Date and time: Mon 27/03/2023, 5:30 pm
Location: Hetzel Lecture Theatre North Terrace Adelaide, SA 5000
Come and join us for a free lecture night, delivered by the History Council of South Australia’s two Fellows, Dr Heidi Ing (2022 Fellow) and Margaret Boult (2023 Fellow). The two presentations will explore their research projects, which both focus on key aspects of South Australian history and heritage.
Dr Heidi Ing (2022 Fellow)
Heidi Ing is a social historian with a research interest in intergeneration social mobility, networks, and institutions. After a career as an educator, and then as a librarian, Heidi Ing completed her PhD with Flinders University in 2020. Her doctoral thesis was on the occupational and geographic mobility of the individuals who arrived with South Australia’s ‘First Expedition’. She is currently writing a book on the experiences of South Australia’s early arriving settler-colonists, with a focus on occupations and social structure.
Title: Identifying the Investors: Land Speculation in Settler-Colonial South Australia
At the end of her 2022 HCSA Fellowship Heidi Ing presented the State Library of South Australia with an Excel spreadsheet which detailed the initial purchasers of Adelaide’s 1042 ‘Town Acres’. Heidi hopes that, with the addition of geospatial and biographical data, this spreadsheet could potentially contribute to a visualization project which would combine information and images. In this presentation, Heidi will provide an overview of those investors who purchased South Australia’s ‘Preliminary Land Orders’, and those who selected Adelaide’s Town Acres through auction.
Margaret Boult (2023 Fellow)
Margaret Boult is a medical historian and visiting researcher at the University of Adelaide’s Discipline of Surgery. In 2019, she earned a M. Phil. for her thesis on epilepsy in South Australia’s lunatic asylums. Since then, she has written about the history of smallpox and polio in South Australia, and is currently working on a book about the first two colonial surgeons during the early years of the colony, supported in part by the HCSA Fellowship. Margaret has also worked as a medical scientist, during which time she published articles on a range of medical topics. She serves as secretary for the Australian & New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine and is on the committee of the South Australian Medical Heritage Society.
Title: South Australia’s First Colonial Surgeons
Margaret Boult will provide insights into her upcoming HCSA Fellowship project, which will examine the lives and careers of Thomas Young Cotter and James Nash, the first two colonial surgeons in South Australia. These doctors served during a time of significant challenges for the colony, from roughly 1836 to 1855, including a growing population, an unstable economy, and poverty-related health problems. Margaret’s project aims to contextualize their experiences within the broader history of medicine in the early 1800s, including the professionalization of the field, shifting views on disease causation, and the development of public health institutions. By doing so, she hopes to shed new light on an important period in South Australian medical history.