Meet Dr Meg Foster: historian of banditry, settler colonial history, Australian bushranging, and ABC Top5 media resident.
Dr Meg Foster
In late June, the ABC announced the successful applicants of it's Top5 media residency program designed for early-career researchers to spend two weeks with ABC's Radio National. The ABC Top5 call out had been for "dynamic early-career PhD scholars with flair and passion for communicating their work to a non-academic audience".
Meet Dr Meg Foster "historian of banditry, settler colonial and public history, with a particular interest in Australian bushranging" who started her residency this week. For the next fortnight, Meg will be working with some of Australia's leading journalists and producers to sharpen her skills in communicating with media and their audiences about her field of expertise.
About Meg:
I'm a Chancellor's Research Fellow in Social and Political Sciences and the Australian Centre of Public History in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS.
Area of interested and research area:
I'm an historian of banditry, settler colonial and public history, with a particular interest in Australian bushranging.
My first book, Boundary Crossers, recovered histories of the 'other' bushrangers who broke the bushranging archetype. Instead of white men like Ned Kelly, the bushrangers in my book were people of colour, and one was also a woman.
I love researching where history intersects with the present day, and bushrangers are incredible topics where history, memory and legend converge.
My Chancellor's Research Fellow research project takes my foundational history research in a new direction, as I aim to access current social attitudes to crime and policing by seeing how different Australians understand bushrangers, stock thieves and police from the colonial past.
While criminologists recognise that social attitudes have real world impacts on crime and policing today, there is a dearth of research on how history affects these attitudes.
Bushrangers provide a great entry point here, as ideas about our criminal national icons shine a unique light on how we understand justice, and for whom it should apply.
My journey to UTS:
I actually worked at UTS for a year after honours as a research associate at the Australian Centre for Public History in 2014. At the ACPH, I consulted on a project to understand new and future directions of Public History.
The following year, I started a PhD in History at the University of New South Wales which I completed in 2020. As part of that degree, I was also lucky enough to have experience as an associate at the University of Leicester as part of the ERC-funded Carceral Archipelago project and I also spent a year as a visiting PhD scholar at the University of Cambridge.
After I completed my PhD, I started a 3 year postdoc at Newham College, University of Cambridge, and from there I made my way back to Australia and UTS this year.
What the ABC residency is about, and what can we anticipate?:
I was lucky enough to get an ABC Top 5 Media Residency in the Humanities. In August, the four other humanities ECRs and I will spend time across the road at the ABC in Ultimo, being shown behind the scenes and taught how to create engaging, rich content for Radio National based on our research.
At the end of the residency, we'll not only have a strong understanding of the current media landscape and how to craft powerful stories for a public audience, but be in the process of making a contribution to this, ourselves.
Where I was when I got the call:
The day following the panel interview for the residency, I received a text asking me to call the ABC. My heart plummeted, as it was so close to the interview that I was sure they could only be eliminating applicants. Reluctantly, I dialed, only to be told that I had secured a place!
I was thrilled, and that sense of elation has only grown as the residency approaches. It's such a brilliant opportunity to learn from people at the top of their fields, and I feel so grateful to have the chance to develop my media and storytelling skills at the ABC.
Boundary Crossers: The hidden history of Australia's other bushrangers
By Dr Meg Foster
Bushrangers are Australian legends. Ned Kelly, Ben Hall, Captain Thunderbolt and their bushranging brothers are famous. They're remembered as folk heroes and celebrated for their bravery and their ridicule of inept and corrupt authorities. But not all Australian bushrangers were seen in this glowing light in their own time. And not all were white men.
In Boundary Crossers, historian Meg Foster reveals the stories of bushrangers who didn't fit the mould. These bushrangers' remarkable lives have been forgotten, obscured, misrepresented or erased from the national story for over a century, and this is no accident. All is not as it appears. There is far more to these bushrangers, and their histories, than immediately meets the eye.
Meg talking about her book Boundary Crossers with ABC'S Joanna Crothers