The School of Humanities at the University of New England will throw open its doors to the public next week during a week-long “Humanities Research Expo”. On offer will be lectures, presentations, and a “great debate” – all open to the public and free of charge.

On Tuesday, September 18, at 4pm in Arts Lecture Theatre A2, staff from the school will argue the topic “Why Our Discipline Is The Best” in a debate that promises to be “fun, fancy, and just a little fanatic”, according to Dr Bronwyn Hopwood, the organiser of the event and a lecturer in Roman History in the School of Humanities.

This will be followed by a free Political and International Studies public lecture delivered by Dr Tim Battin on ‘The Future of Social Democracy’ at 6pm in Arts Lecture Theatre A2.

At 6pm on Wednesday, September 19, in Arts Lecture Theatre A2, the annual Russel Ward Public Lecture will be delivered by Emerita Professor Jill Roe on ‘Revisiting the Frontier: from Miles Franklin’s Brindabella to South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula’’.

At 6pm on Thursday, September 20, Dr Paul Roche from the University of Sydney will give a talk on ‘Lucan’s Supernatural’ in the Aspects of Antiquity Lecture Series held in The Gallery at Earle Page College.

Finally, on Friday, September 21, at 9.30am in Arts Lecture Theatre A3, Dr Hopwood will present a talk in the School of Humanities Seminar Series: “What’s In A Name? Appian and the Nomenclature of Oktaouios Kaisar”.

Dr Hopwood said this was the first year the School of Humanities had run such an “all-in-one” expo, and that she hoped the format would be popular with the public as well as with students and staff.

“We normally have workshops every year, but we thought this would be a good opportunity to showcase some of our research as well as to provide those workshops.”

As well as this the public events, information sessions will run throughout the week on the School of Humanities’ research projects, honours, MA, MPhil and PhD programs, the skills required for thesis writing, conference presentations, applying for scholarships, grants, and awards, and for academic publishing in general. Current students will also give presentations of their ongoing research.

A full programme of events is available from Dr Bronwyn Hopwood: bhopwood@une.edu.au.

The September Aspects of Antiquity lecture at the University is concerned with supernatural phenomena in the Civil War (Bellum Civile), the great epic poem by the first century AD poet Lucan.

Dr Paul Roche, who taught Classical languages and Ancient History at UNE in 2006 and 2007, will be the next speaker in the regular Aspects of Antiquity lecture series held in ‘The Gallery’ at Earle Page College, on Thursday 20 September at the slightly later time of 6pm.

Now Senior Lecturer in Latin at the University of Sydney, Paul Roche is very well qualified to speak on this subject. He recently published a commentary on book 1 of Lucan’s epic poem, and is currently preparing an edition of another of the books in this famous Latin epic.

This accessible lecture considers the use of the supernatural elements in Lucan’s epic poem. It will treat divination, haruspicy, astrology, prodigies, oracles, prophecy, prayer and the gods, sacrifice, and necromancy. A thematic overview will be provided which draws on examples of these phenomena in Lucan, and considers them against the overarching themes and preoccupations of this poem.

The Aspects of Antiquity lecture series is sponsored by the UNE School of Humanities, the Armidale Chapter of the UNE Alumni Association and Earle Page College.

The civil war motif continues the next day, Friday morning 21 September, when Dr Bronwyn Hopwood, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at UNE, will give the seminar in the School of Humanities weekly research seminar series. This will take place at 9.30 at the University in Arts building Lecture Theatre A3.

Dr Hopwood’s title is ‘What’s in a name? Appian and the nomenclature of Oktaouios Kaisar.’

In this seminar she considers a much discussed passage in the second century AD Roman historian Appian, who claims (Civil Wars 4.8-11) to provide a Greek translation of the Latin proscription edict dated November 43 BC. The authenticity of the edict reproduced by Appian is widely accepted. Yet the opening title of this edict challenges this, for one of the triumvirs (the later Augustus) is called Octavius Caesar even though he was believed to have taken the name of his adoptive father, Gaius Julius Caesar (assassinated the year before), and to have avoided the name Octavianus entirely. Dr Hopwood will consider what we are to make of this historically.

