Bruce Scates

Bruce Scates is a graduate of Monash University and the University of Melbourne. He has taught Australian History and Australian Studies in universities across Australasia, including the University of New South Wales, Murdoch University and the University of Auckland. Professor Scates is the recipient of National, State and Faculty awards for excellence in teaching, sharing several of these achievements with his colleague, Professor Rae Frances.

Professor Scates has served on a number of state and national committees including reviews of the West Australian History syllabus, the NSW History Awards, the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, the Executive Committee of the History Council of NSW and the Australian Army History Unit. In 2005-6, he was a member of an expert panel convened to recover the bodies of men missing from the Great War and he is the author of a submission to the Senate Inquiry into controversial road works at Gallipoli. He has also led several historical tours of the battlefields and commemorative sites of the Great War, including the Premier of Victoria's 'Spirit of Anzac'.

His many public presentations include key-note addresses to conferences in Australia and abroad, funded participation to symposiums in Canada, the United States and the Netherlands, a host of papers to learned societies and the opening address to the National Conference of the History Teacher’s Association of Australia. In 2005, Professor Scates delivered the Tenth Annual History Lecture at Government House, Sydney, marking the 90th anniversary of the Gallipoli Landing; his work on Anzac Pilgrimage has also been broadcast on national radio and television in both Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand.

In 2008 Professor Scates delivered the distinguished Sir Keith Sinclair address at the University of Auckland on Australia and New Zealand's shared experience of war. In 2009, he addressed major public forums in the Melbourne Town Hall and Federation Square on the contested meanings of commemoration.

Bruce Scates’ work on Indigenous Australia and the memory of the frontier received special commendation in the first report of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. He has organised a number of scholarly forums including (with A/Professor Melanie Oppenheimer) a Round Table discussion of the memory of the Great War at the International Congress of Historical Sciences, the Inaugural Monash Arts Public Lecture and the National Conversation Series convened by the National Centre for Australian Studies. In 2002, Professor Scates chaired the Young People’s History Forum at the State Library of NSW in association with the Ministry for the Arts and the History Council of NSW. The proceedings were published by the History Council and have informed moves towards a National History Syllabus. He also serves on the judging panel of the premier's Teacher Scholarships at the invitation of the Premier of NSW and on the judging panel of the CEW Bean prize for the best thesis on Australia's experience of war, at the invitation of the Chief of Army.

Bruce Scates is a prolific contributor to leading scholarly journals in Australia and overseas and the author of opinion columns in both the state and national press. Amongst his current projects are a history of Victoria’s Shrine of Remembrance (also to be published by Cambridge University Press), a study of pilgrimages to the traumascapes of World War Two and a history of the NSW Soldier Settlement Scheme. He is also engaged on an innovative biography of Dr Mary Booth, founder of the Anzac Fellowship of Women. In 1997, he was awarded a NSW History Fellowship in recognition of this work and his most recent project is an ‘Imagined History’ reconstructing the search for the missing across the killing fields of Gallipoli.

He is the author/co-author of five titles with Cambridge University Press, including Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War, A New Australia, and the recently republished Women and the Great War. The last of these won the coveted NSW Premier’s History Award in 1997. In 2009, Cambridge University Press published the History of the Shrine of Remembrance, marking the 75th anniversary of the Memorial’s dedication.