SSEAC Stories

What exactly is an archive? Who and what are involved in the making and naming of memory projects as archives? What kinds of stories become told through archives, and what stories are muted?

Dr Beth Yahp chats with Dr Thushara Dibley about her work with Malaysia Design Archive, exploring the inner workings of the archive-making process, and inviting us to pay closer attention to the everyday stories of objects around us. This conversation is based on Beth’s participation in a series of Living Archives workshops developed in collaboration with Dr Fiona Lee from the Department of English and Ezrena Marwan and jac sm kee from Malaysia Design Archive.

Originally from Malaysia, Beth Yahp is an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction, whose work has been published in Australia and internationally. Her novel The Crocodile Fury was translated into several languages and her libretto, Moon Spirit Feasting, for composer Liza Lim, won the APRA Award for Best Classical Composition in 2003. Beth was the presenter of ‘Elsewhere’, a program for travellers on ABC Radio National (2010-2011). Her latest publication is a collection of short stories, The Red Pearl and Other Stories (Vagabond Press, 2017). Her travel memoir Eat First, Talk Later (Penguin Random House, 2015) was shortlisted for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Award for Literature (Non-Fiction). Beth teaches Creative Writing at the University of Sydney.

Find out more about Malaysia Design Archive on their website: www.malaysiadesignarchive.org/

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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After decades of economic and political isolation, Myanmar’s rural economy is rapidly shifting from a narrow reliance on low-productivity agriculture, to a more diverse array of farm and non-farm activities. This transition poses urgent policy and scholarly questions for the analysis of inequality, livelihood patterns and food security among the country's rural population. Despite some gains, poverty, landlessness, access to non-farm job opportunities, and food insecurity remain significant challenges for rural Myanmar.

Assistant Professor Mark Vicol caught up with Dr Thushara Dibley to discuss his work investigating the changing relationships between livelihood patterns, land, poverty and food security in Myanmar, arguing that in order to create impactful change, we need to rethink food and nutrition security and adapt to the local context.

Mark Vicol is Assistant Professor in the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University, and an honorary associate of the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney. Mark is a human geographer by training and his research focuses on the intersections between rural livelihoods, smallholder agriculture and patterns of agrarian change in South and Southeast Asia.

You can follow Mark on Twitter @markvicol.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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As a Thai-Australian woman artist, Phaptawan Suwannakudt has long battled prejudice and discrimination relating to her gender. This disappointment with society’s dictates features at the heart of Phaptawan’s artistic practice. Spanning more than four decades, Phaptawan’s rich body of work includes paintings, sculptures and installations, informed by Buddhism, women’s issues and cross-cultural dialogue. Now her talents are on display on the global stage once again, in ‘The National 2021: New Australian Art’ from 26 March to 5 September 2021.

In this episode of SSEAC Stories, Phaptawan Suwannakudt chats to Dr Natali Pearson about identity, power, and placemaking in the space in-between, recounting how she overcame hurdles to her artistic education and practice in what was once a male-dominated art scene, to become one of Australia’s and Thailand’s most prominent female artists.

Phaptawan Suwannakudt (born in Thailand, 1959), is an internationally acclaimed Thai contemporary artist. She trained as a mural painter with her father, the late master Paiboon Suwannakudt, and subsequently led a team of painters that worked extensively in Buddhist temples throughout Thailand in the 1980s-90s. She was also involved in the women artists group ‘Tradisexion’ in 1995, and later in ‘Womanifesto’. Phaptawan relocated to Australia in 1996 where she completed a Master of Visual Arts at the Sydney College of the Arts. She has exhibited extensively in Australia, Thailand and internationally. Most recently, her work was featured in 'Beyond Bliss', the Inaugural Bangkok Art Biennale in 2018-2019, as well as in the 2020 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts in Melbourne, Australia. Many of her works are held in public and private collections locally and overseas, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Thailand, the National Gallery Singapore, and the Thai Embassy in Paris, among others. You can find more information about Phaptawan Suwannakudt on her website: phaptawansuwannakudt.com/.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Around the world, orangutans are widely recognised as an iconic species for environmental and wildlife conservation efforts. The rainforest in the Malaysian state of Sarawak is one of last remaining habitats of the nearly extinct Bornean orangutan. While conservation efforts have made the region a top priority for protecting orangutans, these efforts often sideline the indigenous peoples who live along the great apes.

Dr June Rubis speaks with Dr Natali Pearson about her lifelong work in orangutan conservation, and reflects on mainstream conservation narratives, politics, and power relations around orangutan conservation in Sarawak and elsewhere in Borneo. In describing the more-than-human relations that link the indigenous Iban people and endangered orangutans, Dr Rubis encourages us to rethink our relationship to the environment, and to learn from indigenous knowledge to decolonise conservation and land management practices.

