SPEAKERS
Get to know those who are presenting at the Imperialism and Resistance Conference. Click on the speakers' photo below to read their biography.
Keynote Speakers
Session A
Rachel Perkins is a filmmaker with a career spanning documentary, TV drama and movies. Her Australian Aboriginal heritage (Arrente/Kalkadoon) has inspired much of her work including The Australian Wars documentary series which she wrote and directed, and which was commissioned by SBS and produced by Blackfella Films. Other notable documentary work includes First Australians and Blood Brothers. Her fiction work includes TV dramas Total Control, Mystery Road and Redfern Now and the movies Jasper Jones, Mabo, Bran Nue Dae, One Night the Moon and Radiance. She spends her time between her traditional country of Mparntwe/Alice Springs and Sydney.
Rachel Perkins
Rachel Perkins
Session C
Tony Abbott served as the 28th Prime Minister of Australia, from 2013 to 2015, and last year published a bestselling history of Australia. In 2014, and again in 2015, he spent a week running the government from a remote Indigenous community.
He served as the member for Warringah in the Australian parliament between 1994 and 2019. He served in the Howard government cabinet between 2001 and 2007, variously, as Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Minister for Health, and Leader of the House of Representatives.
He has degrees in economics and law from Sydney University and in politics and philosophy from Oxford which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author of The Minimal Monarchy (1995), How to Win the Constitutional War (1997), Battlelines (2009) and, most recently, Australia: A History, which was the bestselling book in its category in 2025.
In 2020 he was appointed as a Companion of the Order of Australia. Currently, he is a director of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, is a visiting fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs and the Danube Institute and is a director of FOX Corporation.
The Hon Tony Abbott
The Hon Tony Abbott
Session E
Professor Henry Reynolds spent much of his career teaching history and politics at James Cook University in Townsville. Local experience and everyday contact with Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders led him to begin a long period of research which greatly influenced his teaching and his published books and articles. After ten years of research all over Australia and in Britain, he published The Other Side of the Frontier which was initially published locally in 1981 but has been in print ever since. Many other books followed, many of them winning literary prizes.
Professor Henry Reynolds
Professor Henry Reynolds
Session B: Histories of contact and conflict in Australia
Kate Fullagar is a professor of History at Australian Catholic University, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and Vice President of the Australian Historical Association. She is a historian of the eighteenth-century world, especially modern empires and Indigenous resistance in North America, Australia, and the Pacific. She is the author of The Savage Visit: New World Peoples and Popular Imperial Culture (UCP, 2012) and the award-winning The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (YUP, 2020). Her most recent book is Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Simon & Schuster, 2023), which was short-listed for the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize, Australian History. She is the co-editor with Michael McDonnell of Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age (Johns Hopkins, 2018).
Professor Kate Fullagar
Professor Kate Fullagar
Mina Murray, co-editor of The Australian Wars (2025), is a Wiradyuri scholar, educator and historian. Her research focuses on reclaiming the history of armed Indigenous resistance by integrating archival research and conventional, historical practice with the knowledge and philosophy of her people. Other recent publications include How to decentre 'whiteness' in historical education (2025) and Bilawi-gibang naabarra-nganhal: wanhamindyarra (2024).
Mina has worked with the ABC, SBS, AFL, the Australian War Memorial and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. She has collaborated with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities on a variety of projects, with a recent focus on education materials and teaching resources. In 2024, Mina collaborated with Wiradyuri Elders and local Aboriginal organisations as part of Dhuluny to produce a suite of Bathurst Wars teaching resources. In 2025, she worked with Banjima people to develop curriculum material to support the release of Yurlu | Country (2025).
Mina Murray
Mina Murray
Dr Nicholas Clements is a historian of Aboriginal Tasmania and frontier conflict. His 2014 book, The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania, explored the motivations and experiences of both colonists and Aboriginal people during that conflict. Nick’s 2021 book, co-authored with Henry Reynolds, was Tongerlongeter: First Nations Leader and Tasmanian War Hero – the story of a remarkable Palawa leader and the incredible resistance he and his people mounted against the invasion of their country. Most recently, he contributed the Tasmanian chapter to The Australian Wars (2025). Nick’s work seeks to humanise history’s actors but also to view them through the moral lenses of their time, rather than those of the twenty-first century.
Dr Nicholas Clements
Dr Nicholas Clements
Session D: Colonial Australians fighting for the British Empire
Dr Tom Richardson is a historian at UNSW Canberra, and the Director of Professional Education in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. After completing his doctorate in 2014 he worked as a researcher on the Official History of Australian Peacekeeping (2015), and as a researcher on the Official History of Australian Operations in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan (2016-2018). He has lectured extensively on counterinsurgency, Australian military history, and special operations. His first book, Destroy and Build: Pacification in Phuoc Tuy, 1966-1972 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017; his second, Soldiers and Bushmen: The Australian Army in South Africa 1899-1902, was published (also by CUP) in 2025. He is currently working on a history of the Australian Army and limited war in Southeast Asia.
Dr Tom Richardson
Dr Tom Richardson
Peter Bakker has been researching and documenting Aboriginal military involvement for two decades. Peter is a leading scholar on the service of Aboriginal men in the South African (Boer) War, and in the AIF’s small War Graves Services unit (First World War). He conducts his research in close collaboration with family descendants to have the life and military service of Aboriginal men recognised through publications, public presentations, photographic exhibitions, grave headstones and war memorials. Peter was the founder of Victoria’s first Aboriginal war memorial, dedicated in Warrnambool on 1 November 2010. He has provided research to the Australian War Memorial, the Shrine of Remembrance (Melbourne) and the Victorian Aboriginal Reconciliation Committee (VARC). In May 2026, he established the Victorian Aboriginal Military Service Roll. Peter is a co-author of Australian War Graves Workers and World War One, (Palgrave, 2019).
