‘Seeing the Australian Frontier: how colonial art subdued our national history’
Professor Greg Lehman
Pro Vice-Chancellor, Aboriginal Leadership
University of Tasmania
The Wentworth Lecture is held in honour of the Honourable W C Wentworth AO. It was established in 1978 to pay tribute to Mr Wentworth's contribution to Indigenous studies in Australia and as a means to encourage all Australians to gain a better understanding of issues that go to the heart of our development as a nation.
This event has now concluded.
Online event
Event postponed from 30 November 2022 and rescheduled for 17 March 2023.
Greg Lehman
Professor Greg Lehman is a descendant of the Trawulwuy people of northeast Tasmania and is a well-known Tasmanian art historian, curator, essayist and commentator on Indigenous identity and place.
Professor Lehman has an intimate relationship with the island’s Indigenous culture and his creative works explore the impact of colonisation on Tasmania’s social fabric.
Prior to appointment in January 2020 as Pro Vice Chancellor, Aboriginal Leadership at the University of Tasmania, Professor Lehman was a McKenzie Research Fellow at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.
He has a past association with AIATSIS – in 2011 he was appointed as an Indigenous Visiting Research Fellow with the institute. He later worked in several research roles at the Australian National University’s National Centre for Indigenous Studies and at Deakin University’s Institute for Koori Education.
In 2012, Professor Lehman was awarded a Roberta Sykes Indigenous Education Scholarship to complete a Masters in the History of Art and Visual Cultures at Balliol College, University of Oxford. He received the 2016 AAANZ award for ‘Best Art Writing by an Indigenous Australian’ for his essay Benjamin Duterrau: the Art of Conciliation. And in 2017 he completed his PhD at the University of Tasmania’s Academy of the Arts, submitting his thesis ‘Regarding the Savage’ – an exploration of the understanding of Aboriginal culture, history, and identity through visual history.
About William (Bill) Wentworth
William (Bill) Wentworth (1907–2003) played an important role in the establishment of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS) in 1961.
He had a long-term and intense interest in the origins, society and cultures of this continent’s First Peoples.
Dr Jacquie Lambert, in her excellent ANU doctoral dissertation on the history of the Institute, refers to Wentworth as its ‘founding father’.
He made a major contribution to what has become the world’s primary repository of knowledge concerning the cultures and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