As always, the lecture and seminar are free and open to all to attend.

Enquiries: Prof Greg Horsley (Classics and Ancient History) 6773 2390, ghorsley@une.edu.au.

Dr Alice Storey, an archaeologist at the University of New England, is tracing the global migration routes of domestic chickens back through thousands of years towards their origins in the jungles of South-east Asia.

In doing so, Dr Storey is pioneering the use of DNA from ancient chicken bones recovered from well-dated archaeological sites around the world. This is enabling her to add a fourth dimension – that of time – to an emerging “map” of chicken dispersal. One of the ultimate goals of such research is identifying the original Asian centres of jungle fowl domestication.

“All of our domestic chickens are descended from a few hens that I like to think of as the ‘great, great grandmothers’ of the chicken world,” Dr Storey said.

Biological, linguistic, historical and archaeological data have all contributed to an understanding that chickens accompanied human movements from their Asian homeland west through the Middle East to Europe and Africa, and east through the islands of South-east Asia and the Pacific.

Dr Storey’s analysis of ancient DNA is disentangling complications in this broad picture caused by interactions later than the original dispersal. “Only ancient DNA provides a unit of analysis with the chronological control necessary to reconstruct and disentangle the signals of initial dispersals from those of later interactions,” she said. Hers are the first published reports on the use of ancient DNA in this context.

A paper by Dr Storey and her colleagues, titled “Global dispersal of chickens in prehistory using ancient mitochondrial DNA signatures”, is published today in the online scientific journal PLoS ONE.

The paper, available at http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0039171, provides evidence for dispersal out of Asia over 3,000 years ago involving the movement of chickens both westwards to Europe and eastwards into the Pacific.

One of the most striking results of the study was the discovery of the same DNA signature in ancient chicken bones from Europe, Thailand, the Pacific and Chile, and from Spanish colonial sites in Florida and the Dominican Republic. This means that chickens dispersed both westwards and eastwards from a single ancient domestication centre, and converged thousands of years later when the Spanish brought their chickens from Europe to the New World.

“While unambiguous data does not yet exist to trace any of the detected mitochondrial DNA signatures back to specific domestication centres, the analysis of ancient DNA sequences presented here is an important first step towards it,” the paper concludes.

Media contact: Dr Alice Storey on (02) 6773 3085 or Leon Braun (UNE PR) on (02) 6773 3771.

A new book about development by University of New England political sociologist, Habib Zafarullah, promises to earn a cherished place on academic bookshelves, as well as at the elbows of NGO workers, community activists, and the leaders of grassroots movements in developing countries.

Managing Development in a Globalized World: Concepts, Processes, Institutions takes a broad look at stories of development success and failure in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. According to its publisher, it “underscores development as a continuous process that must be supported by sound policies and efficient management, supplying a wider understanding of the field.”

An important theme running throughout the book is that development must be an inclusive process and “always have people at its centre”, Dr Zafarullah said.

“The state is not the sole proprietor of the country’s development,” Dr Zafarullah said. “The people must be involved at a decision-making level in bringing about their own development. That way they will have true ownership of the development process.”

As an example of grass-roots development in action, Dr Zafarullah pointed to the Nobel prize-winning Grameen Bank founded by Prof Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in 1976.

“What the Grameen Bank did was to create a source of credit for villagers and the benefit of the poor. Small social loans are given to use for productive purposes. These loans are given not to individuals, but to groups of people – and, importantly, without requiring any collateral. What is also significant is that most the borrowers are women.

“Remarkably, repayment rates for these loans are around 98% – far better than any government bank. People used these loans to buy livestock and start businesses, and many of them have gotten out of poverty as a result.

“It is these kinds of home-grown, grass-roots initiatives that this book argues provide the paradigms for sustainable development.”

Dr Zafarullah said the book is already being used as a textbook at UNE and at McMaster University in Canada, where Dr Zafarullah’s co-author, Prof Ahmed Shafiqul Huque, teaches in the Faculty of Social Sciences.

