Meetings
Our meetings are held on the second Tuesday
5pm for 5.30pm start
March, May, July, September (A.G.M), November.
Great Southern Room
4th Floor - State Library of Western Australia
12 May 2026
Christine Harris - Ghost Towns in Western Australia
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FHWA project
Fabulous fortunes, shocking tragedies, mystery and excitement surrounding Western Australia’s many ghost towns are being unveiled.
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At present, our list of identified ghosts towns has grown to more than 500 with more being identified every day. Of these perhaps the mining towns are the best known. In the 1901 census the largest towns in Western Australia included the mining towns of Day Dawn, Kanowna, Mount Morgan and Nannine, all of which are ghost towns today.
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Western Australia’s size, vast distances, boom and bust and unforgiving climate have left us with many places where once there was life that now has gone or almost gone. What remains may only be a crumbled down structure or grid patterns of a few streets which have now all but gone back to bush.
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The project is providing a richer, more human connection to these places, by giving voice to communities whose stories are often overlooked or marginalised in traditional historical narratives. The project will ensure that these individuals and locations are not forgotten. Information gathered will be published on an online website and index.
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Members and guests are warmly invited to join us before the meeting for drinks and nibbles. ​
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14 July 2026
Charlie Fox - State Hotels Project of the Scaddan Government in the years 1911 - 1916​
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Charlie Fox went to Borden Primary School and Albany High School in the 1960s, then to UWA in the 1960s and 70s. In 1980 he moved to Melbourne, wrote a PH.D and taught at Melbourne University before returning to WA in 1989 to teach at UWA where he taught a wide variety of Australian history units and historiography. After serving as Head of Department for a couple of years he retired in 2011. Thereafter he maintained a connection with UWA, supervising several UWA and Notre Dame University theses, and taught briefly at Notre Dame.
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Charlie is a labour historian who has written and edited three books on the history of work and unemployment in Australia and edited a 1996 book on the history of intellectual disability in WA. In 2017 he was the lead editor and author of the successful book, Radical Perth, Militant Fremantle and for two years ran well attended radical walking tours around Perth and Fremantle until Covid put an end to them. He has written many articles on issues as diverse as social welfare in the Mt Lyell copper mine in Tasmania and Aboriginal people and the Fourteen Powers Referendum of 1944. He has edited the Australian Association for the Study of Labour History, WA Branch journal, The Western Worker for several years.
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Members and guests are warmly invited to join us before the meeting for drinks and nibbles. ​
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8 September 2026
AGM - Kate Gregory; Dr Dean Chan; Catherine Belcher - Researcher in Residence Project funded by Maud Sholl Bequest
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Members and guests are warmly invited to join us before the meeting for drinks and nibbles. ​
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17 November 2026
Jane Lydon - The Abolition of Slavery and Settler Colonisation
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Jane Lydon’s research centres upon Australia’s colonial past and its legacies in the present. In particular, she is concerned with the history of Australia’s engagement with anti-slavery, humanitarianism, and ultimately human rights. She is is a white settler scholar who aims to carry out politically located research that respects Indigenous sovereignty. Her work has contributed to decolonizing heritage and academic practice, with a strong impact on debates regarding colonialism and Australian legacies of imperialism and slavery. Her most recent books include Imperial Emotions: The Politics of Empathy across the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2020) which examines the role of the compassionate emotions in creating relationships spanning the globe, and Anti-slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land? (Routledge, 2021), which explores the anti-slavery movement in imperial scope, arguing that colonization in Australasia facilitated emancipation in the Caribbean, even as abolition powerfully shaped the Settler Revolution. She currently leads the ARC-funded research project ‘Australian Legacies of British Slavery: Capital, Land and Labour’, with Zoë Laidlaw, Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, Alan Lester, Edmond Smith, Elizabeth Anya-Petrivna and Kiera Lindsay (DP240101389, 2024-2026). She has authored seven books, and edited a further fifteen collections (including journal special issues).
https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/persons/jane-lydon/
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Members and guests are warmly invited to join us before the meeting for drinks and nibbles. ​
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