Overview

The Canberra & District Historical Society proudly presents the 2026 Canberra Day Oration at the National Library of Australia.

Frank Bongiorno AM delivers the 2026 address: Does history have a future in Canberra?

Entry to this event is free but bookings are essential. The presentation will also be available online. Please make a booking and the Library's Events team will send you a direct link to the livestream event via email. Or you can join anytime through the Library's YouTube channel.

You live in a world where an understanding of history often seems an inadequate guide to the present and future, yet it is also among the very few tools you have. Canberra has long been a place where history is produced, in a range of forms, and it has been understood as offering this kind of guidance.

Canberra history-making has resisted the allure of the ivory-tower; it has frequently been an injunction to act in and on the world, not merely to understand it. In this year's Canberra Day Oration, Frank Bongiorno will explore Canberra as a place of 'history-making', and he will consider what a future for history in Canberra might look like – in an era where sound historical practice can seem almost countercultural.