Full name: Professor Russell McGregor

Position: Adjunct Professor of History, James Cook University

Role in the project: Chief Investigator

Brief Background bio: Russell McGregor has published extensively on the history of settler Australian policies and attitudes toward Aboriginal people. His major books are Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory (1997), winner of the 1998 WK Hancock Award, and Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal People and the Australian Nation (2011), which won the 2012 NSW Premier’s Prize for Australian History and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. He also researches and writes on the history of Australian nationalism and environmental history.

Above: Russell McGregor with Rebecca Fisher, Collections Officer in the Cultural Heritage Branch of the Australia Museum, examining a rainforest shield collected by Walter Roth. Photo: Maureen Fuary

Recent publications:

Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal People and the Australian Nation, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2011.

‘A Dog in the Manger: White Australia and its Vast Empty Spaces’, Australian Historical Studies, vol.43, no.2, 2012, pp.157-173.

‘Drawing the Local Colour Line: White Australia and the Tropical North’, Journal of Pacific History, vol.47, no.3, 2012, pp.329-346.

‘Developing the North, Defending the Nation? The Northern Australia Development Committee, 1945-1949′, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol.59, no.1, 2013, pp.33-46.

‘Northern Optimism: The Preliminary Scientific Expedition to the Northern Territory’, Northern Territory Historical Studies, no.24, 2013, pp.40-51.