June Rubis is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Indigenous Environmental Studies of the Sydney Environmental Institute at the University of Sydney. She researches Indigenous conservation and land management practices from a decolonial perspective, with a particular focus on Malaysian Borneo. Her recent project has focused on the human-environment and human-animal relationships within the multi-scalar forces of conservation in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. She is a former conservation biologist, with twelve years of conservation fieldwork and Indigenous rights issues in Borneo (both Malaysian and Indonesian Borneo), and was born and raised in Sarawak. She is currently the co-chair of "Documenting Territories of Life" programme with the ICCA (Indigenous Communities Conserved Areas) consortium.

You can follow June on Twitter @JuneRubis.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here.

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Since it first arrived in Asia in 2018, African swine fever virus has caused a devastating pandemic resulting in more than a quarter of the global pig population being killed by this disease. As there is currently no vaccine or treatment for this disease, which has a nearly 100% mortality rate in infected pigs, a strong focus has been placed on preventative biosecurity measures. But this strategy has proved particularly challenging in Timor-Leste, where pigs often roam freely around villages.

In this episode, Associate Professor Paul Hick speaks to Dr Thushara Dibley about his work reducing the impact of African swine fever and other animal diseases on local livelihoods in Timor-Leste.

Paul Hick is an Associate Professor in veterinary virology at the Sydney School of Veterinary Science. Paul’s skills in field epidemiology and laboratory tests for animal disease are used to provide better understanding of complex multifactorial diseases across a range of farming systems. The goal is to reduce the burden of disease and promote ethical and sustainable animal production.

Paul has 10 years’ experience studying disease in aquaculture in Indonesia where he aimed to help adapt to a food secure future through improved health, welfare and production of aquatic animals. Recently he has embarked on the new challenge of improving disease surveillance in Timor-Leste. A focus of these activities will be capacity building of the veterinary service to support diagnosis of disease and provide preventative advice for improved health, welfare and production.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here.

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Financial inclusion has been one of the most prominent issues on the international development agenda in recent years, as access to payments, remittances, credit, savings and insurance services have been shown to improve economic resilience and livelihoods. While bank account access remains low in many developing countries, widespread access to mobile phones is providing a platform to push financial access even into remote areas. The Covid-19 pandemic has only reinforced the importance of digital finance, which provides a safe, socially-distanced means to transact, including for distribution of social assistance transfers. In this episode, Dr Russell Toth spoke to Dr Thushara Dibley about his work on digital finance schemes and how owning a mobile phone can help lift people out of poverty in Myanmar.

Russell Toth is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Economics at the University of Sydney. He is a development microeconomist, focusing on the development of the private sector in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, on topics such as financial systems, digitisation, agricultural value chains, and small and medium enterprises. His research often involves partnering with private and public sector organisations to evaluate programs intended to improve private sector development outcomes. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University.

You can follow Russell on Twitter @russell_toth.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here.

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Long praised for their splendid plumage, birds of paradise are a rare sight only to be found in the remote rainforests of New Guinea and associated islands. They are among the earliest animals to have the inglorious honour of obtaining legal protection against their trade. While the trade in the species is more than a millennium old, it was only in the late 19th century that globalisation pushed some bird of paradise species towards extinction.

In this episode, Jude Philp, Senior Curator at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, explores the dark history of the trade in birds of paradise, the destruction of their habitat, and the ways in which local people have tried to protect the species.

About Jude Philp: As Senior Curator of the Macleay Collections at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, Jude Philp is interested in stimulating research into the collections and increasing the purposefulness of museum holdings through exhibition, research, and events. Jude's current research is in the world of 'British New Guinea' and the 19th-century practice of natural history for museums. She recently published Recording Kastom: Alfred Haddon’s Journals from the Torres Strait and New Guinea, 1888 and 1898 (2020, Sydney University Press) in collaboration with Anita Herle. In 2021, Jude will publish a chapter entitled ‘Circulations of Paradise (or How to Use a Specimen to Best Personal Advantage)’, in the book Mobile Museums: Collections in Circulation (2021, University College London Press, edited by Felix Driver, Mark Nesbitt, and Caroline Cornish).

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here.

Dr Natali Pearson is Curriculum Coordinator at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the protection, management and interpretation of underwater cultural heritage in Southeast Asia.

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COVID-19 has had such far-reaching impacts that it can be, and has been, studied from the perspective of almost any academic discipline. For geographers, the ways in which COVID-19 affects place, space and movement is particularly consequential. It is at once a global phenomenon, yet it also ties us to localities in a way not experienced for a very long time in our increasingly mobile and interconnected world.

