Dr Jeff Brownrigg

Dr Jeff Brownrigg is, he says, ‘some sort of cultural historian’.  His work for almost sixty years has been to recover and make accessible the lives and careers of many ‘lost’ Australians; people, who played a prominent part in the story of their own time, but who have been forgotten and deserve to be better known. Much of this work was undertaken at the National Film and Sound Archive where, from 1986 to 2005 he worked in various roles including research and outreach. Dozens of lectures and broadcasts presented in that time (and after) have been published in Australia and overseas. As the ‘wandering national historian’ - that’s peripatetic not ‘absent-minded’ - for the Centenary of Federation, he worked, face to face, with hundreds of communities, helping them to recover and record their own stories. He played a prominent role in the Centre for Australian Cultural Studies and in establishing the Donald Horne Institute in Canberra. His books have included: The New Melba: The Tragedy of AmyCastles, an examination of sectarianism and singing in the early 20^th century; Anzac Cove to Hollywood: the story of Tom Skeyhill, master of deception, a different ‘take’ on the Anzac ‘legend’; and An Elegy for Mrs P: Encounters on the Hippie Trail. Recently Heaven, Earth and Canberra: Shakespeare and the Ghosts of Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive was published by Ginninderra Press, Adelaide, and will be launched in Canberra later this year. So will On Behalf of the People of Ireland: Celebrating the 75^th Anniversary of Irish Australian Diplomatic Relations which he edited with Associate Professor Sharon Crozier-de Rosa from the University of Wollongong. This book includes essays by prominent historians and documents the arrival of the first Irish Minister Plenipotentiary (later, the first Ambassador) Dr T J Kiernan and his exuberant wife, the celebrated Irish singer, Delia Murphy. And there are two or three other books in ‘the pipeline’, including a couple of historical novels.