Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Contribution to conference
Australian history has overwhelmingly focused on British ‘discovery’, exploration and settler colonialism, despite visitations by European and Asian agents of imperial and commercial interests over many centuries previously. The Global Encounters & First Nations Peoples: 1000 Years of Australian History project aims to radically shift Australia’s historical awareness, by concentrating on the dynamic history of encounters between First Nations peoples and voyagers from the sea over the period of a millennium. With a methodology designed to profile Indigenous agency, the project draws on a rich archive of records in order to synthesise the perspectives of First Nations peoples (‘inside looking out’) and outsiders (‘outside looking in’), thereby producing new and powerful understandings of First Nations and outsider encounters. The inaugural Global Encounters & First Nations Peoples 2021 Symposium places this history of encounter within the context of a broader global history of encounters, interactions, movements and transactions between First Nations peoples and outsiders. Over a series of nine one-hour feature sessions, scholars from Oceania, Asia, Africa and the Americas will showcase the dynamic history of encounters within the lands and seas of the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council's Australian Laureate Fellowships scheme (FL190100161).