Reading Radiation: Evidence and Future-Making in Post-Disaster Fukushima
Lecture/seminar
How does radiation function as evidence? Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Fukushima, Japan site of the 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown, this talk examines how radiation is activated, contested, and suppressed in discourse across a range of sites—museum…
Museums, Truth, Governance: The Civic Agency of the Country/culture Couplet
Lecture/seminar
There will be three aspects to this presentation. First, I will briefly review the concerns that have informed my contributions to museum studies since the publication of The Birth of the Museum in 1995. These have been informed chiefly by two aspects of Michel Foucault’s work: his conception of…
Honours 2027 - Information Session
Information session
Learn all about the Classical Studies Honours program:why you might want to do an Honours year, what an Honours year entails, how to ensure you are eligible, and the funding opportunities available to help support your Honours year.
Speaking Animals, Talking Books: From Radio Play to Digital Download
Lecture/seminar
Ruth Park’s The Muddleheaded Wombat is widely known today through the illustrated children’s books first published in the 1960s. Wombat first reached Australian children as a broadcast voice in a long-running ABC radio series within the Children’s Session. Written by Park and performed by a…
Forensic Investigation of Victims of the Batavia Mutiny, 1629
Seminar
On 4 June 1629, the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) retourschip Batavia wrecked on Morning Reef, in the Houtman Abrolhos, approximately 65 km off the Western Australian coast. The macabre events following the wrecking saw more than 100 individuals murdered over a three-month period, by…
Reckoning with Anthro-Cast: A Progress Report from the Wenner-Gren Foundation
Lecture/seminar
In 2024, Chip Colwell and I convened a Wenner-Gren Seminar that scrutinised the Foundation's ethical obligations in connection with the Foundation's legacy casting program, Anthro-Cast, a profit-generating enterprise that the Foundation ran between 1962-76 (see Colwell and Rutherford 2025)1.…
How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent
Lecture/seminar
This past summer, wildfires again washed across southeast Australian landscapes, affecting over 500,000 hectares. Many of the forests that have carried these combustive tides are regrowth of native forests industrially cleared for mining and then recleared for timber. Many of the grasslands that…