Alecia Simmonds in conversation with Anne Summers, Kate Rossmanith and Zora Simic

Until well into the twentieth century, heartbroken men and women in Australia could claim compensation for ‘breach of promise of marriage’. Hundreds of people came before the courts, and their stories give us insight into the romantic landscape of the past — where couples met, how they courted, and what happened when flirtations turned sour. Join Alecia Simmonds in conversation with Anne Summers, Kate Rossmanith and Zora Simic for a discussion of love and loss in Simmonds’ new book: Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law (2023).

Dr Alecia Simmonds is an inter-disciplinary scholar in law and history. She has published in national and international journals on the relationship between intimacy, imperialism, gender, race and law in Australia and the Pacific. Alecia was the Library’s Merewether Fellow in 2013.

Dr Anne Summers AO was appointed as Professor at University of Technology Sydney Business School in 2022. In this role Anne continues her ongoing research dedicated to ending domestic and family violence, which she has been working on while serving as an inaugural Paul Ramsay Foundation Fellow (2021–22), also based at UTS.

Associate Professor Kate Rossmanith is an ethnographer, a nonfiction writer, and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. She is co-founder and Deputy Director of the Creative Documentary Research Centre, leading the portfolio ‘Writing, Language, Narrative’. She researches narrative and emotion in legal processes, as well as methods and forms of creative writing.

Dr Zora Simic is an historian and Gender Studies scholar. Her particular areas of teaching and research expertise are past and present feminisms, especially but not only Australian; twentieth century Australian history, especially gender history and migration history; and histories of sexuality. She is currently Convenor of History and Area Studies.