Images, history and invention - that’s the title of an event coming up on Monday 14 July at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, and I have been invited to speak at it in my capacity as a Flickr photographer, archivist and contributor to Picture Australia.

“Join image makers and picture curators in conversation on their passion for image collections. View a DVD of works produced by creative Australians and from the collections of museums, galleries, libraries and archives across the country. Find out about the collective image network that makes up Picture Australia and the opportunities for you to contribute.”

6.30 pm, Monday 14 July 2008
National Library of Australia
Screening: LG1 Theatre
Parkes Place, Canberra

Free entry
Bookings essential: 02 6262 1271

The event is part of the Vivid National Photography Festival. Once I’ve given the talk I hope to reflect on things in writing here (reader, live in hope).

The Evangelists of Empire online journal, part of the History Conference and Seminar series from the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne (deep breath, still with me?) was launched today. I worked on it with my colleagues at the eScholarship Research Centre, James Williams and Eve Young, and the lovely editors from History, Amanda Barry and Joanna Cruickshank.

All that wonderful research, freely available to the public and much more easily accessible (through Google) than it would have been pre-Web. Not to mention a print version of the entire journal finished and available at the same time.

We used Open Journal Systems for the content management system, and are pretty pleased with the results - although I tore my hair out at times working with it (and I really did tear my hair out - a bad habit developed since having a baby). Deferring to the blurb, “Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research.”

Making the journal look different to so many of the other journals using OJS involved much tinkering with the css and the templates (and unfortunately having to resort to hard coding content into the about template :( - ah well) - that’s the good thing about open source. But I really should give some feed back to the developers about what improvements would have made my life easier - that’s the other thing about open source - finding the time to contribute when the next project beckons…

A case in point. A husband and wife newly arrived in Sydney this week (trying to make a better life for their two children, who have been left behind in Mauritius with family). All their savings spent on expensive airfares and a most likely useless business management course that some exploitative “immigration/eduction” agent in Mauritius has sold them (she would rather do hairdressing, and it would be so much more practical, but if she trys to change courses now they’ll lose much of what they’ve down paid).

The agent has also told them work will be easy to get in Australia (try finding work newly arrived in a foreign country with no networks, yeah, right). The agent has set them up in a house where six people are sharing a room (one room) and being charged $150 per person a week. Together they are paying more in rent a week for a shared room than we are paying to rent a two bedroom house. The husband has been out to the country to check out agricultural work, and if he took it, would have to live in a shipping container with every other desperate immigrant currently trying to eke out an existence in this lucky country.

What to do?