For the 2026 Eldershaw Memorial Lecture Professor Clare Wright who completed her democracy trilogy with the publication of Naku Dharuk The Bark Petitions in 2024 will be conversation with Trawulwuy art historian, Greg Lehman.
Professor Clare Wright OAM is an award-winning historian, author, broadcaster, podcaster and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media. She is currently Professor of History and Professor of Public Engagement at La Trobe University. She is the author of five works of history, including the best-selling The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (winner of the 2014 Stella Prize) and You Daughters of Freedom. Her latest book, and the final instalment in her Democracy Trilogy, is the highly acclaimed Ṉäku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions which won the Queensland Literary Award for Non-Fiction and NT History Book Award and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, Victorian Premiers Literary Awards, Age Book of the Year Awards, Australian Political Book of the Year and ABIA Awards, and was longlisted for a Walkley Award and the NIB Literary Award. Clare has written and presented history documentaries for ABC TV and is Associate Producer of the feature film One Mind One Heart, written/directed by Larissa Behrendt, which won the NSW Digital History Award. She also hosts the ABC Radio National history podcast, Shooting the Past, co-hosts the La Trobe University podcast Archive Fever (with Yves Rees) and is Executive Producer of Hey History! the first Australian history podcast designed for use in the classroom. In 2020, Clare was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours list for ‘services to literature and to historical research’. Clare is Chair of the National Museum of Australia Council and past Board Director of the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas.
Professor Greg Lehman is a descendant of the Trawulwuy people of northeast Tasmania, and a Professorial Fellow at the University of Tasmania. He holds a Master of Studies in the History of Art and Visual Cultures from Oxford, and a PhD in Art History from the University of Tasmania, where he is currently a Professorial Fellow. Greg is a curator and writer, a well-known Tasmanian art historian and essayist on Indigenous history, identity and place. In 2017, he led the development of First Tasmanians, the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery’s first permanent Indigenous gallery. Together with Tim Bonyhady, he also co-curated The National Picture: the Art of Tasmania’s Black War, a major touring exhibition that won the 2019 Museums and Galleries Australia Award for Travelling Exhibitions. Greg is a previous member of the National Museum of Australia’s Indigenous Reference Group and Chair of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery’s Aboriginal Advisory Council. He is currently a member of the National Reference Group, advising the Northern Territory Government on its establishment of the National Gallery of Aboriginal Art in Alice Springs.