In oral history interviews, memories of water often incorporate broader conversations about environmental change, community histories, personal identities and political debates. Whether in the complexities of water management, the witnessing of changing climates, the trauma of disaster, or the pleasures of swimming in a river or the sea, the ways in which people talk about water can tell us a great deal about their relationships to place, community, the past and the present. In this panel discussion, three oral historians will reflect on their interviews about water, including its politics, joys and risks on a heating planet.
Time: 6pm-7pm
Date: Thursday, 11th September
Location: Online via Zoom
Speaker bios:
Dr Scott McKinnon is an award-winning oral historian, curator and writer. A highly experienced interviewer, Scott has worked on a range of oral history projects for universities, government departments, community groups and collecting institutions, including the National Library of Australia and the State Library of NSW. Scott has published extensively on the impacts of disasters and environmental change on individuals and communities, including as co-editor of Disasters in Australia and New Zealand: Historical Approaches to Understanding Catastrophe (Palgrave, 2021). He is an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe University and the vice president of Oral History NSW.
Dr Margaret Cook is an environmental historian and a Research Fellow at the Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University and an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe University. Margaret has been conducting oral histories about waterways and environmental change in the Murray-Darling Basin. Margaret is a regular contributor to The Conversation, radio and television. She is the author of A River with a City Problem: A History of Brisbane Floods (UQP, 2023) and co-editor of Disasters in Australia and New Zealand: Historical Approaches to Understanding Catastrophe (Palgrave, 2021).
Katie Holmes is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Inland at La Trobe University. Her work integrates environmental, gender, oral and cultural history and she has a particular interest in the interplay between an individual, their culture and environment. Her recent research, which includes working closely with oral histories, is on the cultures of drought in regional Victoria, and water cultures and conflicts in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin. Katie’s books include Between the Leaves: Stories of women, writing and gardens (2011), the co-authored Mallee Country: land, people, history (2020) and Failed Ambitions: Kew Cottages and Changing Ideas of Intellectual Disability (2023). Katie is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science Australia, and was the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Chair in Australian Studies, Harvard, 2023-24.
This event is presented online by Oral History NSW as part of History Week 2025