Regina Ganter

Biography

Regina  is the multi-award winning author of The Pearl Shellers of Torres Strait (1994) and Mixed Relations (2006) has published widely in the field of cross cultural encounters and contributed to a number of broadcasts, museum exhibitions and curriculum materials. She has also produced a web-directory of intercultural encounters between indigenous people and German missionaries in Queensland for the Queensland Sesquicentennial celebrations in 2009 (http://missionaries.griffith.edu.au/). As an Australian Research Council Future Fellow she extended that research to cover the whole Australian continent and produced The Contest for Aboriginal Souls: European Missionary agendas in Australia (ANU Press 2018).

Regina migrated to Australia in 1979 and has taught Australian history and heritage studies in the School of Humanities at Griffith University since 1992. She has been on the national executive of the Australian Historical Association, and gained the inaugural AHA Prize in Australian History in 1992, and the NSW Premier’s History Book Award and the Ernest Scott Prize in Australian History in 2007.  Her work has helped to bring about a shift in Australian historical attention to pre-British external relations and to the multi-racial dimensions of Australia’s past. Her retirement in 2019 was not related to a spate of Facebook mobbing as falsely reported in the press.