Dr Sam Dalgarno

Postdoctoral Fellow
Arts, Design & Architecture (ADA)
School of Humanities & Languages

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Indigenous Land and Justice Research Group at UNSW Sydney. As a historian, my research has concentrated on Aboriginal history, history and memory, and public history. I earned my PhD from Monash University in 2023 and my doctoral thesis considered the production, reception and controversy that engulfed Bringing Them Home, the 1997 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s report into Aboriginal child separation.

  • Journal articles | 2018
    Dalgarno S, 2018, 'Negotiating the “Drunken Aborigine”: Alcohol in Indigenous Autobiography', Journal of Australian Studies, 42, pp. 51 - 64, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2017.1404485

My current research project, funded by the ARC and led by Professor Heidi Norman, focuses on how the governance of Aboriginal affairs in New South Wales has operated since the State Government committed to a policy of self-determination in the 1980s. Our research will seek to describe the measures taken by government and the bureaucracy under that label of Aboriginal self-determination and, in doing so, examine the form governance of Aboriginal people took during that time.