What initially drew you to your field of study?
I’ve long been drawn to the stories Australia doesn’t always tell about itself—histories of colonisation, race relations, and cross-cultural encounters that sit just beneath the surface of national narratives. Like many non-Indigenous Australians, these histories are not abstract, but difficult, powerful and embodied and are threaded though my own family story too.
Early in my career, I worked in museums and heritage. In the 1990s, I was involved in the Roving Curator program at Museum Victoria. That work took me across Victoria, collaborating with Indigenous curators and communities in Kulin Keeping Places and cultural centres. I learned a great deal. I was also lucky to work on the first Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre exhibition at Melbourne Museum, which opened in 2000. Being part of that team was both a privilege and a turning point. It led me back to university, where I began studying postcolonial history at the University of Melbourne. I was hooked. That path eventually led to a PhD and a career moving between universities and museums—spaces where research meets public history.
What role do the social sciences play in your work?
I often tell my students: history should never be the place where theory goes to die! History has always been part of the social sciences, and my work has certainly been shaped by fields like critical race theory, feminist sociology, southern theory, and political theory.
I’m particularly interested in how ideas and social movements travel across borders. For example, I’ve written about the #BlackLivesMatter protests and travelling memory across the US, UK and Australia, showing how histories of slavery and colonisation coalesce and continue to resonate in the present.
The social sciences give us the tools to connect past and present—to understand not just what happened, but why it matters now.
What are you most proud of?
One of the most meaningful experiences of my career came during my time in Tasmania, when I served on the board of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. In 2021, the museum delivered a landmark apology to Tasmanian Aboriginal people. It was the first of its kind by any state or federal museum in Australia.
In writing the initial draft and thinking through the fraught settler politics and emotions of ‘sorry’, my book Settler Colonialism and Reconciliation (2016) assisted me a great deal. It was a daunting task: how do you begin to apologise for more than 200 years of colonising and disrespectful collecting practices, and institutional harm? The process was collaborative, carefully workshopped, and legally reviewed, but it was also very emotional.
We approached it as a form of ritual, an act of trust-building, with a commitment to doing things differently in the future. Reconciliation in settler societies will always be an imperfect process, and apologies cannot be an endpoint in themselves. But facing the past offers a new beginning—a way of opening a relationship together. I’m glad that this moment helped shift how museums across Australia think about accountability, reconciliation, and responsibility. We need to see more of it.
What continues to motivate your work?
Much of my work has been to place Australia and the Western Pacific back into the big global debates on empire, colonisation, race, unfreedom and slavery, human rights, reconciliation and matters of redress. Often much of this research comes the northern hemisphere. I’m interested in imperial legacies and postcolonial futures in the Antipodes and Global South, and how people have challenged and shaped alternative futures.
What should your field be doing more of right now?
We need to get better at communicating our work beyond academia. I saw this clearly during my time on the Australian Research Council’s Humanities and Social Sciences panel. Some of the most impactful research wasn’t coming from the most elite universities, but from institutions that were deeply embedded in their communities, such as those working on Indigenous archaeology, history and legal reform, and social change.
The challenge is making sure those stories and their impact reach a broader public audience. There’s extraordinary work being done. We just need to tell those stories more effectively.