History Lab || exploring the gaps between us and the past || This series is made in collaboration by the Australian Centre for Public History and Impact Studios at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Subscribe:.rss.atom.json.md.m3u.pls
Live Last read · last published · next check
Saves to your Listen queue, to pick up on another day or another device.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
