Professor Penny Edmonds

Professor Penny Edmonds has qualifications in history and heritage studies, including a BAppSc in Heritage Studies, Univeristy of Canberra, a Postgraduate Diploma (History) and a PhD (History) from the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne. Her research is distinguished by over two decades of creative and interdisciplinary work in the areas of British empire and colonialism, Indigenous and settler histories, reconciliation, humanitarianism, transnational Australian and Pacific-region histories across Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and North America.

Website:

The website 'Eyewitness to Empire - Reform in the Antipodes' is based on Penny's ARC Future Fellowship which examines the early histories of  humanitarianism and colonialism in the Antipodes, tracing three key Quaker journeys of investigation to Australia, South Africa and the Pacific in the 19th century.

https://eyewitnesstoempire.com/

Books:

Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings  (Palgrave UK Cambridge Imperial and Postcolonial Series, 2016) examines the performative life of reconciliation and its discontents in settler societies. Taking case studies from the Pacific settler nations USA, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand the book traces reconciliation's past and present in settler states, a contested political process which is especially salient where formal decolonisation cannot occur. 

The study explores the affective refoundings of the settler state and reimaginings of its alternatives and, in particular, the way the past is creatively reworked and mobilized in the name of social transformation within a new global paradigm of reconciliation and the 'age of apology'. In search of a new emancipatory politics, it takes particular account of Indigenous-led refutations or reworkings of consensus politics in public culture that directly confront the ongoing structural legacy of colonial violence. Settler Colonialism and (Re)Conciliation was shortlisted for the University of Melbourne’s esteemed 2017 Ernest Scott Prize for best book in Australian and New Zealand colonial history.

‘Part exposé and part archive, this book is not afraid to explore the tensions between the enduring promise of reconciliation as a route towards cultural rapprochement and its intractable limits as a mode of postcolonial justice ... Edmonds’ deft analysis of performance as fundamental to the negotiation process reveals an emerging trans-indigenous movement geared to change not only how we think about reconciliation, but also, and more importantly, how we go about doing it.’ - Professor Helen Gilbert, Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research, Royal Holloway, University of London.

‘[In this] searching and deeply researched meditation on the 'performative life of reconciliation and its discontents in settler societies' … [Edmonds] is very much aware of the emotional and moral questions raised by frontier violence and reflecting on their contemporary resonances … This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the transformative potential (and limitations) of reconciliation movements internationally … Few scholars writing on reconciliation have managed to express the dilemmas and tensions inherent to the process as succinctly as Penny Edmonds.' - Professor of History Mark McKenna, University Of Sydney, Journal of Australian Studies, 42:3.

Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities  (University of British Columbia Press, 2010)

Frontiers were not confined to the bush, backwoods, or borderlands. Towns and cities at the farthest reaches of empire were crucial to the settler colonial project. Yet the experiences of Indigenous peoples in these urban frontiers have been overshadowed by triumphant narratives of progress. Inspired by the spatial turn and critical race studies Urbanizing Frontiers examines the comparative politics of race, space, gender and segregation, and the often violent biopolitics of settler colonialism in Canada and Australia. It explores the lives of Indigenous peoples and settlers in two Pacific Rim cities – Victoria, British Columbia, and Melbourne, Australia. Built on Indigenous lands and overtaken by gold rushes, these cities emerged between 1835 and 1871 in significantly different locations, yet both became cross-cultural and segregated sites of empire. This innovative study traces how these spaces, and the bodies in them, were transformed, sometimes in violent ways, creating new spaces and new polities. ‘Highly commended’ for First History Book, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, 2010. 

‘Taking as her case studies Victoria on Canada’s west coast and Melbourne, Australia, Edmonds makes a compelling case for the ways in which urban and Indigenous histories are deeply entwined … the urban stories she tells are rich, complex, and densely critical ... Urbanizing Frontiers is an outstanding contribution to the nascent literature on urban colonialism and indigenous peoples.’ 

– Professor Coll Thrush, University of British Columbia, Pacific Historical Review, 2011

‘An excellent work of comparative colonial history ... the casual reader of British Columbian or Australian history as well as the academic of urban studies, policy, urban geography, colonial, gender and race history should consider reading this book.' –  Professor Omeasoo Butt, University of Saskatchewan, Canadian Journal of History / Annales canadiennes d'histoire, Vol. XLVlI, Autumn/automne 2012

‘Urbanizing Frontiers is a fine example of comparative colonial history ...[it shows] rich and compelling evidence and insightful analysis with reference to postcolonial, feminist and spatial theory ... a sophisticated monograph, carefully crafted and impressive in scope. It deserves a wide readership in Indigenous studies, colonial history, urban history and historical geography, while also making an important and timely contribution to both Australian and Canadian history.'

– Professor Frances Steel, University of Otago, Aboriginal History, Vol 35, 2011

Edited Collections:

Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim, co-edited collection with Amanda Nettelbeck, (Palgrave UK, Cambridge Imperial and Postcolonial Series), 2018.

Other co-edited volumes include the landmark Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity (Palgrave, 2010) with Tracey Banivanua-Mar, and Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim (Routledge Series in Cultural History, 2015) with Kate Darian-Smith.

