Emeritus Professor Peter Spearritt / Courtesy of Emeritus Professor Peter Spearritt / View full image
Peter Spearritt
Peter Spearritt is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Queensland. He has a particular interest in how Australia has been depicted in visual culture, from painting and photography to travel promotion. He has written about how Brisbane and Sydney have been depicted in art and popular culture, and contributed to catalogues on Kenneth Macqueen and Margaret Olley.
As the co-editor of the Queensland Places and Victorian Places websites, he is committed to increasing public knowledge about the histories of our towns and places, also evident in his book Where History Happened (2018), published by the National Library of Australia. As co-curator of the University of Queensland Art Museum exhibitions ‘Triumph in the Tropics: Selling Queensland’ (2009, with Dr Marion Stell) and ‘Defending the North: Queensland in the Pacific War’ (2005, with Michele Helmrich and Ross Searle), Peter has a particular interest in how Queensland presents itself to a variety of publics. In 2024, he donated a large collection of Australian travel and tourism ephemera (1880–2000) to the State Library of New South Wales.
