History Lab

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 their lives”; they are killed by someone, with something, for reasons that can be named. And it insists on the connections between home front and battlefield that have too often been treated as separate stories.
The conversation includes the Australian War Memorial’s 2022 decision to reverse its long-standing position about the frontier wars — a change, Rogers argues, that came directly from decades of academic research, not popular opinion. They discuss the centenary wave and its aftermath, the digitisation of First World War records, and the way genealogy pulls people into military history and then requires them to understand the broader context.
Voices
Maggie Hutchison is a Senior Lecturer in History at UNSW Canberra. Her research covers war art, commemoration, and the long-term costs of military service. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary project on veteran suicide.
Tom Rogers is a historian in the Military History section at the Australian War Memorial. His research focuses on the colonial period and the frontier wars. He is currently working on soldiers’ letters published in newspapers during the South African War.
Credits
Recorded and edited by Lachlan D’Acourt. Executive producers: Michelle Arrow and Kate Fullagar. Executive producer, Impact Studios: Sarah Gilbert. History Lab is made by UTS Impact Studios and the Australian Centre for Public History. Field Notes is made in collaboration with the Australian Historical Association.
Further Reading
Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (2013)
Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (2019)
Evan S. Connell, Son of the Morning Star (1984)
Andrew Gordon, The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command (1996)

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 history from Kay Daniels’s 1975 national archival survey through the shift from women’s history to gender history, the writing of Creating a Nation (1994), the history wars of the 1990s, and the transnational networks that took Australian feminist historians well beyond the local debates. Lake describes a moment of liberation in those years: realising that if Australian male historians wouldn’t engage with feminist scholarship seriously, there were feminist historians across the world who would.
The conversation is candid about the paradox that remains. Women now make up roughly half of employed historians in Australia, and women have often led the Australian Historical Association. But national histories — written by men of both progressive and conservative persuasions — continue to treat women as peripheral.
Voices
Marilyn Lake is Professorial Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne and one of the founding figures of feminist history in Australia. Her books include Creating a Nation (co-authored with Patricia Grimshaw, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly), Getting Equal and Drawing the Global Colour Line (with Henry Reynolds). She is currently working on a project about Australia’s founding ideals in 1901.
Clare Corbould is a Professor of History at Monash University. Her research focuses on African American history and its transnational dimensions. She is currently writing about Sally Hemings and the history of the American Revolution.
Credits
Recorded and edited by Lachlan D’Acourt. Executive producers: Michelle Arrow and Kate Fullagar. Executive producer, Impact Studios: Sarah Gilbert. History Lab is made by UTS Impact Studios and the Australian Centre for Public History. Field Notes is made in collaboration with the Australian Historical Association.
Further Reading
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1970)
Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985)
Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath, and Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation (1994)
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilisation (1995)

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 through the study of 1960s transnational activism, and found his way to decolonisation proper only when a supervisor’s question stuck with him long enough to send him back to sources he thought he’d already exhausted.
They discuss what a decolonial approach actually requires: taking positionality seriously, working across archives that are not equally preserved, and refusing to let the boundaries of the logo map define Australian history. The conversation moves through the historiography — Frantz Fanon, CLR James, the landmark work of Tracy Banivanua Mar on decolonisation as an oceanic movement — and into practical questions about how the history is made. Piccini describes working with Papua New Guinean archives and the irreducible privilege involved in that encounter, while Woollacott discusses the seminal work of Henry Reynolds and the influence of the Colonial Frontiers Massacres Map as presenting incontrovertible evidence of frontier violence.
Voices
Jon Piccini is a Senior Lecturer in History at Australian Catholic University in Brisbane/Meanjin. His work spans transnational activism, human rights history, and Australia’s colonial relationships in the Pacific. He is completing a book on Australia and decolonisation.
Angela Woollacott is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the School of History at the Australian National University, on Ngunnawal Country. Her books include Settler Society in the Australian Colonies (2015) and a biography of Don Dunstan. Her current project examines Australians who shaped the intellectual and political challenge to colonialism in the mid-twentieth century.
Credits
Recorded and edited by Lachlan D’Acourt. Executive producers: Michelle Arrow and Kate Fullagar. Executive producer, Impact Studios: Sarah Gilbert. History Lab is made by UTS Impact Studios and the Australian Centre for Public History. Field Notes is made in collaboration with the Australian Historical Association.
Further Reading
Tracy Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific (2016)
CLR James, The Black Jacobins (1938; rev. ed. 1963)
Shannyn Palmer, Unmaking Angus Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station (2022) — Prime Minister’s History Prize winner
Jessica Urwin, Contaminated Country (forthcoming, Melbourne University Press)
Henry Reynolds, Looking from the North (2024)

