History Lab

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, Julius Stone, and Tammelo entered a small but influential circle of European émigré thinkers.
Together, they challenged the narrow traditions of Australian legal education, introducing new ideas about law, justice, and society. Through Tammelo’s story and those of his contemporaries, the episode reveals both the constraints of bureaucratic systems and the resilience of those who navigated them, forging intellectual and cultural communities in an often unwelcoming environment.
Voices
Josh Bornstein is a lawyer who specialises in employment and labour relations law, and author of the book, Working for the Brand: how corporations are destroying free speech (Scribe, 2024). Josh’s grandparents fled Poland, arriving in Australia in 1938.
Katherine Biber is a legal scholar, criminologist and historian and Professor of Law at UTS. Her latest book is The Last Outlaws (Simon & Schuster Australia, 2025). Her podcast of the same name is featured on History Lab.
The voice of Ilmar Tammelo is performed by Professor Rain Liivoja and Otto Bondy by Michael Stockenhuber. Paul McCartan voiced the Australian government officials.
Credits
This special History Lab series was made on Gadigal land, in Sydney.
Writer and Producer: Olivia Rosenman
Collaborating scholars: Katherine Biber, Sara Dehm, and Ana Filipa Vrdoljak
Additional research: Eloise Chandler
Sound design and audio engineering: Melissa May
Thank you to everyone we interviewed and all the voice actors for this episode: Terry Kass, Michael Kirby, Anthony Blackshield, Arthur Glass, Eureka Henrick, Rain Livoja, Paul McCartan, and Michael Stockenhuber.
Special thank you to Danny Mulheron, the grandson of Richard Fuchs, for allowing us to use his grandfather’s music in this episode. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.
Emergency Exit was supported by funding from the Australian Research Council.
History Lab is an Impact Studios podcast. Its executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.

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 refugees and real threats.
From there, his world shrank to barbed wire and bureaucracy. Arrested, detained, and then deported on the infamous HMT Dunera, Adam was transported across the world to an internment camp in rural Australia. Yet even within the confines of captivity, Adam refused to be defined by the labels imposed on him. He taught, lectured, and helped build a vibrant intellectual community among fellow internees.
Through Adam’s extraordinary journey, this episode reveals how abstract legal categories can upend lives and how, even in the harshest conditions, people resist, adapt, and hold onto their humanity.
Voices
Josh Bornstein is a lawyer who specialises in employment and labour relations law, and author of the book, Working for the Brand: how corporations are destroying free speech (Scribe, 2024). Josh’s grandparents fled Poland, arriving in Australia in 1938.
Katherine Biber is a legal scholar, criminologist and historian and Professor of Law at UTS. Her latest book is The Last Outlaws (Simon & Schuster Australia, 2025). Her podcast of the same name is featured on History Lab.
Sara Dehm is Associate Professor of Law at UTS, where she teaches and researches in the areas of public international law, legal history, international migration and refugee law, and the law of international organisations. She is also a co-convener of the advocacy network Academics for Refugees.
Ana Filipa Vrdoljak is UTS Professor of Law and the UNESCO Chair in International Law and Cultural Heritage. She is co-coordinator of the UNESCO-UNITWIN Network on Culture in Emergencies.
The voice of Leonherd Adam was performed by Thorsten Kostulski, Carl Wehner by Andreas Bork, Robert Ranulph Marett by Alistair Senior, and Esther Simpson by Toni Johnson. Winston Churchill's voice was generated by a bot. Olivia Rosenman reads the news articles.
Credits
This special History Lab series was made on Gadigal land, in Sydney.
Writer and Producer: Olivia Rosenman
Collaborating scholars: Katherine Biber, Sara Dehm, and Ana Filipa Vrdoljak
Additional research: Eloise Chandler
Sound design and audio engineering: Melissa May
Thank you to everyone we interviewed and all the voice actors for this episode. Mary-Clare Adam, Andreas Bork, Alistair Senior, Toni Johnson, and Thorsten Kostulski who also provided invaluable assistance as a talent scout.
The music in this episode included recordings of the Dunera Mass, composed by Max-Peter Meyer on the ship as it sailed for Australia. It was performed by the Luminescence Chamber Singers and The Oriana Chorale, directed by Roland Peelman A.M. with sound engineering and production Jim Atkins. It was recorded at the Wesley Music Centre Chapel in Canberra in 2024 with the support of Creative Australia.
Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.
Emergency Exit was supported by funding from the Australian Research Council.
History Lab is an Impact Studios podcast. Its executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.

