A Frontier Conversation

ACIH’s Yale Collaborations

This film came out of a series of activities with Yale scholars and affiliates who travelled to Australia in August 2004. After a major conference ‘Narrating Frontier Families in Australia and North America’ at the National Museum of Australia, and an exclusive postgraduate workshop, a group of ANU and Yale academics and students conducted an ‘Exchanging Histories’ workshop at Charles Darwin University. This was followed by a History Tour organised by Sonia Smallacombe, then the Head of the School of Indigenous Knowledges, CDU, which saw an unlikely mini bus convoy of Indigenous and other academics from Australia and North America having conversations about history at a number of Indigenous community organizations in the Northern Territory. Professor Ann McGrath took the exchanging histories theme to the Western Historians Association Conference in St Louis, Missouri, with a panel discussion on the film and tour that included Dr Jay Gitlin of the Lamar Centre, Yale, Dr Margaret Jacobs of the University of Nebraska, and Professor McGrath herself.

This documentary film had its official US launch at Yale in October 2006. Participating in the Panel discussion were Sonia Smallacombe (now working in New York for the UN Secretariat on Indigenous Peoples), Prof Malcolm Gillies of the ANU, Dr Jay Gitlin, Deputy Director of the Lamar Centre, and a number of Yale tutors and Indigenous alumni as well as RSSS History postgraduate Tiffany Shellam.

Tiffany Shellam has taken advantage of the ACIH/Lamar Centre/Yale collaboration in various ways. In 2004, she was a participant in the postgraduate workshop and the Northern Territory history tour with Yale scholars, and in 2006, she visited Yale to meet with academics and graduate students and to give a paper from her Doctoral thesis. Scholars from the Lamar Centre have also encouraged her to apply for a Scholarship to Yale to undertake post-Doctoral research. Emily O’Gorman is another History postgraduate student who has visited Yale to undertake research and meet Lamar Centre scholars.

A more detailed report on the initial Yale collaboration and the full program is available here http://acih.anu.edu.au/partnerships/partnerships.php

A Frontier Conversation was preselected in the top ten documentaries by the Australian Teachers of Media Awards (ATOM) and has attracted strong interest from schools and Universities. It is available from Ronin Film Distributors. http://www.roninfilms.com.au/video/2421341067/0/2424720609.html