Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In this paper, historians Victoria Haskins and John Maynard, a Worimi Aboriginal man, will reflect upon the significance and importance of transcultural Indigenous historical research for the twenty-first century, as the founding directors of the Purai Global Indigenous History Centre at the University of Newcastle, NSW. Purai is an Awabakal Aboriginal word meaning “the earth, the world,” and the Centre aims to bring together researchers who integrate Indigenous and transnational approaches. Tracing some of the key themes and methodologies that predominate in settler colonial nations seeking to address ongoing issues around colonization, Indigenous dispossession, and race relations today, we will discuss the tensions between global, regional and local historical scales, and the value and challenges of focusing upon Indigenous mobilities. We argue for the importance of understanding both the larger global and interconnected nature of Indigenous transcultural history, and the local, place-based diversity of Indigenous historical experience, to generating new shared understandings of the persistence of the past in the present.