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Six prestigious research fellowships totalling over $100,000 have just been awarded by the State Library of NSW.

According to Richard Neville, Mitchell Librarian & Director of Education & Scholarship at the State Library of NSW: “The State Library is committed to supporting original research that questions or provides new perspectives on Australia’s documented history.”

The 2019 recipients are:

Dr AM Hertzberg Fellowship ($20,000):
Dr Elizabeth Humphrys’ project Pressed and strained: the lives of metal workers in the era of globalisation (1970‐1990) will examine how changes to the metals industry, brought about by globalisation, has impacted on the lives of their largely blue‐collar workforce.

CH Currey Fellowship ($20,000):
Dr Ian Hoskins’s project Re‐imagining the Pacific: exploring white Australian identification with its near neighbours 1870‐1970 will examines the under‐
appreciated relationship of European Australia with the Pacific, prior to the independence movements of the 1970s.

Nancy Keesing Fellowship ($20,000):
Dr Kate Forsyth’s project Charlotte Atkinson: Australia’s first children’s writer will examine the life of her relative Charlotte Atkinson, who anonymously published the first children’s book written in Australia in the aftermath of great personal trauma, including poverty, domestic violence and custody battle.

Australian Religious History Fellowship ($20,000):
Dr Stephen Jackson’s project Sunday Morning Empire: Protestantism and Empire in the British World, 1880‐1970 considers how Protestant Sunday schools helped frame an imperial identity in the early part of the 20th century, across the Anglo‐world, and
Australia in particular.

David Scott Mitchell Memorial Fellowship ($12,000):
Dr Isobelle Barrett Meyering’s project Pipi Storm Theatre Company: A Cultural History of Children’s Rights examines the growth of the idea of children’s rights from the 1970s through the Library’s extensive collections of papers of the Pipi Storm Theatre, which delivered theatre across NSW schools and welfare institutions.

Merewether Fellowship ($12,000):
Dr Rebecca Hamilton’s project Conservation mapping: a case study of Sydney’s 19th century water reserves will draw on historic data to try to determine the actual history of places now regarded as natural and historic landscapes. In part, she will test claims of ‘pristine’ environments thought to have escaped European development.

The Library’s extensive Fellowships program, which includes the biennial Coral Thomas Fellowship (valued at $75,000), is supported by the State Library Foundation and generous private benefactors.