A four-year ARC Discovery project has seen Professor Heather Burke involved in the new SBS series, The Australian Wars. We ask Heather about the importance of sharing this story, and how watching a very different type of cult classic movie has become a tradition in her family.

What is your current role at Flinders, and what does that entail?

I’ve been a balanced academic in archaeology at Flinders since the early 2000s, so I split my time between teaching and research. My speciality is historical archaeology, which is the archaeology of the colonial period in Australia, and I teach both undergraduate and graduate students in the Bachelor of Archaeology and the postgraduate program in Archaeology and Heritage Management.

As a researcher, I am also involved in multiple projects across Australia. That means I also spend a lot of my time in the field, searching for and recording artefacts and sites, excavating sites, and recording contemporary oral histories about why places are important to people today.

So, the short answer is that my current role is “archaeologist”, but the long answer is that this can involve laboratory-based classes, lecture-based classes, helping students design research projects, or spending long periods of time in various parts of Australia trying to understand why and how the past matters to people today.

What journey brought you to this role?

When I first started at university, I wasn’t thinking much about the future. I just wanted to do things that interested me. Archaeology was one of those interests (not that I had any clue what it really was and certainly not what it would mean as a career). I kept doing it because I loved it. I started teaching as a half-time academic, then decided to do a PhD. The combination of teaching, followed by the intensity of PhD study, with the additional opportunities offered through work on a range of part-time consultancy projects, expanded my skill-set and interests even more. The more I learnt, the more I wanted to do.

After completing my PhD, I worked in consultancy full time for a few years and then transitioned to a full-time academic. Research combines both roles for me beautifully, as it shares qualities with consultancy and teaching. It provides the variety offered by different projects, requires in depth and ongoing community involvement and consultation, is based on fieldwork to find and understand new sites, and also creates opportunities to teach communities about what we find and impart archaeological recording and heritage management skills.

What do you love most about your role?

I love teaching, particularly when I see that students “get” a concept or process and then apply it. I also love being in the field. Many of my projects are in either far northern or far western Queensland, so fieldwork has to be done in winter, during the monsoonal dry season, so I get to leave behind winter in Adelaide and go north. Fieldwork is definitely the best part of my role, since – even though the physical exigencies can be challenging – I am regularly in amazing places, talking to interesting people and getting paid for it.

What did you enjoy most about being involved in The Australian Wars?

I’m not sure “enjoy” is quite the right word, since I found this series—and the project my involvement derived from—sobering, and often very sad. Our segment in The Australian Wars came out of a four-year long ARC-funded Discovery project to record the camp sites of the Queensland Native Mounted Police (NMP), which is a project I’m most proud of. The NMP were a paramilitary force whose role was to keep the frontier open for colonial settlement and profit-making—which means they were tasked with ‘pacifying’ First Nations peoples and eliminating any Indigenous resistance to European arrival. They performed this role with guns and ammunition.

Telling this story through the artefacts we retrieved from NMP camp sites in Queensland was a challenge in The Australian Wars, since the artefacts we collected are mostly routine domestic objects: glass shards from medicine or alcohol bottles, broken ceramic fragments from plates, tea cups or tea pots, nails, buttons, the occasional child’s toy. The exception to these are the unfired bullets we excavated, and the occasional gun part, which is, of course, what Aboriginal people would have encountered from the NMP most often.

Being able to tell that story and show those objects as part of the series was important and very special. Rachel (Perkins) became quite emotional at the end of that segment, so I know the stories represented by those objects have a significant impact.

How do you spend your spare time?

It’s probably revealing that my first impulse when answering this question is to say “doing archaeology”, and that’s true – research never stops. On the odd occasions when I’m not doing archaeology, I aim for total escapism: reading, gardening, streaming. There’s also a tradition in my family of watching Sharknado every Christmas (any one of them—we’re not particular), so that’s always something to look forward to.

The Australian Wars is currently showing on SBS and SBS on Demand.