The Peter Tobin Oration is held each Eureka Day to honour the significant contribution of the late Peter Tobin OAM to the commemoration and interpretation of the Eureka Stockade and its legacy.
We are honoured to welcome Professor Susan Lawrence to deliver this year’s Peter Tobin Oration on the 165th anniversary of the Eureka Stockade. Susan will speak about her ground-breaking new research into the environmental legacy of the gold rush, which informs her recently published book Sludge, co-authored by Peter Davies.
Sludge: An Environmental History of Water and the Gold Rush
The gold rush played a major role in reshaping Victoria’s rivers: they were dammed and diverted for water supply and then choked with the sand, gravel and silt that poured from the mines. One hundred years later this profound environmental disruption is all but forgotten, yet the legacy is still here. New research is showing how the gold rush continues to shape Victoria’s rivers and floodplains. It has implications for the management of cultural heritage, river remediation programs, catchment management, public health and debates about how people and environments interact.
Professor Susan Lawrence is an archaeologist and environmental historian at La Trobe University, Melbourne. A Canadian, she discovered the gold rush while living in Ballarat and has been fascinated by it ever since. She has worked on sites all over Australia, including Tasmanian whaling stations and South Australian farms, and has published internationally on gender, artefact studies, urban archaeology, colonialism, and industrial archaeology. Susan is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Society of Antiquaries. Her most recent book is Sludge: Disaster on Victoria’s Goldfields (Black Inc/La Trobe University Press 2019), co-authored with Peter Davies.
Following Susan’s talk, please join us for drinks and canapes. Susan will also be available to sign copies of her books, ‘Sludge’ (with Peter Davies) and ‘Dolly’s Creek – An Archaeology of a Victorian Goldfields Community’.
