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Penelope Edmonds

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Dr Penelope Edmonds

ARC Future Fellow

B.App.Sc. (Heritage Conservation) University of Canberra
Post Grad Dip. (History) University of Melbourne
PhD (History) University of Melbourne

Penny Edmonds

Contact Details

Contact Campus Sandy Bay Campus
Building Social Science
Room Reference 344
Telephone 03) 6226 1984
Fax 03) 6226 2575
Email Penny.Edmonds@utas.edu.au

General Responsibilities

Penelope Edmonds is Australian Research Council Future Fellow, School of Humanities. She has qualifications in history and heritage studies, and teaches in the Australian, Pacific, (post)colonial, museum and public history areas.

Penny is the Chief Investigator of ARC funded Future Fellowship project  'Reform in the Antipodes: Quaker Humanitarians, Imperial Journeys and Early Histories of Human Rights', (2012-2015).

Penny has broad professional experience in the fields of history, public history and cultural heritage, and has worked in museums both nationally and internationally. Penny was an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History, University of Melbourne (2008-2011) and Lecturer, Department of History, University of Melbourne (2006-2008). She was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Heritage Conservation, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC for three years (1991- 1994). 

Penny's research is supported by grants from the Australian Research Council. She is a member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts (Creative Arts and Humanities panel), 2013-2015.

 

Teaching Responsibilities

Penny teaches in the Australian, Pacific, (post)colonial, museum and public history areas. She has over ten years of teaching experience, and has lectured in and coordinated courses in the following areas: 

Australian history and political culture; Australia in the Pacific world; Australian history and human rights; settler colonialism; empire, race and human rights; comparative postcolonial and indigenous histories; gender and empire; heritage, museums and public history; visual culture; history and media; history and memory.

 

Publications

Books

Forthcoming

  • Penelope Edmonds and Kate Darian-Smith (eds), Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim, (edited collection), Routledge Series in Cultural History, due 2014.

Published

  • Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities, (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2010)
  • Penelope Edmonds and Tracey Banivanua-Mar (eds), Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity, (Basingstoke: Palgrave UK, 2010)
  • Penelope Edmonds and Samuel Furphy (eds), Rethinking Colonial History: New and Alternative Approaches, (Department of History, University of Melbourne and RMIT Publishing, 2006).

Refereed Articles

Forthcoming:

  • Penelope Edmonds, 'Surely this is the African slave trade in miniature': Sealers, Aboriginal Women and Humanitarian Anti-slavery Discourse in the Bass Strait Islands', Australian Historical Studies, Special issue on Anti-slavery, Humanitarianism and Their Legacies, edited by Fiona Paisley, due March 2014.

Published:

  • Penelope Edmonds, 'Travelling 'Under concern': Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker Tour the Antipodean Colonies, 1830s-1840s', Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History special issues on humanitarianism, 40: 5, 2012, pp.769-788.
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'Unofficial Apartheid, Convention and Country towns: Reflections on Australian History and the New South Wales Freedom Rides of 1965', in 'Making Indigenous Place in the Australian City', a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 15.2, 2012, pp.167-190.
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'Failing in every endeavour to conciliate': Governor Arthur's Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and their Transnational Connections', Journal of Australian Studies, Special issue on Visual Culture, vol.35, no.2, June, 2011, pp.208-218.
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'The Proclamation Cup: Tasmanian Potter Violet Mace and Colonial Quotations', ReCollections, National Museum of Australia's online journal, Vol.5, no.2, Nov. 2010.
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'Unpacking Settler Colonialism's Urban Strategies: Indigenous Peoples in Victoria, British Columbia, and the Transition to a Settler-Colonial City', Urban History Review, Special Issue 'Encounters, Contests, and Communities: New Histories of Race and Ethnicity in the Canadian City', Vol. 38, No. 2. Spring 2010, pp.4-20.
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'The Le Souëf Box: Reflections on Imperial Nostalgia, Material Culture, and Exhibitionary Practice in Colonial Victoria,' Australian Historical Studies, No. 127, April, 2006, 117-139.

Book Chapters

Forthcoming:

  • Penelope Edmonds and Tracey Banivanua Mar, 'Indigenous Peoples and Settlers,' New Cambridge History of Australia, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, due 2013).
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'Canada and Australia: On 'Oceana', Transcolonial History, and an Interconnected Pacific World', Within and Without the Nation: Canadian and Transnational Histories (working title), (eds) Adele Perry, Karen Dubinsky, Henry Yu, University of Toronto Press, (due 2013).

