Dr Michaela Ann Cameron

Founder, Director, Lead Historian, Editor, Transcriber and Database Developer

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

DR. MICHAELA ANN CAMERON is a digital historian whose research spans colonial Australia and colonial America with specific research interests in ethnohistory, social history, sensory history (aural history / sound studies), digital history, public history, eighteenth-century Parramatta, nineteenth-century Parramatta, convicts, seventeenth-century New France, First Peoples, settler colonialism, Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples, and neurodecolonisation.

Michaela Ann Cameron, Stealing the Turtle's Voice, Algonquian, Iroquoian, Soundways, Acoustemology, The Old Parramattan, Cameron, PhD Thesis
Michaela Ann Cameron, Stealing the Turtle’s Voice: A Dual History of Western and Algonquian-Iroquoian Soundways from Creation to Re-creation (PhD Thesis, 2018). Click here for full text (open access)

Dr. Cameron completed her PhD thesis, Stealing the Turtle’s Voice: A Dual History of Western and Algonquian-Iroquoian Soundways from Creation to Re-creation, at the University of Sydney in 2018. An ethnohistorian specialising in sensory history (sound and audition), her doctoral thesis explores how and why deeply ingrained acoustemological differences created cultural conflict between natives and newcomers both in and beyond the colonial period in the New World. Towards the end of her PhD candidature, she contributed a chapter, “Singing with Strangers in Early Seventeenth-Century New France,” to the edited collection, Daniela Hacke and Paul Musselwhite (eds.), Empire of the Senses: Sensory Practices of Colonialism in Early America, (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2017), pp. 88–112. Read more about her American History research here.

Michaela’s additional research interests in colonial Parramatta and particularly the convict experience have stemmed from the fact that her family has lived in Parramatta continuously since 1801. Known as “The Old Parramattan” for the purposes of her work as a public historian, Michaela has worked on a number of projects with the aim of promoting the history and heritage in her local area and raising awareness of its endangered heritage sites.

In 2019, Dr. Cameron was awarded a $66,290 Create NSW Arts and Cultural Grant for a collection of “Old Parramattans” to be published on her independent, digital, public history website St. John’s Online (est. 2015), which tells the stories of people buried in and/or registered in the parish of St. John’s, Parramatta. Other activities over the years include;

Many of Michaela’s ancestors are buried at St. John’s Cemetery, including her oldest “Old Parramattan” and five-times great grandmother, the convict Lydia Barber (née Lydia Childs, alias Lydia Parker). Michaela’s ancestral connections to the cemetery continue to inspire her to raise the cemetery’s profile and increase community engagement with this under-appreciated heritage site by bringing to life the stories of the people buried there.

Qualifications

  • PhD (History), University of Sydney
  • Dip Ed (Secondary: English), University of New South Wales
  • BA (Hons I), Majors: History and English, University of Sydney

Memberships

  • Friends of St. John’s Cemetery, Parramatta General Committee Member (2016 to present)
  • National Trust NSW (Member)
  • Parramatta and District Historical Society (Member)
  • Parramatta Female Factory Friends Action Group (Member)

Contributions

 ORCID iD iconorcid.org/0000-0002-2355-8061