In celebration of History Week 2019 (Aug 31st-Sept 8th), Oral History NSW invites you to the OHNSW Annual Lecture:

“Everywhere you look is a loss”: Memories of Bushfire in a Transformed Suburban Landscape

In 2003, the Australian Capital Territory experienced a devastating firestorm in which four people were killed and hundreds more injured. The fire burnt across bushland, plantation forests and farms, and reached into the Canberra suburbs, destroying nearly five hundred homes. Rural and suburban landscapes were permanently transformed. In this lecture, Dr Scott McKinnon will examine the interweaving of memory, space and recovery in the years after the fire. McKinnon argues for the importance of including slow recovery processes in the recorded history of disaster and for situating understandings of disaster recovery in landscapes imbued with memory.

About the speaker:
Dr Scott McKinnon is a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Australian Centre for Environment, Society and Space (ACCESS), University of Wollongong. He is an oral historian and geographer with a research background in disasters research, geographies of memory, and histories and geographies of sexuality and gender. Scott is Vice President of Oral History NSW and Sydney’s Pride History Group. He is the author of  Gay Men at the Movies: Cinema, memory and the history of a gay male community (Intellect, 2016).

Book tickets here