maritime Museum. Mack will be
joining us as a special guest speaker, after which conference guests will be invited to attend a private, sunset viewing of
rare, imperial maritime relics at the Museum.
Mack McCarthy is a senior archaeologist of the Maritime Museum in Western Australia. His research
has gained popular attention in recent years as a result of his integral role in discovering the wreck
of the HMAS Sydney, Australia’s most significant naval loss of the Second World War. The whereabouts
of the Sydney and the cause of its disappearance quickly became one of Australia’s most enduring historical
mysteries.
As a scholar of maritime archaeology, however, Mack also specialises in the movement of people across the
frontiers of Empires. His paper will challenge the disciplines of History and Archaeology to better integrate their
research, and thereby extend our knowledge of the past and its treasures.
AHA Special Panel
‘Empire, Faith and Conflict in the Pacific’
We are fortunate to have the collaboration of the Australian Historical Association in this event and it is with their sponsorship
that this special panel has been convened.
Professor Hilary Carey
Faculty of Education and Arts
University of Newcastle
Hilary M. Carey is a Professor of History at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales and Ourimbah
Director of Research Development in the Faculty of Education and Arts. She is a graduate of the University
of Oxford and the University of Sydney.
Hilary’s research ranges from medieval cultural history to religious aspects of settler imperialism. She is the
author of God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), which was nominated for the Ernest Scott Prize; edited Church and State in Old and New (Leiden: Brill, 2011)
with John Gascoigne; and is the editor of Empires of Religion (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Hilary is President of the Religious History Association and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the
Humanities (FAHA). She was previously the Keith Cameron Professor of Australian History at University College
Dublin and has held visiting research appointmentsin such universities as Balliol College Oxford, the University
of St Andrews and the University of Edinburgh.
Professor Margaret Jolly
School of Culture, History and Language
Australian National University
Margaret Jolly is Professor in Gender and Cultural Studies and Pacific Studies in the School of Culture,
History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific. She is an historical anthropologist who has
written extensively on gender in the Pacific, on exploratory voyages and travel writing,missions and
contemporary Christianity, maternity and sexuality, cinema and art.
Margaret is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. She has previously headed the ANU
Gender Relations Project and Centre, taken the Burns Distinguished Visiting Chair in the Department of
History at the University of Hawai’i, and been a Visiting Professor at both the University of California in
Santa Cruz and the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales in France.
Dr Tracey Banivanua Mar
School of Historical and European Studies
La Trobe University
Tracey Banivanua Mar lectures in Australian, Pacific and transnational Indigenous histories at La Trobe
University. She has published widely on the entwined colonial histories of Australia and the Pacific, and
her most recent publications include Violence and Colonial Dialogue (2007) and the co-edited collection
of essays Making Settler Colonial Space (2010).
Tracey is currently completing an ARC Discovery Project called 'Land and Colonial Cultures' and has a
forthcoming book entitled Decolonisation and the Pacific (CUP: 2014) on transnational decolonisation
movements in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.