Australian Identity Through Cultural Materials Conservation

Venue: Public Lecture Theatre, Old Arts Public Lecture Theatre

Presenters: Professor Robyn Sloggett AM

The material world surrounds us: feeding our senses, our imagination and our curiosity. We inherit and we create cultural and scientific records that help us make sense of this world. Cultural materials conservation employs materiality to understand and protect these records, integrating knowledge acquired in the sciences and the humanities with that developed by cultural knowledge holders and practitioners. Conservation studies provide unique understandings of how cultural knowledge, disciplinary knowledge and the materiality that surrounds us, can come together to shed light on significant questions of knowledge and identity.

In this lecture Professor Robyn Sloggett explores the valuable contribution that cultural materials conservation makes to the continual quest to understand our place in the world. She examines how conservation studies expand our understanding of Australia's diverse epistemological traditions and their significance in contemporary Australian life and expand opportunities for economic innovation, referencing Australia's rich, ancient and continuous Indigenous knowledge, the disciplinary genealogy of the Western history of ideas, and our place in the Asia-Pacific region.

Her lecture concludes by addressing the question: Without a national strategy for the preservation of its cultural and scientific record is Australia risking identity amnesia?

Professor Robyn Sloggett AM is Director of the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation at the University of Melbourne.

from
https://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/6863-australian-identity-through-cultural-materials-conservation