Madalyn Grant
"I always liked the sense of community within the school [of History]; tutorial rooms filled with puffer jacketed undergrads in old Coombs, a small pile of us reading in the quads when the sun was out and the magpies were friendly, corridors of decorated staff doors as you hunted for a printer, or the shared looks of confusion as a microfiche was explained.”
Madalyn Grant was up much earlier than usual when she saw the email. Perhaps nerves kept her fidgeting all night long, anticipating the outcome of her application as a 2024 Gates Cambridge Scholar.
Initially the words, ‘congratulations' and 'offer' gleaming back at her meant ‘no thanks.’
A feeling of disbelief engulfed Maddy as she read the email more thoroughly, coming to realise that she had in fact been accepted to complete her PhD in the U.K. So, she celebrated silently, with a perhaps less than interested audience – her cat. Waiting for the sun to rise before she could pass on the exciting news to her friends and family.
Reflecting on the path that led her to this pivotal moment, she recalled her time at the Australian National University (ANU). Here she completed a double degree in Arts, majoring in History, and Archaeological Practice, majoring in Bio-Anthropology and Regional Archaeology. Her honours thesis delved into the emotional debates of Australia's 'reburial movement' from the 70s – 90s.
"I’ve been hooked and haunted by the topic ever since," Maddy comments.
Whilst undertaking her PhD, she hopes to address a significant oversight in the field of cultural repatriation.
“There’s a lack of primary data on the emotions of non-Indigenous professionals involved in repatriation processes, a gap that affirms the idea that Indigenous peoples make ‘subjective’ or ‘emotional’ cultural claims for return despite the ‘rationality’ of further research or display. Yet, those arguing for retention often do so in highly emotive ways. I’m keen to address this gap, to harness findings on the nature, role, and impact of emotions and use that to inform best practice. I believe that doing so may facilitate greater opportunities for inter-community reconciliation.”
Maddy fondly reminisces about the strong sense of community within the ANU School of History. "Nothing served as a testament to the strength of that community more than the way in which my honours year continued with little to no interruption during the 2020 lockdowns. But I always liked the sense of community within the school; tutorial rooms filled with puffer jacketed undergrads in old Coombs, a small pile of us reading in the quads when the sun was out and the magpies were friendly, corridors of decorated staff doors as you hunted for a printer, or the shared looks of confusion as a microfiche was explained.”
Adding, “Biological Anthropology telescoped my understanding of history. Lectures situated man-made monuments and man-making molecules on the same timeline, and lab work flattened immense topics to key datapoints, or single and exciting research questions. History - from primates to present-day - were all brought into reach.”
Always fascinated with object-biography, what intrigues her most is, “the stories we favour, forget, and set in stone as ‘fact’ about objects, artefacts, and items; things which can’t speak and so can’t ever tell us if we’ve got something twisted. What we write on a museum plaque about an artefact is interpretation, what we infer from scientific data about an object is typically summation, and what we personally feel about an item is the culmination of many intended and unintended influences.”
For Maddy, initially repatriation, “was a field I used to hold a great deal of antipathy towards. When I started at university, I was interested in finding, preserving, and displaying items.” But her perspective changed as, “The theoretical and methodological frameworks I learnt under ANU historians expanded my understanding of how and why we understand and relate to objects in culturally, temporally, and regionally informed ways.”
Maddy advises students considering history to appreciate its expansive influence across disciplines. "History is rather wonderful like that; you don’t have to dig deep beneath the surface or tug the veil far up on a single topic to realise you’re dealing with a historical network of dizzying longitude and latitude," she advises.
Her experiences at ANU, particularly her role in relaunching the ANU Historical Journal, underscored the importance of historical understanding in shaping research and authorial voices in academia.
Her ongoing work promises to continue shaping the field of repatriation and cultural heritage, grounded in a profound understanding of history and its impacts.
