AMplify - Conversations at the Australian Museum

Professor Fred Hollows AC by Gabi Hollows AO (with Sandra Sully)

New Zealand born, UK trained eye surgeon Fred Hollows’ drive to end the injustice of avoidable blindness emerged from a deep commitment to social equality. The economical approach to ophthalmology – focussing on training local surgeons and reducing the cost of lens - which he and his orthoptist wife Gabi developed, has restored sight to more than 2.5 million people. The Fred Hollows Foundation which the couple established in 1992 just six months before Fred died, continues to empower poor and neglected communities across the world.

Recorded in the Hallstrom Theatre at the Australian Museum on 11 June 2019.

Dr Macarena Gomez-Barris - The Occupied Forest

Venture into the cacophonous space of the forest with Macarena Gómez-Barris of the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn USA, as she considers its contested conceptual, indigenous and potentially regenerative narratives.

Recorded in the Hallstrom Theatre at the Australian Museum on 25 June 2019

Live at the AM: Lunchtime Conversation Series - Terry Percival AM, representing CSIRO WLAN by Australian Museum

Live at the AM: Lunchtime Lecture Series 2019: John Maynard On Charles Perkins by Australian Museum

Google Maps began in the spare room of software engineer Noel Gordon’s Sydney apartment in 2003. Today’s instant digital information, directions and street views of almost anywhere on earth has changed our lives, our understanding of the world and how we move and interact within it.

Noel Gordon is in conversation with Australian Museum Director and CEO Kim MCKay.

Recorded at the Australian Museum in the Hailstorm Theatre on the 25 September 2018.

Australian Museum Director and CEO Kim McKay AO has led the transformation of the nation’s first museum into one of the world's pre-eminent natural history and cultural institutions. Kim also co-founded the Clean Up Australia and Clean Up the World campaigns, and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to the environment and the community. She offers reflections on the historic, scientific and cultural significance of the newly-restored Westpac Long Gallery, the nation’s first gallery, and its collection of treasures.

Kim McKay is in conversation with Tracey Holmes, recorded at the Hailstorm Theatre at the Australian Museum on 18 September 2018.

Dick Smith in conversation with Kim McKay as part of the Australian Museum Lunchtime Lecture series.

Sydney born Dick Smith is an adventurer, businessman, entrepreneur, philanthropist, political activist and 1986 Australian of the Year. The founder of Dick Smith Electronics became a household name, launching Australian Geographic magazine in 1984 to sponsor adventure and inspire a love of nature. His own groundbreaking aviation feats include a solo helicopter flight around the world and to the North Pole, as well as a non-stop balloon trip across Australia.

Recorded 11 September 2019 in the Hallstorm Theatre at the Australian Museum.

This talk took place on Tuesday 21 May 2019 in the Hallstrom Theatre as the first installment of the Australian Museum's Lunchtime Conversation Series.

Author Thomas Keneally in conversation with Australian Museum Director & CEO, Kim McKay

One of our most popular and prolific authors, Thomas Keneally has produced more than forty novels, screenplays, memoirs and non-fiction. His embrace of challenging themes and social justice is evident in Bring Larks and Heroes, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Schindler’s Ark, which won the Booker Prize, and was made into the Academy Award winning film Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg.

This talk was presented on 14 May 2019 as part of the Australian Museum's HumanNature series.

HumanNature Series: Environmental justice and the power of the Pacific word

Experience the award-winning "eco-poetry" of Craig Santos Perez from the University of Hawaiʻi, as he reflects on the vital role of Pacific literature in the environmental movements of Oceania.

The Pacific region is at the front line of Climate Change. Can literature play a significant role in raising awareness and inspiring activism? Join award-winning Craig Santos Perez as he reflects on the vital role of Pacific literature and poetry in environmental justice movements across the region.

ABOUT HUMANNATURE

In this landmark series of talks, the Australian Museum is proud to host a stellar line up of leading Australian and international scholars. They will share with us their insights from history, literature, philosophy, anthropology and art to examine the significant interplay between the humanities and the environmental crisis we face today, including climate change, biodiversity loss and a wide range of other issues.

ABOUT CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ

Craig Santos Perez is an associate professor at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, where he teaches Pacific literature and eco-poetry. The author of four collections of poetry, and co-editor of four anthologies, he is the first Pacific Islander to receive the American Book Award, and first Micronesian to receive the highest literary award from the Hawaiʻi Literary Arts Council. Dr Santos Perez has lectured and performed at the IUCN World Conservation Congress, the UNESCO Ocean Literacy conference, the Indigenous Book Festival, the Festival of Pacific Arts and the International Conference on Environmental Futures.

This talk was presented as part of the Australian Museum's HumanNature series on 30 April 2019.

HumanNature Series: Is green the new white?

Lesley Green (University of Cape Town) considers how environmentalism squares with anti-racism and social justice in the sourcing of `green’ commodities from the sands of South Africa.

Green explores the impact of extracting titanium dioxide, used to produce lighter spectacles, more fuel-efficient airplane parts, whiter paper and food, on the coastal settlements of Xolobeni and Lutzville. Both villages are embroiled in a struggle with the same Australian mining company as they try to sustain a living from the land. Green unravels the categorical jiu jitsu of the South African Anthropocene - where the economy is limited to finance; the hope of political liberation becomes a belief in trickle-downs from market neoliberalism, and environmentalists, in opposing extractivism, become white capitalists opposing black economic empowerment. Is green, she asks, the new white?

ABOUT HUMANNATURE

In this landmark series of talks, the Australian Museum is proud to host a stellar line up of leading Australian and international scholars. They will share with us their insights from history, literature, philosophy, anthropology and art to examine the significant interplay between the humanities and the environmental crisis we face today, including climate change, biodiversity loss and a wide range of other issues.

ABOUT LESLEY GREEN

Lesley Green is Professor of Anthropology and founding Director of Environmental Humanities South at the University of Cape Town. A Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2018, former Rockefeller Humanities Fellow at the Smithsonian and Mandela Fellow at Harvard, her research focuses on science and democracy in a time of climate change in South Africa.

Professor Green is the author of Rock | Water | Life: Ecology and Humanities for a Decolonising South Africa (2019), editor of Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge (2013) and co-author of Knowing the Day, Knowing the World: Engaging Amerindian Thought in Public Archaeology (2013).