with Professor Katie Holmes "Broken Hill: 'Modern Water' and an Inland Mining Empire" co-sponsored by a Gaines Center for the Humanities 2023-24 Mini Grant

Broken Hill is an Australian mining town in the far west of New South Wales. It is also the home of Broken Hill Propriety Limited, or BHP, now the world's largest mining empire. The town is celebrated as a proud heritage city that is foundational to Australia's economic success and identity. But the town also exemplifies settler-colonial mismanagement and extraction. It is a history that connects the inland of Australia and the global empire BHP built--including oil and gas--to a fossil fuel industry that has shaped our Anthropocene world. This presentation considers climate and the problem of water in an inland arid region. Water connects Broken Hill to global empires of mining, agriculture, and fast fashion. 

Professor Katie Holmes is the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Chair in Australian Studies, Harvard, 2023-24. At her home university, La Trobe University in Melbourne, she is Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of the Inland.