Fighting for Peace: Aftermath, Commemoration and Regional Remembrance Conference CFP

11-12 November 2019, Warehouse Clunes Library, Fraser Street, Clunes 

The centenary year of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 provides a fitting moment at which to consider the aftermath and legacy of the Great War. This conference seeks to pull the historiographical lens back from 1914-1918, to help us better understand how the First World War shaped the history of the newly federation Australian nation, and how we live with its legacies still. While Australians extracted from the war a mythology of national birth, they also confronted enormous challenges in the post-war period. The state faced the task of repatriating hundreds of thousands of soldiers and settling them back into a society that had been riven by the bitter conscription debates, industrial unrest and conflict between those who served and those who stayed at home. Communities grieved the loss of 60,000 lives from a population of less than five million people, while they absorbed returned soldiers who had been altered physically and mentally by their experience of war. 

We invite presentations on:

Convenors invite presentations on: Repatriation and the veteran experience; Foreign policy legacies of the war; The experience of Indigenous returned soldiers; Memory and commemoration of the Great War; and Regional legacies of the Great War.  

We are please to confirm Professor Joan Beaumont as keynote speaker and Dr Julie Kimber will lead the keynote plenary panel.

The book launch of The Great War Aftermath and Commemoration by Professor Christina Twomey published by UNSW Press on Thursday 11th of November.

Conference Dinner will be held at Quigley and Clarke, Fraser St, Clunes on Monday night 11 November. The second day includes a morning programme of the conference stream and then the tour of the Kingston Avenue of Honour and an informal farewell.

Conference registration $25 (please note that places are limited due to spatial constraints).

Co-conveners Professor Keir Reeves CRCAH, School of Arts, Federation University Australia and Dr Carolyn Holbrook, ARC DECRA Fellow, Contemporary Histories Research Group, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University.

Please send all enquiries or your conference paper title, abstract, 4 line bio to k.reeves@federation.edu.au and carolyn.holbrook@deakin.edu.au no later than 20 October 2019. Early submissions are welcomed.