Special Issues:

'Uncanny Objects in the Anthropocene' (co-edited with H.Stark and K.Schlunke) Australian Humanities Review, special issue 63 (2018), http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2018/12/01 

This issue brings together things which are dead and/or alive, human and/or nonhuman, sensate and/or insensate, fantastical and/or historical, natural and/or cultural, spectacular and/or mundane. These objects are here re-enlivened in order to expose alternative ways of knowing the past, understanding this anthropocentric present, and imagining the role of humans in shaping environmental futures. In this way, the collection interrogates present and future problems—species mass-extinction, climate change, anthropogenic environmental impact—in relation to how the past is re-imagined, interpreted, commemorated, subverted and displayed. 

'Empire, humanitarianism and violence in the colonies', eds. P. Edmonds and A. Johnston, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 17.1  (2016) https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/33312

Australian Research Council funded grants:

2024-2028 ‘The Great Exhibitions and their Lost Indigenous Objects’ IN240100030 Indigenous Discovery Project team $854,591.00
Lead CI Gaye Sculthorpe.

This project will rediscover the Australian Indigenous objects sent overseas to the Great Exhibitions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such objects acted as powerful forms of cultural, political and economic display, and a form of imperial and colonial projection. It will excavate the hidden histories of Indigenous people involved in these events and the many objects lost to Australia. Through collaborative work at community dialogues, the project will repatriate knowledge and remake connections between objects, museums, and Indigenous people. In doing so, it will bring contemporary Indigenous perspectives to global attention, generate new exhibition possibilities and influence international museum practice.

2022 LE230100079 Time Layered Cultural Map of Australia: Advanced Techniques and Big Data $472,543. Emeritus Prof Hugh Craig (Lead – University of Newcastle), Prof Paul Arthur; Prof Penny Edmonds, Prof Ning Gu; Prof Rosalind Smith; Prof Andrew May, Prof H. Maxwell-Stewart, Prof Martin Gibbs, Prof Catharine Coleborne, Emeritus Prof Lyndall Ryan, A/ ProfBill Palmer, Dr Julie Nichols; A/Prof Tully Barnett; Dr Julieanne Lamond.

2021- 2024 ARC SRI ''Slow' Digitisation, Community Heritage and the Objects of Martindale Hall.' SR200200900. $277,224.  Lead CI Prof Penny Edmonds, CI A/Prof Jane Haggis, CI A/Prof Tully Barnett, CI Prof. Heather Burke, CI Prof. CI Prof, Claire Smith, Dr Ania Kotarba (all Flinders University), Emeritus Prof Margaret Allen (University of Adelaide), and Ngadjuri Elders Heritage and Land Care Council incorporated.

This project will focus on a more sustainable model for the digital preservation of historically significant objects, stories and places at Martindale Hall and elsewhere in the Clare Valley. We expect to develop a new method that embeds digitisation in historical and cultural knowledge and assists organisations to make better decisions about when and how to digitise. The long term benefits include improved public access to significant cultural heritage assets, return on investment for local history organisations, and protection of heritage by the many communities that care for them.

2016 - 2021 ARC Discovery Project, ‘Intimacy and Violence on the Anglo Pacific Rim 1830-1930’. DP 150100914. $500,037. Lead CI L. Ryan L, CI A.Nettlebeck A, CI P.Edmonds P, CI V. Haskins, CI A. Johnston, PI A.Wanhalla

Violence and Intimacy were critically intertwined at all stages of the settler colonial encounter, and together they were fundamental to the shaping of modern settler societies. Yet we know surprisingly little of how they were connected. This project seeks to interrogate and extend understandings of the nexus between violence and intimacy, and its centrality to the formation of settler colonial economies that were deeply dependent on the everyday proximity of Indigenous and settler workers on the Anglo Pacific Rim 1830-1930.

2014–2018 ARC Linkage Project  ‘Treating Criminals from Shore to Ship: Public Health, Humanitarianism and Convict Transportation’. LP 140100623 CI H. Maxwell-Stewart, CI P. Edmonds, PI S.Thomas

2012-2017 ARC Future Fellowship FT110100572 ‘Reform in the Antipodes: Quaker Humanitarians, Imperial Journeys and Early Histories of Human Rights’. Lead CI Penny Edmonds. This project examines the early histories of colonialism and human rights in the Antipodes, tracing three key Quaker journeys of investigation to Australia, South Africa and the Pacific in the 19th century. The project seeks to resituate important Australian and antipodean histories back into the larger, global story of human rights. Located at the intersection of British humanitarianism, antislavery thought, transcolonial travel, and addressing the salient and political questions of convictism, slavery and the expropriation of Indigenous peoples in the colonies, this rich study is conducted with international collaborators Pro. Zoe Laidlaw, then at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Prof Elizabeth Elbourne, Mc Gill University, Canada. This project was awarded two Elite PhD scholarships. 

2008–2011 ARC Linkage Project 'Conciliation Narratives and the Historical Imagination in British Pacific Rim Settler Societies'. LP0776803. CIs K. Darian Smith, J.Evans, APDI P. Edmonds, PI A.Smith.  This project deepens Australian understandings of the negotiated forms of conciliation that occurred between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the colonial period to present. By comparing these with conciliation events in New Zealand and British Columbia, the Australian experience is positioned within the global context of the Pacific Rim. The project's innovative approach unites historical and legal research with material culture of extraordinary heritage significance held by three major national collecting institutions (partner organisations) and others. Among the outcomes are scholarly publications, international symposia, publicly assessable web-based and educational materials, a travelling exhibition, and professional training.