He said that the book was already selling well, according to its publisher.

“I have been told by a number of academics that this book provides an excellent link between teaching and practice, which was very much our aim when we were writing it,” Dr Zafarullah said. “Our hope is that it can go beyond merely being a textbook to becoming a genuinely useful manual for people everywhere working in the field of development.”

Media contact: Dr Habib Zafarullah on (02) 6773 2250 or Leon Braun (UNE PR) on (02) 6773 3771.

A public lecture at the University of New England on Thursday 8 September will examine Australia’s complex relationship with South Africa at the time of the Boer War, and subsequent links between the two countries.

The prize-winning author and historian Jim Davidson will present his insights into this relationship when he gives this year’s Russel Ward Annual Lecture at UNE.

“Australia entered the Boer War enthusiastically as an imperial cause,” Dr Davidson said. “Nonetheless the war had, until recent attempts to revive its memory, faded from public consciousness – save for the Ned Kelly-like figure of ‘Breaker’ Morant.”

His lecture, at 6 pm in the A2 Lecture Theatre in UNE’s Arts Building, will examine the reasons for this and the legacies of the war on Australia’s relationship with South Africa. “Although eclipsed in the apartheid era, Australia’s relations with South Africa have been persistent and complex,” he said.

He will highlight the existence of a large community of Australian miners in South Africa around the time the war began – and after. “Indeed, South Africa at that time could be said to have been Australia’s forgotten frontier,” he said. “Moreover, these miners played a crucial role in determining the racist cast of twentieth-century South African politics.”

Dr Davidson will also consider South African influences in Australia, such as that of the writer Olive Schreiner. “As a feminist and passionate anti-war campaigner she had considerable influence on Australian opponents of the Boer War,” he said. And he will discuss the influence of the war on the Australian writer Miles Franklin, “giving an edge to her early feminism”.

Jim Davidson is an Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow at the Australian Centre in the University of Melbourne’s School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. He is the author of two highly-praised biographies: Lyrebird Rising, the story of the music patron Louise Hanson-Dyer, and A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W.K. Hancock, which was described by the eminent historian Geoffrey Blainey as “one of the very best Australian biographies about a mind at work”. A Three-Cornered Life won the prize for non-fiction in The Age Book of the Year Awards for 2011, and is shortlisted for this year’s NSW Premier’s History Prize.

Dr Davidson was the editor of Meanjin from 1974 to 1982, and has published an acclaimed edition of Anthony Trollope’s South Africa.

The Russel Ward Annual Lecture, sponsored by UNE’s School of Humanities, honours the memory and legacy of Emeritus Professor Russel Braddock Ward, one of UNE’s most renowned scholars. Russel Ward taught at UNE from 1957, and was Deputy Chancellor of the University from 1981 to 1989. He was the author of a number of important books, including The Australian Legend (1958), A Nation for a Continent (1977) and Finding Australia (1987).

For more information on the lecture, phone Dr David Roberts at UNE on (02) 6773 3794 (e-mail: drobert9@une.edu.au).

An historian at the University of New England has finally uncovered evidence that dates the death of the “wife” of the New England bushranger Captain Thunderbolt.

Carol Baxter (pictured here), an Adjunct Lecturer in History at UNE, has spent the past few years tracing the life of the part-Aboriginal woman Mary Ann Bugg, who was born at Berrico outstation on the Gloucester River in 1834.

Mary Ann roamed for many years with the bushranger Frederick Ward – also known as Captain Thunderbolt – living in the bush with him, helping him to evade the police, and bearing him three or four children including a son, Frederick Jnr. Mary Ann, who has become a legendary historical figure in her own right, was long thought to have died in November 1867. However, Ms Baxter’s research has now determined that Mary Ann lived for another four decades. “A few researchers have suggested that the woman who died in 1867 might not have been Mary Ann,” Ms Baxter said. “But until now the actual date or location of her death has not been positively proven.”