Published

  • Penelope Edmonds and Tracey Banivanua Mar, 'Making Space in the Settler Colony', Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds (eds.), Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity, (Basingstoke: Palgrave UK, 2010), pp.1-24.
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'The Intimate, Urbanising Frontier: 'Native Camps', Gender Relations and Settler-Colonialism's Violent Array of Spaces Around Early Melbourne', eds. Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds, Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity, (Basingstoke: Palgrave UK, 2010), pp 129-154.
  • Penelope Edmonds, '"I followed England round the world": the Rise of Trans-imperial Anglo- Saxon Exceptionalism and the Spatial Narratives of Nineteenth-century British Settler Colonies of the Pacific Rim', Re-Orienting Whiteness, eds. Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey and Katherine Ellinghaus, (Palgrave, 2009), pp.99-118.
  • Penelope Edmonds, '"We think that this subject of the native races should be thoroughly gone into at the forthcoming Exhibition": The 1866-67 Intercolonial Exhibition', Seize the Day: Exhibitions, Australia and the World, Kate Darian-Smith, Richard Gillespie, Caroline Jordan and Elizabeth Willis (eds), (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2008), pp.
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'White Spaces? Racialised Geographies, Anglo Saxon Exceptionalism and the Location of Empire in Britain's c19th Pacific Rim Cities', Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of an Identity, eds. Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey and Kat Ellinghaus, RMIT publishing, 2008.
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'Imperial Objects, Truths and Fictions: Reading Nineteenth-Century Australian Colonial Objects as Historical Sources', in Penelope Edmonds and Samuel Furphy (eds), Rethinking Colonial History: New and Alternative Approaches, (Department of History, University of Melbourne, and RMIT Publishing, 2006), pp.73-87.
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'Dual Mandate, Double Work: Land, Labour and the Transformation of 'Native' Subjectivity in Papua 1908 ' 1940', Collisions of Cultures and Identities: Settlers and Indigenous Peoples, Patricia Grimshaw and Russell McGregor (eds), (RMIT Publishing, Melbourne, 2006), pp.163-186.
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'From Bedlam to Incorporation: Whiteness and the racialisation of settler colonial urban space in Victoria, British Columbia, 1840s ' 1880s', Exploring the British World: Identity - Cultural Production - Institutions, RMIT publishing, 2004.
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'Conserving the Things We Keep', A Museum for the People: A History of Museum Victoria and its Predecessor Institutions, ed. Carolyn Rasmussen, Museum Victoria, 2001.
  • Penelope Edmonds and Elizabeth Wild, 'New Obligations: Conservation Policy And Treatment Approaches For Aboriginal Collections in The Bunjilaka Aboriginal Centre, Melbourne Museum,' International Institute for Conservation (IIC), Melbourne Congress, 2000.

Book reviews and shorter entries

  • Penelope Edmonds  and Jane Carey, 'A new beginning for Settler Colonial Studies', Settler Colonial Studies, 2013, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2-5
  • Penelope Edmonds,  Review of 'The Many Voyages of Arthur Wellington Clah: A Tsimshian Man on the Pacific North West Coast' by Peggy Brock, BC Studies, British Columbian Studies Journal,  2013.
  • Penelope Edmonds,  'Theatre of Evidence: 'Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country', (Theatre review), History Australia journal, vol.9, no.2, 2012.
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'Afterword: On Recognition, Apology and the 'Hidden History of the Americas', Settler Colonial Studies, vol.2, 2011, pp.182-184.
  • Penelope Edmonds, Review of 'White Mother to a Dark Race' by Margaret Jacobs, Pacific Historical Review, Nov. 2010.
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'Shaking Hands on the Fringe' by Tiffany Shellam, Labour History,(Australian Society for the Study of Labour History), issue 98, 2010.
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections', edited by Nicholas Peterson, Lindy Allen and Louise Hamby, (Melbourne University Press: 2008), Australian Historical Studies, 2010.
  • Penelope Edmonds, 'Australia's Missing Treaty', review of Bain Attwood's 'Possession: Batman's Treaty and the Matter of History', MUP, 2009, The Age, September 26, 2009.
  • Penelope Edmonds, entries on 'Batman's Hill' and 'Founding Myths', Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain (eds), The Encyclopedia of Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 2005, http://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00164b.htmhttp://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00603b.htm
  • Penelope Edmonds, Review of 'Land of Promise: Robert Burnaby's Letters from Colonial British Columbia 1858-1863', Anne Burnaby McLeod and Pixie McGeachie (eds), City of Burnaby, 2002, British Columbian Studies Journal, Winter, 2004.
  • Our Place: Indigenous Australia Now, (exhibition catalogue), Museum Victoria and the Powerhouse Museum, selected curatorial entries 2004.
  • Penelope Edmonds, two catalogue entries 'The Le Souef Box' and 'The Proclamation Board', Treasures of the Museum, Victoria, Museum Victoria, 2004 ISBN 0 957747152

