BRAC EVENTS
BRAC aims to bring a variety of events that showcase the history of our coverage area and the breadth of our collection. Some events are in partnership with other organisations and many required you to book (even if they are free events) - always check the details for each event so you don't miss out!
Events are always posted to our Facebook Events page to make it easy for you to share details and attendance with friends.
BRAC events - as well as a collection of other history and heritage based events taking place in our catchment area - are included in our quarterly newsletter - subscribe HERE to stay up to date.
Upcoming Events
Thursday 8 July 2021
Discovering History: Such Sweet Sorrow
FREE live venue and online event - bookings required
Presented by Desiree Pettit-Keating (BRAC) and Dr Emma Robertson (La Trobe)
Desiree Pettit-Keating (Bendigo Regional Archives Centre) explores both the bitter and the sweet in the world of chocolate and confectionery across the centuries in north-west Victoria. Uncover surprisingly tragic tales of lost loves, suspicious deaths and intrigue.
Desiree is joined by Dr Emma Robertson (La Trobe University), author of Belles from Bournville and Beyond: Histories of Women Chocolate Workers in Australia.
Includes chocolate demonstrations and tastings from Hayley Tibbett (Indulge Chocolates) and Sue Schrieber (Choclartiste)
A Discovering History seminar - BRAC in partnership with La Trobe University and Goldfields Library Corporation
Friday 30 July 2021
Such Sweet Sorrow - Bite Size!
FREE live event at Axedale Library Branch - bookings required
Presented by Desiree Pettit-Keating (BRAC)
Desiree Pettit-Keating (Bendigo Regional Archives Centre) explores both the bitter and the sweet in the world of chocolate and confectionery across the centuries in north-west Victoria. Uncover surprisingly tragic tales of lost loves, suspicious deaths and intrigue.
Tastings of old style favourites will be a popular element of this event!
Thursday 5 August 2021
Discovering History: The Bendigo Red Ribbon Miners & Democracy in Victoria
FREE live event at Bendigo Library - bookings required
Presented by Dr Marjorie Theobald
The orthodox view of democracy in Victoria is that it was the result of the clash between the Ballarat miners and the authorities in December 1854. Yet a Westminster Act of 1850 gave the Australian colonies the right to draft their own constitutions and to enfranchise whomever they chose. Governor La Trobe was so alarmed at the influx of gold diggers that he and the Legislative Council prevaricated, insisting that only Westminster could confer universal suffrage. This paper argues that the authorities were jolted into action by the militancy of the Bendigo Red Ribbon miners in mid-1853 over the licence fee. A few days after the huge protest meeting of 27 August the Legislative Council appointed a committee to draft the new constitution. This document was sent to Westminster for ratification well before the Eureka incident occurred. Eureka is an important symbol of democracy but the Red Ribbon men should be given their due.
Tuesday10 August 2021
Such Sweet Sorrow - Bite Size!
FREE live event at Dingee Library Branch - bookings required
Presented by Desiree Pettit-Keating (BRAC)
Desiree Pettit-Keating (Bendigo Regional Archives Centre) explores both the bitter and the sweet in the world of chocolate and confectionery across the centuries in north-west Victoria. Uncover surprisingly tragic tales of lost loves, suspicious deaths and intrigue.
Tastings of old style favourites will be a popular element of this event!
Past Events
Thursday 6 May 2021
Discovering History: Parade Committees & Secret Societies
Presented by Leigh McKinnon, Golden Dragon Museum
From secret societies whose members were pledged to uphold a creed of loyalty and brotherhood through to the early committees that organised the public spectacle of the Bendigo Easter Fair’s Chinese section, the Golden Dragon Museum houses banners, certificates, photos, and documents which help illuminate the historical contexts and personal stories behind a variety of local Chinese community organisations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This talk will cover several of these artefacts from our collection, focusing on what they can reveal about these organisations and the central Victorian Chinese communities which created and sustained them.
Watch this presentation here anytime on YouTube
Thursday 1 April 2021
Discovering History: Making the Family Farm
Presented by Dr Charles Fahey, La Trobe University
This talk will examine the history of one of the enduring institutions in Australia: the family farm. Dr. Fahey will examine the farming fortunes of the James family and their neighbours in the parish of Wanurp, north of Bendigo. It will discuss the importance of the family in settling on the plains; the decisions families made to cope with the rigours of settling and farming the plains, and the strategies families made to reap the rewards of one of the more prosperous periods in the history of rural Australia - 1900-1921.
Watch this presentation here anytime on YouTube
Thursday 4 March 2021
Discovering History: Life in the clearings - home & housewifery on the Central Victorian Goldfields
Presented by Katrina Dernelley, La Trobe University
The central Victorian goldfields were always a domestic, as well as an industrial, political, economic and environmental landscape.
