Librarian Jack Chan has had a long-time interest in local and family history and has researched his own Chinese ancestry in Australia. He has documented the history of his own family’s Chinese restaurants in Geelong. Join Jack for his trip down memory lane and his tips for researching family history.

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.

Local author June Factor will discuss her book Soldiers and aliens: men in the Australian Army’s Employment Companies during World War II, which details the forgotten history of the remarkable contribution of non-British subjects to Australia in 1939-1945.