What's coming in 2025? History Lab update and previews with Tamson Pietsch

If you're an old friend, hello and thank you for hitting play. If you're a new listener, welcome.

History Lab, as many of you will know, was Australia’s first investigative history podcast. 

We've made five seasons so far, and our tagline is exploring the gaps between us and the past.

And while you notice that from season to season our storytelling style changes, we're still always asking questions that provoke curiosity, that are attentive to sources and their limits, and that challenge us to think about how we live in the present.

Things have been a bit quiet on the History Lab feed lately, so we want share two bits of exciting news, and preview what's coming up in 2025!

History Lab season 5 won an international Signal award for the Red Light Green Light episode of Listen to Darlinghurst. 

And, History Lab had a baby! It’s called Hey History!, and it’s an Australian history podcast for kids and their adults. Each episode explores a different topic, from first meetings at Kamay Botany Bay, to the Gold Rush.

---

This year, there’s three new seasons of History Lab coming your way. 

First up is Unsettling Portraits, a series that looks closely at the history of portraiture, colonialism, and First Nations responses.  You’ll hear historians Kate Fullagar and Mike McDonnell speaking with Indigenous scholars, critics and artists about what these pictures mean today. 

Ancestral Echoes is a second History Lab season hosted by researcher, producer and historical novelist Sienna Brown.  

Brown hails from Jamaica, and across three episodes, she explores the stories of some significant but little-known Caribbean Australians.

In unearthing these stories, she’s looking for a connection with the past that will help her feel more at home here.  

And in a third History Lab series, historian Leigh Boucher explores the untold histories of the HIV epidemic in Sydney in the 80s and 90s.

The series tells the story from a new perspective, focusing in on the very tight but by no means homogenous 'gaybourhood' of Darlinghurst. 

---

History isn’t the only thing we do here at Impact Studios, of course. 

You can hit play on the three-part narrative podcast Sink or Swim, where host Angelica Ojinnaka Psillakis learns to swim as an adult and works out how to survive in our ever hotter suburbs. 

And for lovers of books and as well as history, check out Fully Lit - a new podcast about Australian books. The trailer's out and episodes release soon.