Housework and the home were central to the history of the gold rushes and a domestic reading of goldfields history places women and domestic labour back in the story, not in the public sphere where most history is deemed to have been made, but in the home where most women worked.
Watch this presentation here anytime on YouTube
Thursday 4 February 2021
Discovering History: History Never Repeats?
Presented by Desiree Pettit-Keating, BRAC Archives Officer
While it’s said that history never repeats, responses to an outbreak of smallpox in 1870’s Bendigo are surprisingly similar to those for the current COVID-19 pandemic. Using BRAC collections, this presentation explores ways the media, municipality and public responded to the presence of infectious diseases both then and now.
Thursday 4 December 2020
Discovering History: Monday Was Washing Day - Farm Women's Domestic Work
Presented by Dr Ruth Ford & Dr Valerie Lovejoy
The Women on the Land project interviewed 80 women who lived on farms from the 1920s to the 1950s. This seminar examines women’s memories and experiences of domestic life in a time before ‘mod cons’ and its crucial impact on family farm economy. The impact of changing technology, environment and climate are also considered.
Watch this presentation here anytime on YouTube
Thursday 5 November 2020
Discovering History: Into Deep Water
Presented by Natasha Joyce
The thousands of children born on or brought to the frontier goldfields of Bendigo existed in a dangerous landscape, with the risk of accident or death ever-present. Children were witness to the tragic deaths of siblings and playmates with their inquest testimonies providing a rare insight into their experiences.
Watch this presentation here anytime on YouTube
Thursday 1 October 2020
Discovering History: Dressed & Blessed
Presented by Elizabeth Offer
Elizabeth's research is part of a larger community-based project uncovering the religious diversity of the Central Victorian Goldfields. Elizabeth's research examines the connection between an emerging British identity and the shifting religious practices of Hebrew congregations which formed in Bendigo and Ballarat between 1851 and 1900.
Watch this presentation here anytime on YouTube
Thursday 6 September 2020
Discovering History: Housing the Diggers - Home & Housing on the Goldfields
Presented by Dr Charles Fahey
The discovery of gold in Victoria created instant cities as thousands of migrants moved to inland gold discoveries. During the alluvial phase of mining, most diggers lived in tents and rough bush houses. Company mining encouraged more lasting housing and the solution was the construction of cheap weatherboard housing on Crown land – the miner’s residence area. The successful gold reefers and local businessmen also built more substantial housing. This talk will examine the way the gold cities housed their residents in the years of company mining looking at both the grand villa and the humble miner’s cottage.
Watch this presentation here anytime on YouTube
Thursday 3 August 2020
Discovering History: Black Gold - Indigenous People's Experiences on Central Victorian Goldfields
Presented by Dr Fred Cahir
Dr Fred Cahir is an Associate Professor in Aboriginal History at Federation University. Fred’s Masters and PhD focused on local Victorian Aboriginal history. Fred is a prolific researcher having published 7 books and over 40 scholarly articles and chapters in the past eight years on topics ranging from anthropology to zoology. One of his most recent book publications (May 2019) is "My Country all gone. The White men have stolen it”: The Invasion of Wadawurrung Country 1800-1870. Dr Cahir tells the story about the magnitude of Aboriginal involvement on the central Victorian gold fields in the middle of the nineteenth century. Come along and hear how Aboriginal people often figured significantly in the search for gold and the stories of their involvement from passive presence, to active discovery, to shunning the goldfields.
Watch this presentation here anytime on YouTube
Thursday 4 June 2020
Discovering History: Children Lost and Found - Strengthening Gold Rush Communities
Presented by Tim Calabria & Tash Joyce
We've heard many stories about children who disappear into the Australian Bush, never to be seen or heard of again. But what about those who survived and were found? We examine how new communities responded to losing - and finding - their children.
Watch this presentation any time on YouTube
29 June 2019
BRAC 10th Anniversary Talks
Bendigo Library Auditorium
The Bendigo Regional Archives Centre celebrated a decade in operation with two talks - we were joined by prominent local historian and academic, Dr Charles Fahey, and Dr David Waldron, academic, author, historian & podcaster who both shared with us the links between study, authorship, popular culture and primary resources found in the archives
Click through for an album of event photos
6 April 2019
ASA Regional Event
Bendigo Regional Archives Centre Reading Room
The Australian Society of Archivists (ASA) Victorian branch hosted a day at BRAC for members to learn about the collection, coverage, approach and future, with an opportunity to explore the archives.
Click through for an album of event photos
28 March 2019
Caring For Collections
Bendigo Regional Archives Centre Reading Room
Australian Museums & Galleries Association (AMaGA) with conservator Erina McCann (Tiaki Objects) delivered a terrific training session on basic principles of caring for paper-based collections, including archives, books and documents.
Click through for an album of event photos