History Lab

In this bonus episode, employment and human rights lawyer Josh Bornstein talks with Katherine Biber about the family history that shaped his career. Bornstein's grandparents left Poland in 1933 hoping to escape, finally securing passage to Melbourne in 1938, only for his grandmother to be hospitalised under a Nazi doctor and his grandfather interrogated by German police during a stopover before they could continue the journey. Grow...

In the aftermath of World War II, a charismatic Estonian man named Ilmar Tammelo arrived in Australia as one of more than 170,000 in the Displaced Persons Scheme. Trained as a lawyer and shaped by the upheavals of Soviet and Nazi occupation, Tammelo was assigned to manual labour in regional Australia, a condition of his participation in the DP scheme.

A chance encounter brought him into the company of the leading legal theorist, Jul...

Leonhard Adam’s life was twice transformed by bureaucratic categories. Declared a “non-Aryan” by Nazi rules, he was forced out of his career and from his home in Germany. He fled to England in search of safety, only to be classified as an “enemy alien”, a category formed in panicked haste as Europe descended into war. Adam was swept up in a wave of mass internment that made little distinction between r...

The Nazi rise to power looms over Europe in the 1930s, causing an exodus of emigrants seeking refuge from persecution. But fleeing fascism involves contending with the arcane - and often arbitrary - immigration systems of other countries who turn a blind eye to the unfolding crisis. Some escape; most do not.

In Australia, a woman named Camilla Wedgwood works tirelessly, trying to help refugees navigate the requirements for would-be ...

How do you tell the story of a "warrior" without flattening him into myth?

Associate Professor Delia Falconer talks with historian Dr Naomi Parry Duncan about her new biography of Musquito — a warrior born around Port Jackson who lived through the first shockwaves of British invasion, was exiled to Norfolk Island, and ultimately met his end in Van Diemen's Land. Parry Duncan set out to tell his full, complicated story —...

Wikipedia doesn't set out to play favourites. But when a made-up Melbourne suburb has more history than real Australian places, something is shaping what gets written.

Who - or what - decides which Australian places matter on Wikipedia?

Hosts Heather Ford and Francesca Sidoti go looking, through a map of 35,000 places, a street corner in Penrith, and a fight over one island's name.

How is Wikipedia biased, and why? The answer will sur...

Environmental history in Australia has moved from the margins to something close to the centre of the discipline — but the path there was longer and less obvious than it might appear. Jarrod Hore and Nancy Cushing map that path from different vantage points. Hore came of age as a scholar inside the field; Cushing arrived at it gradually, via urban history, historical geography, and a childhood in Nova Scotia that made her att...

In this episode of Field Notes, historians Sophie Loy-Wilson and Mei-fen Kuo trace their paths into Chinese Australian history — one drawn by questions of racism and resistance, the other by the discovery of long-neglected Chinese-language newspapers and Qing Dynasty consular records. They discuss the ethical challenges of community history, the archival work required to recover women’s lives, and a question that has sh...

Military history in Australia carries a weight that few other subfields do — it sits at the intersection of popular memory, national identity, and institutional commemoration in ways that make it both unusually accessible and unusually prone to distortion. Maggie Hutchison and Tom Rogers make a case for what serious military history looks like. It demands an active voice — soldiers don’t “lay down their live...

What does decolonisation mean as a field of historical inquiry — and what does it demand of the historians who work in it? Jon Piccini and Angela Woollacott approach these questions from different generations and starting points. Woollacott came to postcolonial thinking through the new imperial history in 1990s American universities, where the field felt genuinely revolutionary. Piccini came through the study of 1960s transna...

Before social media, before streaming, before algorithms decided what you'd hear next, Sydney had the street press — and the street press had the Hopetoun Hotel.

In this episode, State Library Fellow Dr Liz Giuffre takes us inside her archival forays into On the Street and Drum Media, two free weekly publications held in the State Library of NSW's collection that served as the first draft of Sydney's music history from the ear...

What made Australia's fringe cultural scene so generative in the 1980s — and what can it teach us about sustaining creative industries today?

Tony Moore and Mark Gibson, co-authors with Chris McAuliffe and Maura Edmond) join Reg Mombassa (of Mental as Anything and Mambo fame) to launch their book Fringe to Famous: Cultural Production in Australia After the Creative Industries. In a wide-ranging discussion, hosted by journalist...

What happens to women's art when the world stops looking?

That's the question at the heart of A Woman's Eye: Her Art, Drusilla Modjeska's book about a century of women artists who made radical, visionary work — and were then, largely, forgotten. Recorded live at Gleebooks before a packed house, this is a conversation about art history as a political act: who gets remembered, who gets written out, and why it keeps happening.

In ...

In this episode of History Lab Live, we revisit a remarkable moment in Australian history: the 1960 visit of Paul Robeson and his wife, Eslanda Robeson.

Paul Robeson was one of the most famous voices in the world — a singer who could fill concert halls, but also a lawyer, actor, athlete, and one of the most outspoken civil rights activists of the 20th century.

Alongside him was Eslanda, an anthropologist, author, actress and po...

In this episode from History Lab's archive, we stay in Darlinghurst with the award winning Red Light Green Light story from our Listen to Darlinghurst series.

Going back to the street corners and safe houses where sex workers competed for customers in Darlinghurst in the 1980s, you will hear the stories of members of the community who fought for law reform and sex worker's rights.

The last time we heard this story, a petition had bee...

In this bonus episode, History Lab's Tamson Pietsch speaks with historian Leigh Boucher about the making of Darlinghurst's AIDS Crisis — our three-part History Lab series exploring one of the most intense and concentrated episodes of loss, activism, and community life in Australian history (if you haven't listened yet, go to episodes 42-44 of History Lab).

Leigh is an historian based at Macquarie University who has lived in Da...

By the early 1990s, AIDS had reached its devastating peak in Darlinghurst. Obituaries filled the pages of the Star Observer, funerals became routine. Sickness and loss touched almost every friendship and street in the neighbourhood.

In this episode, we move inside the hospitals, hospices and homes where nurses, carers and volunteers supported a generation of young men facing terminal illness. Beyond the wards, grief and anger spille...

By the mid-1980s, the epidemic had taken hold in Darlinghurst. Fear was rising, homophobia was intensifying, and uncertainty shaped everyday life. Who had the virus? What did a positive test mean? And could the state be trusted with that information?

In this episode, historian Leigh Boucher moves into the heart of the crisis as the neighbourhood marshals every last drop of queer energy, love, creativity and strength to hold back the...