Claudia Coutu Radmore Book Reading

BOOK READING

CLAUDIA COUTU RADMORE

Wednesday 23 February 2011

Cultural Collections Reading Room
Level 2, Auchmuty Library

10:00 – 11:00 am
followed by morning tea

Claudia Coutu Radmore, winner of the 2009 National Capital Canadian Author’s Award for Poetry, will read excerpts from her latest works, Arctic Twilight and a minute or two/without remembering and discuss the books and her writing.

Arctic Twilight recounts the life of Leonard Budgell who ran the Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts for decades in isolated communities up the Labrador coast and across the Arctic. he chronicles, in an outpouring of letters to a much younger female friend, a traditional way of life that was changing forever.

a minute or two / without remembering covers the history of New France, the settlement of the area around Montreal, Quebec between the years 1672 and 1790. The voices that tell the stories, and of the history, conflict, news stories and cultural development of those times are women, men, children, soldiers erc who are her actual ancestors, members of the Coutu family.

Claudia Coutu Radmore is also a writer of Japanese-form poetry. She is a teacher, artist and writer who has lived in China and the South Pacific, and now lives near Ottawa.

All are welcome to attend the reading.

‘We shall have a fine holiday’

School of Humanities and Social Science
HISTORY SEMINAR SERIES – 2009

‘We shall have a fine holiday’:
Imperial sentiment, unemployment and the 1928 Miner-Harvester Scheme to Canada

Kent Fedorowich

Friday, 24 April
10am to 11am
(with morning tea/coffee afterwards)

Cultural Collections Reading Room (near the Information Common)
Level 2, Auchmuty Library, Callaghan Campus

The purpose of this paper is to provide a more subtle but comprehensive investigation of what at one level seems to be competing forms of empire and nation building.  This was particularly apparent in 1928 when approximately 8,500 unemployed British coal miners were given assisted passage to help bring in the Canadian harvest.  Using the 1928 Miner-Harvester scheme as a backcloth, the paper examines a number of competing but overlapping issues.  This (failed) scheme was one of many initiated under the banner of constructive imperialism designed to reinforce the bonds of empire by encouraging the ‘right sort’ of British migrant to settle permanently in the senior dominion.  However, schemes like this were invariably wrecked on the rocks of an assertive dominion nationalism, which was also reflected through an increasingly militant Canadian trade unionism which claimed that Britain was dumping her unwanted and unemployed on Canadian shores.  These competing ‘national’ and metropolitan interests which were released during the formulation and implementation of assisted migration and empire settlement between 1919 and 1939 lie at the very heart of what it was to be a ‘neo-Briton’ in Canada at this time.

Kent Fedorowich
University of the West of England, Bristol

Staff, students and members of the public are welcome

Enquiries to: Michael Ondaatje (Michael.Ondaatje@newcastle.edu.au; or
Victoria Haskins  (Victoria.Haskins@newcastle.edu.au)