Not just a gentleman’s club:
The origins and significance of the Royal Society of NSW

Date: Wednesday, 16 July 2025, 1.00–3.00 pm AEST
Venue: History House, 133 Macquarie Street, Sydney
Entry: RAHS and RSNSW Members, $10; Non-members, $15 (includes afternoon tea)
Registration:  Registration is through the RAHS website
All are welcome

This event is in partnership with the Royal Australian Historical Society.

Please click here to register

Summary: The Royal Society of NSW is a twenty-first-century organisation with a long history in the intellectual culture of Sydney and beyond. In this talk, Anne Coote will discuss the origins of this learned society, its character and social position in nineteenth-century NSW, and the significant contribution it made to the development of an active colonial research community.

About the Author

Historian Dr Anne Coote works in the areas of public history and cultural history, including the cultural history of science in colonial Australia. For many years, she held an adjunct position at the University of New England. More recently, as an associate of the Centre for Applied History at Macquarie University, she contributed to a research project investigating the history of shale-mining settlements in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales. She has written entries for the Dictionary of Sydney and published academically on the influence of literate culture on popular perceptions of community and sovereignty in mid nineteenth-century New South Wales; popular science journalism; notable collectors of natural history specimens; the intersection of specimen collection with ideas about class; and the trade in specimens at a local and global level. Dr Coote is a graduate of the University of Sydney and the University of New England, Armidale.

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