Affiliations and Memberships

  • Executive Member, Australian Historical Association (AHA)
  • Honorary Fellow, Indigenous Cultures Department, Museum Victoria, Melbourne.
  • Associate Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of the Emotions, (2013).
  • Member of the editorial board of the new journal Settler Colonial Studies http://ojs.lib.swin.edu.au/index.php/settlercolonialstudies
  • Member Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand (ACSANZ)

Grants and Awards

  • 2012  Mary Bennett Prize, Australian Womens' History Network for 'The Intimate, Urbanising Frontier: 'Native Camps', Gender Relations and Settler-Colonialism's Violent Array of Spaces Around Early Melbourne', Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity, (Palgrave UK, 2010)
  • ARC Future Fellowship (2012-2015), Reform in the Antipodes: Quaker Humanitarians, Imperial Journeys and Early Histories of Human Rights,  (ARC funding $590,205)
  • Publication Support Grant, for the publication of Urbanizing Frontiers from the International Council for Canadian Studies (ICCS), 2009, ($CA 12,000)
  • ARC Linkage Grant LP0776803 Conciliation Narratives and the Historical Imagination in British Pacific Rim Settler Societies (2008-2011), with Partners Museum Victoria, National Museum of Australia, and Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2007, (ARC funding $248, 509).

Current Research

Reform in the Antipodes: Quaker Humanitarians, Imperial Journeys and Early Histories of Human Rights, (2012-2015), ARC Future Fellowship funding $590,205.

Reform in the Antipodes adds an important new chapter to the history of human rights by examining Quaker humanitarian tours to the antipodean colonies of Australia, Mauritius, and the Cape Colony, which led to major imperial reforms in the treatment of slaves, indigenous peoples, convicts and indentured labourers in the British Empire.Using innovative approaches on transnational social movements and networks of empire, it will consider the antipodean colonies though the lens of Quaker humanitarianism and political reform. The project outcomes will be trans-issue and transnational: humanitarian discourses concerning the management of slaves, indigenous peoples, convicts and indentured labourers, which are usually studied in isolation will be considered as interconnected, while for the first time the antipodean colonies will be integrated into histories of trans-Atlantic Quaker reform and re-situated within internationalist debates.

 

Conciliation Narratives and the Historical Imagination in British Pacific Rim Settler Societies (2008-2011), ARC Linkage Grant LP0776803 with Partners Museum Victoria, National Museum of Australia, and Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2007, ARC funding $248, 509.

This multidisciplinary project, with Chief Investigators Professors Kate Darian-Smith and Dr. Julie Evans (University of Melbourne) aims to historicise and explore conciliation events between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the British settler colonies of the Pacific Rim including Van Diemen's Land, Victoria, NSW, New Zealand and British Columbia.  Ideas of 'conciliation' between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Britain's Pacific settler societies, including the signing of treaties, have been the subject of much official, legal, and policy debate. However, there has been less scholarly attention paid to the ways that these settler societies have understood the role conciliation incidents have played in the evolution of their own distinctive histories, and in particular how these narratives have circulated within the popular historical imagination, where their cultural meanings have been reworked over time and expressed in forms of public history-making such as re-enactments and centenary commemorations, and in material cultural heritage.

 

Comparative and Transnational Colonial Histories

Urbanizing Frontiers: Settler and Indigenous Peoples in Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010) is both comparative and transnational and examines the biopolitics of two Pacific and nominally white British colonies. It examines race, mixed relations, segregation and the cofashioning of racialised bodies and spaces in settler-colonial cities of Victoria, southeastern Australia and British Columbia on Canadaâs Northwest Pacific Coast, and envisages such places as key sites within a network of plural British colonial modernities of the 19th c. Pacific Rim.

Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity(Basingstoke: Palgrave UK, 2010) co-edited with Dr. Tracey Banivanua Mar (La Trobe University), interrogates the distinctive processes of settler colonialism in the making of racial, legal and cultural spaces, and especially considers identity, frontiers, and indigenous agency. The book looks across Australia, USA, Canada, New Zealand, and also considers antipodean colonial space in Antarctica, Chile and Argentina.

  

Recent Presentations and Professional Activities

2013

  • Paper, 'Governor Arthur's Proclamation boards to the Aborigines:  'Empire's Humanitarian Handshake and the anatomy of a transcolonial idea', Colonial Objects Conference, Centre for Research on Colonial Culture, University of Otago, Dunedin, 11-13 February, 2013.

2012

  • Invited Paper, 'Surely this is the African slave trade in miniature': Sealers, Aboriginal Women and Humanitarian Anti-slavery Discourse in the Bass Strait Islands', Anti-slavery, Humanitarianism and Their Legacies, specialist workshop convened by Assoc. Professor Fiona Paisley, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Dec. 2012.
  • Invited Paper, 'Crisis in Communication? The not so dismal story of Australian public history', Crises in Australian and Tasmanian history. Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies conference, University of Tasmania, 15 Sept. 2012.
  • Paper, 'Travelling 'Under Concern': Quaker Humanitarians, Antipodean Journeys and Colonial Connectionsâ, Australian Historical Association conference, University of South Australia, Adelaide, July 9-13, 2012.
  • Paper, 'The Le Souëf Box: Reflections on Imperial Nostalgia, Material Culture, and Exhibitionary Practice in Colonial Victoria', Curating Culture, Centre for Colonialism and its Aftermath (CAIA) Winter Symposium, Launceston, 20-22 June, 2012
  • Invited Speaker, 'Conciliation, trust and violence: Empire's humanitarian handshake and the anatomy of a transcolonial idea', Emotions and Empire Workshop, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion, University of Melbourne, March 16, 2012. 

2011

  • Co-convenor, 2-day symposium, 'Conflict and Conciliation Across Empires: Objects and Performances in Historical Perspective, The University of Melbourne and Museum Victoria Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre, University of Melbourne, ARC Linkage supported conference, University of Melbourne, Nov. 17-18, 2011.
  • Paper, 'Dressing Up in the Settler Nation: Aotearoa New Zealand's Waitangi day re-enactments, 1940 and 2010,' Conflict and Conciliation Across Empires: Objects and Performances in Historical Perspective, ARC Linkage supported conference, University of Melbourne, Nov. 17-18, 2011.
  • Invited seminar speaker, 'Conciliation, trust and violence: Empire's humanitarian handshake and the anatomy of a transcolonial idea', ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion seminar series, University of Adelaide, 24 Oct. 2011. http://www.emotions.uwa.edu.au/events/collaboratories/conciliation-trust-and-violence
  • Seminar paper, 'Travelling 'Under Concern': Quaker Humanitarians, Antipodean Journeys and Early Histories of Human Rights', Brown Bag Seminar series, Department of History, University of Melbourne, Sept. 8, 2011.
  • Public lecture with Dr. Julie Evans, 'Captain Cook's 'Resolution and Adventure' medals: Possession and Sovereignty Narratives in British Settler Societies of the Pacific Rim', Museum Victoria, Indigenous Cultures History and Culture seminar series, 22 Sept. 2011.
  • Respondent, 'Thinking About Aboriginal Stones: On Antiquity, Collecting and Metonymic Displacement', Hearts and Stones: A Collaboratory on Emotion, Stone and Temporality, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion, University of Melbourne, July 28-30, 2011.
  • Keynote speaker, 'Urbanizing Frontiers: Cities and Indigenous Space', Australian and New Zealand Society of Architectural Historians Conference (ANZSAH), Brisbane, July 8, 2011.
  • Invited Seminar Paper, 'Settlement and Gendered Territorialism: First Nations Women and Mixed Relations in Victoria, British Columbia, 1850s-1880s', Institute of Historical Research, University of London, for the Reconfiguring the British: Nation, Empire, World, 1600-1900 Seminar Series, May 19, 2011.
  • Speaker 'Nuisance, Vagrants, and Wanders': Aboriginal people, town camps, and colonial litigation in the early Melbourne's urban frontier', for the panel 'Crime on the Frontier', Crime in the Colonies, Centre for Colonialism and Its Aftermath (CAIA) Autumn Symposium, Court Room B, Penitentiary Chapel, Campbell Street, Hobart, 15-16 April, 2011.