7pm Tuesday 5 March, 2024

FREE for Genealogy SA members, $15 for non-members

In the Library or online via Zoom

Presented by South Australia's History Advocate, Dr Kiera Lindsey.

Trawling ship records and shop registers in search of ancestors is extremely absorbing, but while it can be exhilarating to find family and recover them from the historical record, there can be many ethical and methodological challenges associated with trying to write their lives. In this Twilight Tuesday talk, SA History Advocate, Dr Kiera Lindsey, reflects upon lessons learnt from writing about her ancestors in The Convict’s Daughter (Allen & Unwin 2016), before opening a discussion about why & how we write about our families.

Registrations close Tuesday 5 March, 9:00 am.

Zoom registrants will receive a link on the day of the event, and all registrants will receive a link to the recording.

Register now

Dr Kiera Lindsey is South Australia’s History Advocate at the History Trust of South Australia. She is an award-winning ‘creative historian’ who specialises in developing imaginative but ethical ways of re-presenting those who might otherwise remain shadowy in the historical record. Kiera has been enthusiastically deepening our interest in, and understandings of, the past, via books, book chapters and articles, public presentations and workshops, radio and television for over twenty years. Her first book The Convict’s Daughter (Allen & Unwin 2016) was described as a ‘gloriously-unput-downable’, but ‘meticulously researched, broad sweeping book’ which ‘fearlessly cut a new path between history and fiction’. In 2018 Kiera was awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award to investigate the relationship between historical craft and an emerging sub-genre of life writing known as ‘speculative biography’. In addition to co-editing a Routledge collection on this topic in 2021, Kiera published her second speculative biography in 2023. WILD LOVE: The Ambition of Adelaide Ironside (Allen & Unwin 2023) re-presents the little-known life of Adelaide Ironside (1831-1867), the first Australian-born professional female artist to train overseas.

Image: Headshot of Dr Kiera Lindsey, by Ethan White 2023.