STATUES: PUTTING THEM UP, AND PULLING ‘EM DOWN

5pm – 6pm  RHSV AGM  (to see the full agenda and financial reports please click here)

6pm – 6:30pm   REFRESHMENTS

6:30pm – 7:30pm  2021 WESTON BATE ORATION DELIVERED BY JIM DAVIDSON

There may be a lull in the statue wars now, but that is because the front has broadened – certainly overseas. This oration shows how statues rose with the nineteenth century, and spread with the growth of empires, not least to Australia. The nature of traditional Australian statuary is considered, along with the questions it implicitly raises. (Comparisons are made with America.)  Statues, it seems, have become lightning conductors for unresolved tensions, the public culture which once sustained them being increasingly subject to segmentation and fracture.

In our Distinguished Lecturer series, the 2021 Weston Bate Oration will be delivered by the estimable Jim Davidson, following our AGM. The AGM will be from 5pm to 6pm at which time we’ll pause for some refreshments followed by Jim’s oration.

Jim Davidson is an historian and biographer, and a former editor of Meanjin. He is the author of A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian WK Hancock, the memoir A Führer for a Father: The domestic face of colonialism, and Lyrebird Rising, a life of the musical patron Louise Hanson-Dyer. Together they have won half a dozen prizes, including the Prime Minister’s History Prize, the Victorian premier’s non-fiction prize, and The Age Non-fiction Book of the Year (twice). His double biography of Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland – Emperors in Lilliput – will appear from Melbourne University Press next year. He is currently working on his next book, on statues.