History Now: More than human histories

History Now seminars explore current and compelling issues affecting the practice of contemporary history. It is a long-running series of public talks and discussions, bringing new perspectives to all aspects of historical practice. This year History Now is a collaboration between the History Council of NSW (HCNSW), the State Library of NSW and the Australian Centre for Public History (ACPH) at UTS.

Taylor Coyne and Emily O’Gorman discuss the ways that the more-than-human world has shaped histories.

Associate Professor Emily O’Gorman is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow based at the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research is situated within environmental history and the interdisciplinary environmental humanities, and is primarily concerned with contested knowledges within broader cultural framings of authority, expertise and landscapes, with a focus on rivers and wetlands. She is the author of Flood Country: An environmental history of the Murray–Darling Basin (CSIRO Publishing, 2012) and Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-than-human histories of Australia’s Murray–Darling Basin (University of Washington Press, 2021; MUP, 2024).

Taylor Coyne is a PhD candidate in urban and historical geography at UNSW, Sydney. He is also a project officer in the Connection with Country design team at the Sydney-based practice Yerrabingin. Taylor works in the space of creating meaningful, community-centric, culturally inclusive water-sensitive urban design through ecologically and historically contextual storytelling. His research focus is on the history, politics and design of eastern Sydney’s urban stormwater infrastructure; in particular, asking how and why Sydney’s waterscapes came to be the way they are today, and whose knowledges and experiences have been included and excluded in the way these spaces have been designed, planned, managed and governed. All of Taylor’s research interests are threaded together by the overarching aim to address matters that are important to marginalised communities in Sydney, with a particular focus on bringing First Nations knowledges and histories to the fore. Taylor is working towards addressing how landscape architecture and environmental history might come together to incorporate Sydney’s swampy more-than-human histories.

Professor Warwick Anderson is the Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Discipline of Health and leader of the Politics, Governance and Ethics Theme with the Charles Perkins Centre. In 2012–17 he was ARC Laureate Fellow in the Department of History and the Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine. Additionally, he has an affiliation with History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney and is a Professorial Fellow of the School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. As a historian of science, medicine and public health, focusing on Australasia, the Pacific, Southeast Asia and the United States, Anderson is especially interested in ideas about race, human difference, and citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In recent years, his research has focused on the conceptual development of disease ecology and planetary health, ie, the population health impacts of climate change.

History Now is short and sweet. The tone is conversational, and the format is two speakers, each talking for 15–20 minutes, followed by a Q&A. History Now is usually an in-person event unless otherwise stated. History Now 2024 is programmed by Jesse Adams Stein (Vice President of HCNSW / Member of ACPH).

Image credit: Macquarie Marshes, by Emily O’Gorman