UC EVENTS

Speaker: Tracy Ireland and Ashley van den Heuvel

Date\Time: Thursday 17 April 2025, 12:30-13:30

Location: Building 1 Level A Room 1A21, University of Canberra (NB Room 1a21 is accessed from the foyer joining Building 1 and Mizzuna café); 

or Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/95029077504

Abstract

While historical and cultural analyses of Australia’s ‘atomic years’ are growing, the materiality of these activities, and their environmental and landscape signatures, has not yet received similar attention. Vast infrastructure sites, artefacts, and landscapes of atomic heritage, many now abandoned and deteriorating, await meaningful archaeological, material-culture and heritage analyses. Our ARC Linkage project, Nuclear Nation, partnering with the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), is setting out to explore Australia’s national engagement with nuclear science and technologies through its material culture and physical infrastructure—from early 20th century radium mining through to contemporary military, industrial, medical, and scientific applications. 

Nuclear Nation proposes a multi-scalar methodology which juxtaposes the sweeping scale of these national and transnational data, digitally visualising the geographies of nuclear heritage, against the granularity of object and archival collections, applying contemporary archaeology approaches to derive object stories, alongside First Nations researchers.

All are welcome!

Bio

Tracy Ireland is an archaeologist and heritage practitioner, Professorof Cultural Heritage, and Lead CI of the Nuclear Nation and the Everyday Heritage Linkage Projects. Tracy’s work on heritage ethics, significance and values, and on ‘everyday heritage’, is internationally recognized for its impact on policy and practice.

Ashley van den Heuvel is a lecturer in Culture and Heritage at the University of Canberra. Through her mother, she is descended from Walbunja and other community groups from the Far South Coast of NSW. After majoring in anthropology and psychology, she completed a Master of Liberal Arts (Visual Culture Research) (Research), at the Australian National University. Her PhD, under the Heritage of the Air Australian Research Council (ARC) project, looks at the aviation heritage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people through the lens of and museum and archival collections and is titled ‘Flight across Country’.

Supports and fundings: ARC Linkage Funds

The Culture and Creativity Seminar Series is hosted by the Centre for Cultural and Creative Research (CCCR), Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra. To discover upcoming seminars, please follow us on Facebook @uccccr, or Instagram and Twitter @uc_cccr. Alternatively, join our mailing list by emailing cccr@canberra.edu.au.

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