History Lab

This special episode from our archives speaks to this year’s NAIDOC Week themes of strength, vision and legacy. Fishing for Answers explores the sophistication of the fishing practices of Eora women in Sydney Harbour, and asks, How can we hear from the women themselves and find out what their world sounded like? Content warning: If you are an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person this episod...

Colonial portraits have long dictated how Indigenous people were seen. But Indigenous artists continue to challenge that power. Through satire, reinterpretation, and resistance, they’re using art to question history—and reshape the future.   In this episode, historians Kate Fullagar and Mike McDonnell speak with contemporary Indigenous artists who are confronting the legacy of empire. Michel...

In this episode, historians Kate Fullagar and Mike McDonnell revisit Bennelong’s portraits to examine how colonial art encountered Indigenous identity. Indigenous scholar Jo Rey , a Dharug woman, challenges these depictions, questioning their accuracy and impact.   The conversation then expands to the Pacific, where Māori scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville discusses the story of Tupaia, a Poly...

Bennelong, a Wangal man of the Eora nation, was among the first Aboriginal people to travel to Europe and return. As a crucial interlocutor between his people and the British colonists, he navigated two worlds but the way he was depicted in colonial portraits raises complex questions. In one, he appears in traditional body paint. In another, years later, he is dressed in European clothing, his ide...

Can colonial depictions of Indigenous people tell us anything useful about the past?    How do Indigenous people today feel about these enduring images?     Unsettling Portraits is a three-part series exploring the history of portraiture and colonialism, alongside contemporary First Nations responses.  Indigenous artists and historians in Australia, the Pacific and North A...

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 ask...

A special History Lab episode with a soundwork that explores the history of Sydney's South Head, followed by an interview with the maker Sinead Roarty and Director of the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS, Tamson Pietsch. About the soundwork: On the Edge The Gap at South Head in Sydney's eastern suburbs is a place of extreme beauty. It is also famous for being Australia's most well-known...

We've got a new history podcast for you and the kids in your life, called Hey History!  With immersive, sound rich storytelling and Australia's top historians and experts, dive into key events in our history. Find out... How did First Nations people learn on Country? How does learning happen today? What really when Captain Cook and First Nations people met at Kamay Botany Bay? What was life l...

In 1887 there were no less than 22 hotels in Darlinghurst. Over the next century and a half, the character, culture and clientele of Darlinghurst pubs evolved. This story explores the impact on Darlinghurst of two episodes of liquor licensing restrictions in NSW: six o’clock closing and the Sydney lockout laws.    Image: Royal Sovereign Hotel, corner Darlinghurst Rd and Liverpool St, 192...

Terraces, flats, squats, bedsits, mansions, towers, camps and hostels: in Darlinghurst, housing is a mixed bag. This audio story explores the range of lifestyles afforded by Darlinghurst’s dense diversity of dwellings. Voices Jan Cornall, former resident of Darlinghurst squats Paul Solomon, publican’s son and grandson Phillip Adams, former owner of Stoneleigh Shannon Dalton, former Assistant Manag...

At St Vincent's Hospital, the Sisters of Charity have been delivering care to the people of Darlinghurst since 1857. This audio story visits St Vincent’s during three historic public health emergencies: the Spanish Flu, the HIV/AIDS crisis and COVID-19.    Image: Sister and nurse with home visitation car, St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney (Courtesy of the Congregational Archives of the Siste...

In the rapidly gentrifying Darlinghurst of the 1980s, a turf war raged over one of its earliest trades. In this story, we visit the street corners and safe houses where sex workers competed for customers, looked out for each other and stood their ground. Along the way, veterans of the street-based trade describe a changing industry, sharing stories from the frontline of the fight for law reform an...

Darlinghurst has always been a magnet and a haven for exiles and misfits. With writer and Darlo-phile Sunil Badami as guide, this audio story celebrates a handful of local characters and eccentrics, reflecting on the material conditions that enable unconventional people to thrive.     Image: Hare Krishna, Kings Cross 1970-71 (Photographer: Rennie Ellis © Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive...

