History Lab

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...

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...

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...

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...

Feminist history in Australia grew out of the women’s liberation movement and the theoretical challenge it posed to what counted as a proper subject for historical inquiry. Marilyn Lake and Clare Corbould trace that...

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...

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...

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)...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In the late 1970s and early 80s, Sydney’s Darlinghurst was the place to be for queer fun, sex and joy – all bubbling alongside a measure of danger. Packed bars, late-night gyms, house music, new friendships and the...