History Lab

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 conversation with literary biographer Bernadette Brennan — who is currently writing Modjeska's own biography — and joined by artist Julie Rrap, Modjeska moves from Wilhelmine Germany to 1920s Paris to the liberation of Dachau, tracing the lives of women who saw things their own way.
Voices
Drusilla Modjeska is the author of Poppy, Stravinsky's Lunch, The Orchid, The Mountain, Second Half First, and A Woman's Eye: Her Art, published by Penguin Books Australia.
Bernadette Brennan is a literary critic and the author of A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work and Leaping into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears. She is currently writing a biography of Drusilla Modjeska.
Julie Rrap is one of Australia's most significant contemporary artists. Her survey exhibition Past Continuous, centred on SOMOS, was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in 2024–25. SOMOS is now in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
A Woman's Eye: Her Art is published by Penguin Books Australia.
Credits
This episode of History Lab was recorded on Gadigal Land, Sydney, at Gleebooks. For more literary events like this one, see the Gleebooks events page.
Edited and mixed by Maksim Voloshin-Cleary.
History Lab is brought to you by the Australian Centre for Public History and UTS Impact Studios. Executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.
Works mentioned
Paula Modersohn-Becker
Self-Portrait on the Sixth Wedding Anniversary (1906) — nude self-portrait depicted as pregnant Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen https://online-sammlung.hamburger-kunsthalle.de | Google Arts & Culture entry from the Böttcherstraße Museums: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/IwVRLMk5ACZUJQ
Lying Mother with Child II (1906) — nude mother reclining with child Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum / Museen Böttcherstraße, Bremen Google Arts & Culture: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/lying-mother-with-child-ii-paula-modersohn-becker/LgGzY69gnE9o7Q
Portrait of Clara Rilke-Westhoff (1905) — Clara with rose Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg Collection record: https://online-sammlung.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/de/objekt/HK-2362
Claude Cahun
I Am in Training, Don't Kiss Me (c.1927) — self-portrait with pursed lips and curls Jersey Heritage Collection Jersey Heritage page on Cahun: https://www.jerseyheritage.org/history/claude-cahun-and-jersey/
Que me veux-tu? / What Do You Want From Me? (1928) — double-exposure composite self-portrait Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Also held in the Met collection: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/838682
Self-portrait in jester jacket (c.1928) — catching the viewer's gaze Jersey Heritage Collection (as above)
Dora Maar
Untitled [Assia] (1934) — model casting dramatic shadow Centre Pompidou, Paris (various versions held there and elsewhere) Pompidou reproduction page: https://editions.centrepompidou.fr/en/home-decor/dora-maar-reproduction-untitled-assia/1577.html
Nusch Éluard on the beach (c.1935) — photograph of Éluard lying on beach Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris AWARE Women Artists entry with collection details: https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/dora-maar/
Lee Miller
Tanja Ramm under a Bell Jar (1931) — woman's head enclosed in glass bell jar Lee Miller Archives (Farley Farm, Sussex); widely reproduced but not in a single permanent public collection page — the Lee Miller Archives hold the primary rights: https://www.leemiller.co.uk
Lee Miller in Hitler's Bathtub, Munich (1945) — photographed by David Scherman Held at Tate Britain Tate collection record: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/miller-scherman-lee-miller-in-hitlers-bathtub-munich-x100252
Julie Rrap
SOMOS (Standing On My Own Shoulders) (2023) — life-sized bronze, artist standing on her own shoulders Permanent collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia; also shown at MCA Sydney Ocula interview with full context: https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/julie-rrap-standing-on-her-own-shoulders/ MCA exhibition page: https://www.mca.com.au (search "Julie Rrap Past Continuous")

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 political organiser. Their arrival in Australia came after nearly a decade of enforced silence during the Cold War, when the US government stripped Paul Robeson of his passport.
Recorded live at Gleebooks, historian Ann Curthoys joins journalist and academic Lorena Allam to discuss Curthoys' book, The Last Tour – a look at what happened when the Robesons finally made it to Australia.
What emerges is a portrait of the Robesons as “figures of the future” — speaking a political language that echoes today.
History Lab Live brings you recordings of conversations about Australian history from bookshops, universities and public institutions around the country.
This episode is brought to you in partnership with our friends at Gleebooks. Head to the Gleebooks events page to discover more great literary events featuring some of Australia’s best and best known authors.
Voices
Professor Ann Curthoys is an eminent Australian historian who has researched, taught, and published on many aspects of Australian history, and also on questions of feminism, cultural studies, and historical writing and theory. Her major publications include Freedom Ride: A Freedomrider Remembers (2002); (with John Docker) Is History Fiction? (2005, 2010); and (with Jessie Mitchell), Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-government in the Australian Colonies, 1830 – 1890. The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson's visit to Australia and New Zealand was published in 2025 by MUP.
Lorena Allam is a multiple Walkley Award-winning journalist, a Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay woman, and an Industry Professor of Indigenous media at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology Sydney.
Credits
This episode was introduced by Tamson Pietsch, and mixed by Siobhan Moylan.
History Lab is an Impact Studios podcast. Its executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.

