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George Arden, gentleman drunkard
August 8, 2023 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
$5.00 – $10.00Event Navigation
We are delighted that author and historian, Susan Priestley FRHSV, will be delivering this lecture which explores the background and career of editor and author George Arden, whose life compiled by the late P.L. Brown, Geelong and Western District historian, was an entry in the first volume of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (1966). Arden together with his two brothers provide variant exemplars of the lifestyle and widely variant fortunes encountered when gentlemanly emigrants, along with the multitude of others, took the colonial plunge into Britain’s nineteenth century world, thereby illuminating the idiosyncrasies of multi-coloured humanity.
Susan Priestley, Master of Arts (University of Melbourne), has been an independent historian since 1962. Susan’s eleven commissioned histories embrace aspects of places, people and institutions in Victoria. Her ongoing interest is the study of past lives and the evolution of identity – personal, collective and national. an article for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, seven articles for the Australian Dictionary of Biography, as well as papers and reviews, mostly for the Victorian Historical Journal. She is a founding member of the Professional Historians Association (Victoria). She is a founding member and former Vice-President of the La Trobe Society, and a Fellow of the RHSV, having served as RHSV councillor for twenty years and as president from 1999 to 2005 (only the second woman to hold this office in our 114 year history).