We are honoured that our last major lecture for 2019 will be delivered by Professor Katie Holmes, Director, Centre for the Study of the Inland and co-author of the soon-to-be-published Mallee Country: Land, People, History together with Richard Broome, Charles Fahey and Andrea Gaynor. In the early 1890s the Victorian Mallee was seen as a
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George Higinbotham was a highly influential politician in colonial Victoria. One of his contemporaries described him as a man of ‘dash and daring’ who ‘won from privilege and class ground that they have never since been able to recover.’ Even today debate rages about his character and his legacy. Some see him as a visionary
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Author and historian, Alan McLean will spin the story of the wreck of the Fiji off Moonlit Head 1891. There will be a corresponding exhibition in the RHSV Library on the items retrieved from the wreck by Heritage Victoria.

Victoria has many outstanding world-leading engineering works, but many of these achievements are not well documented, or have been forgotten, and need to be celebrated. Four papers will be presented focussing on the history of some of the significant engineering works in Victoria.

We are delighted that Gregory Hill, a leading authority on both Australian Colonial Pottery and Australian Art Pottery, will be delivering a lunch-time lecture on Victoria’s Earliest Potteries. 

When socialist barrister and aspiring member of parliament Maurice Blackburn met Doris Hordern, ardent feminist and campaign secretary to Vida Goldstein, neither had marriage in their imagined futures. But they fell in love - and together, they shook Australia. Caroline Rasmussen talks about her latest book, The Blackburns Private Lives, Public Ambition.