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 been started to bring back the statue of Joy, one of relatively few statues in Sydney that represents a woman - in this case, a sex worker. We are proud and excited to say that Joy has been returned to her rightful place in Darlinghurst, now in bronze and fully permanent!
This episode of History Lab won a Signal Award in the social impact category.
Voices
Julie Bates, veteran sex worker activist; Principal of Urban Realists Planning and Health Consultants.
Chantell Martin, veteran sex worker; Co-CEO of Sex Workers Outreach Project.
Credits
This audio story is a production of the Australian Centre for Public History and Impact Studios at UTS, in partnership with the Paul Ramsay Foundation. It is part of the award-winning Darlinghurst Public History Initiative.
Producer: Catherine Freyne
Sound engineer: Judy Rapley
Music: Blue Dot Sessions
Archival: ABC Library Sales

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 Darlinghurst for years. Walking the streets of the neighbourhood every day, he found himself asking a question the existing histories hadn't quite answered: what did it actually feel like to live in this neighbourhood as the epicentre of an epidemic? The series was his attempt to find out.
Here, Leigh describes the tension between oral history practice — open-ended, associative, unhurried — and what podcasting demands.
Leigh also reflects on the way his research, his interviewees and the collaborative work of making the podcast were able to complicate the story of how AIDS played out in Australia - zooming in to the local experience, and listening to voices that can help us hold that complexity rather than resolve it.
Voices
Leigh Boucher and Tamson Pietsch, presented by Regina Botros.
Credits
Recorded by Siobhan Moylan, edited and mixed by Regina Botros.
History Lab is a UTS Impact Studios production, in collaboration with the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS.
Support
This series of History Lab was made with the support of the support of the Paul Ramsay Foundation and is part of the Foundation's Darlinghurst Public History Initiative, a collaboration with UTS' Australian Centre for Public History and Impact Studios.
Thanks to Macquarie University for its support of this series.
A special thanks goes to the staff and management of City Gym, Darlinghurst, for their generous hospitality. Heartfelt thanks also to Anni Turnbull at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney for her time and expertise, and to the Australian Queer Archives.
Thanks also to the National Library of Australia, the State Library of New South Wales, ACON and the Pride History Group Sydney.

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 spilled into public life — through candlelight vigils, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and growing activism demanding faster access to life-saving drugs.
Then, in 1996, combination therapies changed the course of the epidemic. Soon, for the first time in a decade, the Star Observer ran without a single obituary. But survival came with a new question: how do you rebuild a life — and a community — after so much loss?
This episode explores the final grueling years of the crisis and its aftermath — and the complex and unruly legacies it left for generations to come.
Voices
Narrator: Regina Botros
Historian: Leigh Boucher
Interviewees: Pierre Touma, Lizzie Griggs, Bill Patterson, Frank McCabe, Billy Kokkinos, Tim Vincent, Sara Lubowitz, Bruce Carter, Tess Ziems, Scott Petrie and Ian Innes.
Archive voice actors: Sam David Harris and Michael J Ryan.
Radio news and current affairs archive from Gaywaves, 2SER.
Credits
This special History Lab Original series was created on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation.
Produced, written and narrated by Regina Botros, in collaboration with Macquarie University historian Leigh Boucher.
Story development by Leigh Boucher and Michelle Ransom-Hughes.
Interviews by Leigh Boucher.
Research assistance from Eli Branagh.
Story and script editing by Sarah Gilbert.
History Lab is a UTS Impact Studios production, in collaboration with the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS.
Support
This podcast was made with the support of the support of the Paul Ramsay Foundation and is part of the Foundation's Darlinghurst Public History Initiative, a collaboration with UTS' Australian Centre for Public History and Impact Studios.
Thanks to Macquarie University for its support of this series.
A special thanks goes to the staff and management of City Gym, Darlinghurst, for their generous hospitality. Heartfelt thanks also to Anni Turnbull at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney for her time and expertise, and to the Australian Queer Archives.
Thanks also to the National Library of Australia, the State Library of New South Wales, ACON and the Pride History Group Sydney.
Further reading
To learn more about the history and complex legacies of AIDS in Darlinghurst, read these articles by Leigh Boucher:
Reciting the names of the dead: how Australia's response to HIV/Aids was emotionally - and politically - powerful, Guardian Australia, 1 Dec 2025.
What have we lost with 2026's Mardi Gras Parade after party cancellation?, Star Observer, 13 Feb 2026.