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 immigrants. Through her letters, archival records and personal stories, we meet individuals like German architect Richard Fuchs and Austrian lawyer Eduard Korten, whose futures were shaped by bureaucratic rules about money, age, profession and race.
The episode reveals how seemingly neutral systems such as immigration permits, professional admissions and citizenship rules, can shape lives in profound and unequal ways. What happens when rigid categories fail to reflect the complexity of human lives? How do lawyers - who are pivotal in forming bureaucratic rules - respond when they become the victims of them? Through the stories of real people whose survival hinged on bureaucratic decisions, this podcast introduces the concept of bureaucratic violence: a quiet but devastating force that determines who is allowed to belong, and who is left behind.
Voices
Josh Bornstein is a lawyer who specialises in employment and labour relations law, and author of the book, Working for the Brand: how corporations are destroying free speech (Scribe, 2024). Josh’s grandparents fled Poland, arriving in Australia in 1938.
Katherine Biber is a legal scholar, criminologist and historian and Professor of Law at UTS. Her latest book is The Last Outlaws (Simon & Schuster Australia, 2025). Her podcast of the same name is featured on History Lab.
Sara Dehm is Associate Professor of Law at UTS, where she teaches and researches in the areas of public international law, legal history, international migration and refugee law, and the law of international organisations. She is also a co-convener of the advocacy network Academics for Refugees.
Camilla Wedgewood is voiced by Phoebe Borwick, Josiah Wedgewood by Jonty Claypole, Edward Korten by Bernhard Schmitz, Margaret Hay by Rosa Saladino and Doc Evatt by Gideon Haigh. The voices of Colonel TW White, CH Herbert and the Australian government official were all performed by Paul McCartan. Olivia Rosenman reads the news articles.
Credits
This special History Lab series was made on Gadigal land, in Sydney.
Writer and Producer: Olivia Rosenman
Collaborating scholars: Katherine Biber, Sara Dehm, and Ana Filipa Vrdoljak
Additional research: Eloise Chandler
Sound design and audio engineering: Melissa May
Thank you to everyone we interviewed and all the voice actors for this episode. Dr. Eureka Henrich, Justice Hament Dhanji, Professor Steve Hochstadt, Carina Camamile, Phoebe Borwick, Gideon Haigh, Bernhard Schmitz, Jonty Claypole, Rosa Saladino, and Paul McCartan.
Special thank you to Danny Mulheron, the grandson of Richard Fuchs, for allowing us to use his grandfather’s music throughout this episode.
Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.
Emergency Exit was supported by funding from the Australian Research Council.
History Lab is an Impact Studios podcast. Its executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.

Coming October 1st - this special History Lab series explores the stories of European refugees who escaped Nazi persecution, only to confront new forms of exclusion through Australia’s legal and bureaucratic systems.
Hosted by lawyer Josh Bornstein, with UTS researchers Katherine Biber, Sara Dehm and Ana Filipa Vrdoljak.

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 — not the "last stand" myth historians have leaned on for two centuries, but a life full of relationships, movement, and agency, drawn only from sources written at the time.
The conversation follows Musquito's path from Parramatta to Norfolk Island's coral stone and on to Tasmania's dolerite country, and traces the surprising thread that runs alongside it: Parry Duncan's discovery that her own convict ancestors were caught up in his story, their land grant sitting almost on top of the spot where Musquito was captured. It's a conversation about writing history that holds violence and beauty at once — and about what's owed to a story that's been misused for so long. This episode was recorded live at Gleebooks.
Voices
Dr Naomi Parry Duncan is a professional historian and president of the History Council of NSW, as well as a senior research officer with the Indigenous Land and Justice Research Group at UNSW. She holds adjunct roles at Western Sydney University and the University of Tasmania and was the 2022 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellow. She was lead writer for the NSW Centenary of Anzac publication New South Wales and the Great War (2016).
Associate Professor Delia Falconer is the author of two novels (The Service of Clouds and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers) and two works of nonfiction (Sydney and Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss), which have been shortlisted for national and international awards across the categories of fiction, nonfiction, innovation, biography, history and research. She is the editor of three cohort-defining collections: The Best Australian Stories 2008, The Best Australian Stories 2009 and The Penguin Book of the Road. Delia's short stories and essays have been widely anthologised, including in the landmark Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and The Penguin Century of Australian Stories. Delia teaches creative writing at UTS.
Further reading
Musquito: the real story of a legendary colonial warrior by Naomi Parry Duncan is published by Allen & Unwin.
A review of Musquito by Tim Rowse for The Conversation.
A review of Musquito by Kate Fullagar for Inside Story.
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 Daniel Wiggins.
History Lab is brought to you by the Australian Centre for Public History and UTS Impact Studios. Executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.