Menzies Australia Institute

Celebrating 40 years of the Menzies Australia Institute

In 2022-23, Menzies Australia Institute at King's is celebrating its 40th anniversary. Join us as we review all we achieved over the past 40 years and our reflections on our work to come.

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Global Australia: our new research theme

Australia has long been connected to its region and the world beyond. Before colonisation, Yolŋu people from northeastern Arnhem Land traded with sailors from nearby Makassar (now in Indonesia) and connected Indigenous Australians with supply chains stretching to China. Settler colonialism heralded widespread institutional and personal links with Britain as well as other parts of Europe, Asia, the United States and beyond.

These links inspired a great deal of travel and mobility, and today, Australians are among the world’s most voracious travellers and significant numbers of Australian expats can be found around the world, including in London.

Apply for a Richard Gunter Scholarship

The Richard Gunter Scholarships are travel bursaries, which support postgraduate research students at King’s, and in British and European universities, to do research focused on Australia.

The closing date for 2023 applications was 14 April 2023.

Find out more and apply

Graphic of Australia on the globe with light paths connecting it to other parts of the globe

The Annual Menzies Lecture

For the 2023 Menzies Annual Lecture, Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, explores Australia today and how first prime minister, Edmund Barton and fellow Federation founders would likely be dismayed by what Australia has become.

In the lecture, titled 'Australia: A New Political Geography?', he discusses how the pandemic reminded Australians that soft state borders could quickly turn hard, that differences between states still mattered, and that state and territory government was embedded in everyday life in ways Australians had overlooked or underestimated.

The Annual Reese Lecture

Dr Shirleene Robinson delivered the 2022 Reese Lecture, titled "Collecting in crisis: Oral history, marginalised voices and the AIDS pandemic".

The lecture examined the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and early 1990s in Australia, and considered ways oral history might uniquely facilitate ethical collecting with marginalised people in intensely troubled times.