If you listen after rain, you can still hear the rush of water that used to flow from the sandstone ridge at the apex of Darlinghurst down to the harbour. This audio story goes in search of the creeks and cascades that sustained life and industry for Gadigal people, colonists and Chinese market gardeners, before being covered over by the concrete and tarmac of the modern city.    Image:...

Welcome to a special History Lab series, Listen to Darlinghurst . In this mini episode, History Lab host Anna Clark and Listen to Darlinghurst producer Catherine Freyne introduce the series, which runs from Episodes 18 to 23 on the History Lab feed.  Image: Darlinghurst Rd 1954 by Mark Strizic (State Library of Victoria)   Credits   Producer: Catherine Freyne  Sound engineer: J...

After Jimmy’s trial, what happened to his brother Joe? Joe has mostly been forgotten by history, and his presence in the archives is little more than a whisper. From coronial records, family tales and a visit to a country pub, it becomes clear that Joe fell foul of the frontier, in life and death. And yet, more questions remain: Was Joe Governor, an outlaw, killed lawfully? How do his ancestral re...

How does the law deal with an outlaw? Jimmy Governor is captured and his legal case becomes a lightning rod for justice in the new federation. But how did Australia’s most-wanted murderer get one of the best lawyers in the colony? A prison experiment begins with a diary and we find out how the present mimics the past.

This is the tale of a prison colony trying to become a country and the murder case that stood in its way, but this is not a true crime podcast. Jimmy and Joe Governor, two brothers from Wiradjuri and Wonnarua country, were the last proclaimed outlaws in Australia - wanted dead or alive. 120 years later we examine what has survived and what we can still learn from the Governor brothers' story. To f...

The Last Outlaws is the latest audio series to be released by Impact Studios, an audio production house embedded in the University of Technology Sydney. The trilogy podcast is based on UTS Law Professor Katherine Biber’s tenacious and careful research of Jimmy and Joe Governor, Australia’s last proclaimed outlaws. The Governor brothers' story has been told in books and film before, but never like...

How will Australian universities fare in a post-pandemic world? It depends on an influential but rarely talked about relationship between the state, its institutions, and the public. Discover more in the first podcast episode of The New Social Contract. Brought to you by the makers of History Lab.

Three days before Spain’s general elections in 2004 a series of bombs exploded on crowded Madrid commuter trains, killing almost 200 people. The Spanish authorities found a plastic bag a few blocks away from one of the bomb sites with a single, incomplete fingerprint. This was the trace linked to a man living 9000 kms away, a US Attorney in Oregon by the name of Brandon Mayfield. We’ve been told t...

When was the last time you were asked to sign something and did you stop to think how the strange squiggly mark you make on a page could be used? The signature is a performative act, crucial to the law’s way of knowing, but it’s also been used as an instrument of power and control. In this episode of History Lab we hear from a boy who was stolen, the man who took him away and the Judge who was ask...

'Making a Fortune' looks at the popularity and persecution of two of the most formidable fortune tellers of Federation Australia. In the first decade of the 20th century, Australians were focused on the future. It was the dawn of a new century, and a newly-formed nation. But during this time, police were cracking down on a booming industry dominated by women—it was a service that society deemed su...

History Lab host Dr Tamson Pietsch hands over the mic to Dr Alecia Simmonds, an interdisciplinary scholar of law and history at the University of Technology Sydney. In this bonus episode they dissect how it is the law ‘knows’ and discuss how both history and the law rely on traces from the past to draw conclusions in the present. If truth is uncertain in historical archives - is it even harder to...

Death, money and family are the key ingredients in any last will and testament. They also make a killer cocktail that unleashes a special force not present in any other part of the law. In this episode of History Lab, we’re looking at how the law determines your last wishes through some truly unusual cases. Whether it's for reasons of urgency, eccentricity or expediency, courts around the world re...