In Southeast Asia, the impact of COVID-19 has been particularly severe for migrant workers, who have found themselves un- or under-employed and sometimes stranded as economic activity has shut down and borders have closed. Professor Hirsch is part of a wide-ranging review of the implications of COVID-19 for migrant workers across the Asia-Pacific region, bringing in four main dimensions: what does it mean in terms of governance/rights, gender, public health and the environment?

On the occasion of International Migrants Day on 18 December, Professor Philip Hirsch spoke to Dr Natali Pearson about the impact that the pandemic has had on migrant workers in mainland Southeast Asia, and how we can better protect this vulnerable community.

Philip Hirsch is Emeritus Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sydney, where he taught from 1987 to 2017. He has written extensively on environment, development, natural resource governance and agrarian change in the Mekong Region. He is now based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Books published over the past 10 years include the (edited) “Handbook of the Environment in Southeast Asia” (Routledge 2017), (co-authored) “The Mekong: A socio-legal approach to river basin development” (Earthscan 2016), (co-authored) "Powers of Exclusion: Land dilemmas in Southeast Asia" (NUS Press and Hawaii University Press 2011) and (co-edited) "Tracks and Traces: Thailand and the work of Andrew Turton" (Amsterdam University Press 2010). In 2021, University of Washington Press will publish his co-edited, “Turning land into capital: development and dispossession in the Mekong Region”. Professor Hirsch is fluent in Thai and Lao, speaks intermediate Vietnamese and elementary Khmer.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here.

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As environmental emergencies go, the explosion of plastic waste is right up there. With global plastic production exceeding 300 million tonnes each year, the world has generally looked at it as an unsightly menace to be removed, but Professor Thomas Maschmeyer has gone beyond that idea. His work challenges our perceptions of waste, by turning plastic into an asset that people actively seek out to recycle because it can make them money. What he created might just clean up the planet and lift people out of poverty.

Professor Thomas Maschmeyer speaks to Dr Thushara Dibley about his ground-breaking work developing catalytic technology that can recycle any kind of plastic and turn it into a valuable resource, and how he is helping Timor-Leste become the world's first plastics-neutral country.

Professor Thomas Maschmeyer is Founding and Executive Chairman of Gelion Technologies (2015), Co-Founder of Licella Holdings (2007) and inventor of its Cat-HTRTM technology. He is also the Principle Technology Consultant for Cat-HTR licensee’s Mura Technologies and RenewELP. In 2001 he was one of the founding Professors of Avantium, a Dutch High-tech company. Most recently he was awarded Prime Minister’s Prize for Innovation (2020) – Australia’s top prize in the field.

He concurrently holds the position of Professor of Chemistry at the University of Sydney, where he established and leads the Laboratory of Advanced Catalysis for Sustainability and served as Founding Director of the $150m University of Sydney Nano Institute (2015–2018). In 2011 he was elected youngest Foreign Member of the Academia Europea as well as Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) and, in 2014, of the Royal Society of NSW. In 2019 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the Universities of Ca’Foscari Venice and Trieste in recognition of his scientific and societal contributions in chemistry.

He has authored 330+ publications, been cited 13,000+ times, including 24 patents. He serves on the editorial/advisory boards of ten international journals and received many awards, including the Le Févre Prize of the Australian Academy of Sciences (2007), the RACI Applied Research Award (2011), the RACI Weickhardt Medal for Economic Contributions (2012), the RACI R. K. Murphy Medal for Industrial Chemistry (2018) the Eureka Prize for Leadership in Innovation and Science (2018), the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies’ Contribution to Economic Development Award (2019).

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here.

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Globally, breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women, with over 1 million cases detected annually. The disease is particularly worrisome in Vietnam, where breast cancer incidence has more than doubled over the last two decades, making it the leading cancer among Vietnamese women, ahead of cervical and uterine cancers. It has also demonstrated a high level of aggressiveness, with over 80% of breast cancer patients presenting with local or distant metastases, while only 28% of breast cancers in Australia were diagnosed in late stages. Thus mortality rates are twofold higher in Vietnam compared with developed countries. Professor Patrick Brennan talks to Dr Natali Pearson about his decade-long work on improving breast cancer detection in Vietnam.

Professor Patrick Brennan is a leading researcher at the University of Sydney's School of Health Sciences. His research involves exploring novel technologies and techniques that enhance the detection of clinical indicators of disease, whilst minimising risk to the patient. His research has involved most major imaging modalities including X-ray, computerised tomography, ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging, with a particular focus on breast and chest imaging. His research findings have translated into improved diagnosis and management of important disease states such as cancer, musculo-skeletal injury, arthritis and multiple sclerosis.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here.

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