In late 1867, reports in Parliament and the Press announced that Thunderbolt’s “half-caste” female companion had died near the Goulburn River. While the Press reports named the dead woman as Louisa Mason, the fact that she was referred to as Thunderbolt’s “half-caste woman” led most Thunderbolt biographers to declare that the dead woman was in fact Mary Ann Bugg and that “Louisa Mason” was one of her nicknames.

Records uncovered by Ms Baxter show that Louisa Mason, also known as “Yellow Long”, was definitely not Mary Ann Bugg. A few months before her death, Louisa, a Scone district resident, married a labourer named Robert Michael Mason, otherwise known as “Cranky Bob”. Soon afterwards she encountered Captain Thunderbolt. “Louisa was evidently smitten with the bushranger – and he with her,” Ms Baxter said. “She abandoned her husband late in 1867 and eloped with Fred into the bush – an unfortunate decision, as it turned out.”

Ms Baxter, who is a professional genealogist and an expert in colonial Australian history, spent months sifting through original records and birth, marriage and death certificates, finally confirming that Mary Ann died as Mary Ann Burrows at Mudgee in 1905. She had borne at least 15 children.

The discovery may go some way towards setting the record straight about the life and times of the notorious New England bushranger, who was fatally captured at Uralla in 1870. Ms Baxter is currently working with UNE’s Senior Lecturer in Australian History, Dr David Andrew Roberts, to investigate claims raised in the NSW Legislative Council in March 2010 alleging a government censorship of secret police records relating to Thunderbolt’s death.

Ms Baxter’s forthcoming book, Captain Thunderbolt and His Lady, to be published by Allen & Unwin in September 2011, will reveal startling new information about the lives of both Mary Ann and Frederick Ward. Some of it is bound to prove controversial.

THE PHOTOGRAPH of Carol Baxter displayed here was taken at Chilcott Swamp, Uralla, where the bushranger Captain Thunderbolt was shot and killed on the 25th of May 1870.

The ability of nonviolence movements to bring about social and political change for the better will be on display and under discussion next week during the University of New England’s 2^nd Annual Nonviolence Film Festival.

“We have recently witnessed another remarkable success for nonviolence, when an Egyptian uprising toppled the entrenched dictator Hosni Mubarak, who had held on to power for 30 years, propped up by US financial and military support,” said Dr Marty Branagan, a lecturer in Peace Studies at UNE and the organiser of the film festival. “At the core of this uprising was a subtle, long-term campaign by a group of dedicated activists who had studied and trained in nonviolence.”

Dr Branagan said that the week-long festival of free films presented by Peace Studies at UNE could help people to understand the potential of what he called “the world’s most powerful philosophy of social change”.

The films will be screened each day next week (Monday 23 – Friday 27 May) in the Di Watson Lecture Theatre near UNE’s Northern Carpark. Each session will begin at 1 pm. The festival program is available at http://www.une.edu.au/humanities/pdf/Brochures/nonviolence-film-festival-poster-may-2011.jpg.

The films on Monday will deal with the best-known examples of nonviolence: the liberation of India and the US civil rights movement. Dr Branagan said that these films highlighted the violent and repressive nature of the regimes that the nonviolence movements were opposing.

There will also be home-grown films about Australian activism: Embassy Days, on Tuesday, about the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, and, on Thursday, films about environmental actions such as the Franklin River blockade and more recent activism. Also on Thursday will be a film documenting resistance to Nazism by Jehovah’s Witnesses during World War II.

Wednesday’s film will be about the 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’ in the Ukraine, and the festival will conclude on Friday with The Day After Peace, about one man’s crusade for an annual day of global ceasefire and nonviolence.

Everyone is welcome to these free films, each of which will be followed by a discussion.

The film festival will be accompanied by a week-long exhibition in the UNE Bistro titled Transforming the Human Spirit. This free exhibition is to be presented by the international Buddhist peace organisation Soka Gakkai.

For more information, contact Dr Marty Branagan on (02) 6773 3951 (e-mail: marty.branagan@une.edu.au).