Episode 13: Crocodile Dundee with Dr. Chelsea Barnett and Dr. Joel Barnes
This week Reckoning goes Down Under to talk about 1986's Crocodile Dundee and we are doing it with the founders of Historians At The Movies: Australia: Chelsea Barnett and Joel Barnes. This movie is everything HATM was designed for: taking something fun and then pointing out everything we can take from it. This was a blast to record.
Dr Chelsea Barnett is a gender and cultural historian whose work explores the representation of masculinities in Australian popular culture, in order to understand the complex and varied ways in which masculinity has made sense in particular historical contexts. Under this broad research aim she engages with feminist and queer theory, the history of sex and sexuality, twentieth-century Australian history, and the history in and of popular culture.
Chelsea is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UTS, and is located in the Australian Centre for Public History. In her current project, she is exploring the cultural history of single men, focusing on how Australian film and magazines in the postwar world have represented and made sense of the relationship between men and the expectation of marriage.
Chelsea is the author of "Reel Men: Australian Masculinity at the Movies, 1949-1962" (Melbourne University Press, 2019). She has authored academic articles in leading journals including History Australia, Australian Historical Studies, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Chelsea is currently the ECR co-representative for the Australian Historical Association, and is the co-convenor of Historians at the Movies Australia (#HATMAus).
Dr. Joel Barnes is a historian with interests in histories of science, the humanities, and universities. His main current project (with Associate Professor Ian Hesketh) is examining commemorations of the life and work of Charles Darwin in a range of national and disciplinary contexts. He was recently postdoctoral research fellow on the history strand of the multi-disciplinary Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum project, which investigated the complexity of historical and contemporary relations between evolutionary science and belief across a number of national settings. Both projects are funded by the International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society. Before joining the University of Queensland, Joel was a Research Associate in the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney, working on an Australian Research Council-funded project on the history of humanities institutions in Australia since 1945.