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Alexandra Roginski

Alexandra Roginski

Alexandra Roginski is a research fellow with the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, and an associate of the Centre for Environmental History (ANU). Her work spans history, science, and technology studies, and museum studies. She is the author of The Hanged Man and the Body Thief: Finding lives in a museum mystery (Monash University Publishing, 2015).

Alexandra Roginski reviews 'The First Wave: Exploring early coastal contact history in Australia' edited by Gillian Dooley and Danielle Clode

January–February 2020, no. 418 16 December 2019
First encounters between Indigenous Australians and European voyagers, sealers, and missionaries often unfolded on the beach, a contact zone where meaning and misunderstanding sparked from colliding worldviews. This sandy theatre also serves as one of the enduring metaphors of ethnographic history, a discipline that reads through the accounts of European explorers, diarists, and administrators to ... (read more)

Alexandra Roginski reviews 'Sludge: Disaster on Victoria’s goldfields' by Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies

October 2019, no. 415 25 September 2019
Drive not too far inland from Melbourne in most directions, past thick bands of ordered suburbia, and you’ll reach bush localities that shiver on breezy days with the sound of gumleaves. At dusk, you might glimpse kangaroos slinking like grey ghosts through blocks of steep, rocky land. Despite this poetry, these bushland escapes represent nature in a third life – a scenic recovery from an indu ... (read more)

Alexandra Roginski reviews 'Empire of Enchantment: The story of Indian magic' by John Zubrzycki

January-February 2019, no. 408 20 December 2018
Almost before drawing breath, we meet two troupes of Indian magicians. One appears in the court of the Emperor Jahangir, early seventeenth-century Mughal ruler and aficionado of magic. In the first of twenty-eight tricks, this troupe of seven performers sprout trees from a cluster of plant pots before the emperor’s eyes, the luminous foliage heaving with fruits and songbirds. Four hundred years ... (read more)