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 Sydney's music history from the early 1980s to the early 2010s. Combing through 375 issues of On the Street and 685 issues of Drum Media, Giuffre reconstructed the full gig history of the Hoey — a 200-capacity pub in Surry Hills that somehow managed to be the centre of a very special universe. The numbers tell part of the story: 375 slots for live music in just the first decade, the majority free, Wednesday nights the busiest, genres and genders far more diverse than the "blokey pub rock" myth would have you believe.
But archives only get you so far — the rest is memory, and this panel has plenty of it. From Machine Gun Fellatio forming almost by accident after a misprint in a gig listing, to Box the Jesuit's anatomically ambitious birthday cakes, to the gentleman's agreements between venue bookers that briefly kept Paul Kelly off the Hopetoun stage, the conversation ranges across what made the Hoey's ecosystem tick: the bands, the bookers, the barflies, the street press journos, Terry the Pieman, and Johnny's fish and chips next door. The panel also looks forward — at what's been lost to unaffordability and dispersal, what's quietly thriving in record stores and warehouse spaces and jewellery shops on Parramatta Road, and why culture, as one panellist puts it, always finds a way.
Voices
Dr Liz Giuffre is a Senior Lecturer in Communications at UTS, a music and arts journalist, and a fan. Her work has been published widely for academic and general audiences, and she is still an active commentator online and on radio via TheMusic, 2SER FM and ABC Radio Sydney. She was one of the Library’s Visiting Fellows in 2024. Her new book, Spirits of the Hoey, is a love letter to the iconic Hopetoun Hotel.
Chit Chat von Loopin Stab is a filmmaker, lyricist, music producer, TV presenter, radio announcer, film score composer and gardener. He cowrote The Whitlams’ hit song ‘No Aphrodisiac’, which was voted number one on the Hottest 100 of 1997 and won the 1998 ARIA Award for Song of the Year. Chit Chat is also founding member, producer, manager, keyboardist and occasional vocalist for Machine Gun Fellatio, as well as a music TV presenter on Foxtel’s Max for 12 years. His score for the 2003 Australian crime film Getting Square won multiple awards. Chit Chat’s first band Vrag were regulars at the Hopetoun, as was Machine Gun Fellatio.
Emily Collins is a seasoned music industry leader with deep expertise in strategy, policy and program development. Prior to her appointment as Head of Sound NSW, Emily served for eight years as the Managing Director of MusicNSW, where she played a pivotal role in strengthening the state’s contemporary music sector. Emily’s career began in major music festivals, including the Cockatoo Island Festival and the Great Escape Festival, before expanding into marketing roles at Underbelly Arts Festival, Sydney Writers’ Festival and Darwin Festival. A long-standing champion of the NSW music industry, she has been a prominent advocate for the sector and continues to support artists, venues, festivals and industry organisations across the state through her leadership at Sound NSW.
Lex Davidson is the manager of Cultural Strategy for the City of Sydney and the Chairperson of the Music Cities Network, a global network of music policy professionals. Under his stage name Lex Lindsay, he is a multidisciplinary artist, theatre maker and music composer with a background in directing film and music festivals. Lex has produced work for two Biennales of Sydney and is a contributing artist to pieces in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). His current project, composing choral works for CREATION, a speculative queer climate action religion, has been performed at the Sydney Opera House, Art Gallery of NSW, Carriageworks, and will feature in the grand reopening of the renovated Newcastle Art Gallery in 2026.
Susie Beauchamp is half of the songwriting/performance powerhouse Box The Jesuit, an incredible live and recorded Sydney band from the mid 1980s until early 1990s. They supported Nirvana at the first Big Day Out and, more importantly, gave Hoey patrons all singing, all dancing, all death-defying, all pornographic cake eating nights to remember! The band ended when Susie’s partner in music and life, Goose (Stephen Gray) passed away. The legend remains, and the music remains completely captivating.
Tamson Pietsch is director of the Australian Centre for Public History and History Lab's presenter.
Credits
This episode of History Lab was recorded on Gadigal Land, Sydney, at the State Library of New South Wales. For more literary events like this one, see the library's What's On page.
Edited and mixed by Lachlan A'Court.
History Lab is brought to you by the Australian Centre for Public History and UTS Impact Studios. Executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.
Further reading and listening
Explore the Spirits of the Hoey web page.
Buy Spirits of the Hoey at Melbourne Books.
For more Hoey memories, listen to another Impact Studios podcast ep featuring authors Liz Giuffre and Greg Ferris speaking with singer-songwriters Sarah Blasko and Sally Seltman, along with Hoodoo Gurus bassist Clyde Bramley about the life and times of the Hopetoun Hotel.