Peter Bakker
Peter Bakker
Cam Simpson served with both the Australian and British armies and took part in operations in Northern Ireland, the First Gulf War and escorted the two Australian war artists, Rick Amor and Wendy Sharpe to East Timor. It was during this period that he researched and published Maygar’s Boys, A Biographical history of the 8th Light Horse Regiment AIF, for which he was awarded the Australia Day Medallion and was appointed the research assistant to Dr. Craig Wilcox for his Australians and the war in South Africa, 1899–1902. After leaving the army, he worked as a security manager for over twenty years in the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa while he continued researching South African colonial warfare. He published, either as an author or co-author, eight more books on the subject and received the prestigious ‘Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi Award for Services to the Zulu People’ for his book The Frontier Light Horse in the Anglo-Zulu War 1879. His recent book Moorosi’s Rebellion is a detailed study of the Cape Colony's campaign against the BaPhuthi in 1879 that ran parallel to the Zulu War. He is currently writing about the BaSotho Gun War (1880–81). He is a vice president of the Anglo-Zulu War Historical Society and was one of the speakers at the 2023 Clash of Empires Symposium in London.
Cam Simpson
Cam Simpson
Session F: Colonial society, law and culture
Major Samuel White is the inaugural Army Fellow at the Australian War Memorial. He has served as both a Royal Australian Infantry Corps and an Australian Army Legal Corps officer in a variety of tactical, operational and strategic level postings. Currently, he is OIC Project Greenskin, which looks at strategic story telling of Army military history. He holds a PhD in Law and in 2025 was made both a Fellow of the National Library for Australian legal history, as well as of the Royal Historical Society for his work on cross-cultural understandings of violence.
Major Samuel White
Major Samuel White
Charlotte Macdonald is Professor Emerita at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, and Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi. She has published widely with her most recent book, Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and Across the British Empire (BWB, 2025) winning the Ernest Scott Prize for the best book in Australian and New Zealand History, 2026. She co-led a working group on the History curriculum in New Zealand schools in 2020–2021, and has twice been president of the New Zealand Historical Association. She is a member of the UNESCO Memory of the World Trust, and on the editorial board of the British Journal of Military History.
Professor Charlotte Macdonald
Professor Charlotte Macdonald
Dr Alex Little is an Early Career Researcher, having recently completed his PhD at Australian Catholic University. His forthcoming book, Imperial Advance: Colonial Australian Contributions to British Wars, 1885–1902 (McGill-Queen’s University Press), examines the Australian contribution to British imperial wars of the late Victorian, early Edwardian era. Alex has lectured across a range of topics relating to British history, Australian history, and conflicts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He specialises in transnational histories of the British Empire, and Australian military and naval history.
Dr Alex Little
Dr Alex Little
Session G: Objects that tell stories
Dr Jilda Andrews is a Yuwaalaraay cultural practitioner and the Deputy Director, First Nations at the National Museum of Australia. She has more than 25 years’ experience as a museum professional and leading scholar of museums, anthropology and cultural futures.
Jilda has worked extensively within the galleries, libraries, archives and museums sector in public-facing audience, learning and exhibition roles as well as exhibition design and gallery development – including the Museum’s Great Southern Land gallery and the Australia Pavilion for Expo 2025 in Osaka.
She is a leading voice in the sector, actively contributing through advisory and board positions, including affiliation with the Australian National University. Jilda engages actively in collections research and has a strong record of research and publication in the field.
As an active member of her Yuwaalaraay community, Jilda has represented Yuwaalaraay Country nationally and globally through her work as a researcher, cultural practitioner and performer. Throughout all dimensions of her work, she takes a decisive ‘futures-orientation’, exploring the concept of ‘Ancestral Futures’ in real and applied ways.
Jilda is extending continuities from Australia’s deep cultural roots to inform richly dynamic, culturally strong and inclusive communities and future societies.
Dr Jilda Andrews
Dr Jilda Andrews
Margaret Farmer
Previewing the Pre-1914 Galleries
Session H: Naval and military history in the nineteenth century Australian colonies
Captain Alastair Cooper joined the Royal Australian Navy in 1988. A Maritime Warfare Officer, he served at sea in HMA Ships Canberra (II), Melbourne (III) and Fremantle (II), and ashore as Director of the Sea Power Centre – Australia, Commanding Officer Navy Headquarters South Australia (now HMAS Encounter), the research officer to the Chief of Navy, and in Navy Capability Division. He has also worked in private sector telecommunications and as a public servant in the Department of Defence, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the Attorney General’s Department. Alastair is the author of many articles on the history of the Royal Australian Navy. He is the co-editor with James Goldrick of The Navy Chiefs: Australia’s Naval Leaders 1911–1997 (Allen and Unwin, 2024).
Captain Alastair Cooper
Captain Alastair Cooper
Dr Thomas J. Rogers is a historian in the Military History Section of the Australian War Memorial. He has previously worked as a historian at the Royal Australian Navy’s Sea Power Centre, the Australian National University, and the University of Melbourne. Tom is an Adjunct Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra. Much of Tom’s research focuses on the Australian Frontier Wars, the South African (Boer) War, and the First World War. He has worked on exhibitions relating to the Australian Frontier Wars, and the First and Second World Wars. His book The Civilisation of Port Phillip (MUP, 2018) examines the relationships between settler rhetoric and frontier violence in the early years of British settlement in Victoria.
Dr Thomas Rogers
Dr Thomas Rogers