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 discussion, hosted by journalist and academic Catharine Lumby, the panel examines how music, comedy, film and design crossed over from fringe scenes into the mainstream — and why that transition was never a sellout, but a negotiation.
The discussion ranges from the Sydney pub rock circuit and the role of Countdown, to the institutional infrastructure — public broadcasters, independent labels, accessible welfare — that quietly made it all possible. And they ask the harder question: without that scaffolding, what does the future of Australian creative life actually look like? Enjoy a cameo appearance from Paul Fenech, actor, director, producer and comedian (Pizza, Fat Pizza and Housos).
Fringe to Famous is published by Bloomsbury Academic, and the launch was held on Gadigal land, at Sydney's Gleebooks.
Voices
Tony Moore is a cultural historian and Professor of Media and Communications at Monash University, where he leads major ARC-funded projects on Australian comedy and the convict roots of democracy. A former ABC documentary maker and book publisher, his previous books include Dancing with Empty Pockets: Australia's Bohemians, Death or Liberty: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia, and The Barry McKenzie Movies. He is co-author of Fringe to Famous: Cultural Production in Australia After the Creative Industries.
Mark Gibson is Professor in the School of Media and Communications at RMIT University. His research spans cultural and creative industries, the history of cultural studies, comedy and the role of audiences in cultural production. He is the author of Culture and Power: A History of Cultural Studies and co-author of Fringe to Famous: Cultural Production in Australia After the Creative Industries.
Reg Mombassa is a New Zealand-born Australian artist and musician. A founding member of Mental as Anything — inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2009 — he is also a member of Dog Trumpet alongside his brother Peter. As principal artist and designer for Mambo Graphics, his work helped define the visual identity of one of Australia's most iconic and irreverent surf and streetwear labels. He continues to work as a visual artist and musician.
Catharine Lumby (host) is Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney and foundation chair of its Media and Communications Department. The author and co-author of six books, she writes regularly for The Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald and the ABC, and has advised the public and private sectors on cultural diversity, bullying prevention and social media. She is a leading public intellectual on media, culture and gender in Australia.
Paul Fenech is an Australian filmmaker, writer, director, producer and actor. After winning Tropfest in 1998, he was able to parlayed his 1995 third-place entry, about his life as a pizza delivery driver, into the SBS series Pizza, which ran for five seasons from 2000. He went on to create Housos — winner of the Logie for Most Outstanding Light Entertainment Program in 2014.
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.