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 matter on Wikipedia?
Hosts Heather Ford and Francesca Sidoti go looking, through a map of 35,000 places, a street corner in Penrith, and a fight over one island's name.
How is Wikipedia biased, and why? The answer will surprise you.
This episode comes to History Lab from All That We Touch, a brand new Impact Studios podcast about the entangled relationships between humans, technology, nature and politics. Its inaugural takes a close look at Wikipedia - what it knows, and how it shapes what we know. Subscribe or follow All That We Touch to hear more.
Voices
Heather Ford is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the School of Communication and Social Sciences at UTS. She is the author of “Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age” published by MIT Press.
Dr Francesca Sidoti is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the ARC Discovery project ‘Wikipedia and the nation’s story: towards equity in knowledge production’ in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
Dr Michael Falk is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Melbourne, and is a computational literary scholar, data scientist, speaker and writer. In all his work, he aims to combine the creativity of the arts with the rigour and precision of data science.
Research links
Australian places and Wikipedia
Map of Australian places on Wikipedia (Wikihistories: 2025)
Map showing Edit intensity of Australian place articles: English Wikipedia (Wikihistories: 2025)
Full report: How Australian places are represented on Wikipedia (Wikihistories: 2025)
We analysed 35,000 Wikipedia entries about Australian places. Some of them sanitise history (The Conversation: 2024)
Erinsborough Wikipedia Page
Penrith Wikipedia page
K'gari Wikipedia page
Bias and Wikipedia
Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past by Roy Rosenzweig (The Journal of American History Volume 2006)
Wikipedia's known unknowns (The Guardian 2009) The earliest geographical analyses of Wikipedia’s geographical biases is described Professor Mark Graham.
‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia’s infrastructure and the gender gap ( Social Studies of Science 2017) How Wikipedia’s infrastructure introduces new and less visible sources of gender disparity, by Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman.
Who Gets To Be Notable And Who Doesn't: Gender Bias On Wiki (NPR All Things Considered 2021) On Wikipedia, gender inequality is hiding in plain sight. Of more than a million and a half biographies - that's on the English-language version - fewer than 19% are about women. A recent study by Francesca Tripodi brings some new insight into why that is.
Demographic disparity in Wikipedia coverage: a global perspective (EPJ Data Sci. 2025)Even though people identifying as female and non-binary genders have been better represented in terms of the number of Wikipedia language editions over time, and they are currently better covered than males, current global coverage of people on Wikipedia still shows disparities in both gender and geographical location of biographical subjects in various dimensions.
Wikipedia editors
Who is contributing to Wikimedia projects? (Wikimedia Foundation, nd) The Wikipedia “Change the Stats” page that collates research into the Wikipedia editor base as a baseline for increasing the diversity of Wikipedia editors.
Community Insights Report (Wikimedia Foundation, 2020) A survey with 2500 Wikimedians looking at their demographics, social and technological experiences. Findings from the survey included:
Wikimedia contributors are 87% male. Almost half live in Europe and one-fifth in Northern America, as compared to 9.7% and 4.8% of the global population.
Fewer than 1% of Wikipedia’s editor base in the U.S. identify as Black or African American.
Although women were still markedly underrepresented among contributors, there was a modest increase in women contributors between 2019 (11.5%) and 2020 (15.0%).

Further reading
“Finding Eliza: power and colonial storytelling” by Larissa Behrendt (2016)
“Finding Eliza” exhibition at Hervey Bay Regional Gallery until 16 August 2026
Clips
Jimmy Wales on bias: Lex Fridman podcast 19 June 2023
Comedian Guy Williams on visiting Rottnest Island
Herbs French Letter
World Heritage Fraser Island officially restored to Indigenous name, K'gari, supported by public (ABC News 7 June 2023)
Credits
The executive producer of this series is Heather Ford.
The series is hosted by Heather Ford, Francesca Sidoti and Richard Cooke.
Produced by Jane Curtis. Associate producer is Francesa Sidoti.
Story consultant is Rachael Cusick. Sound by John Jacobs.
Thanks for feedback from Sarah Gilbert, Regina Botros, Celine Teo-Blockey, Siobhan Moylan, Lachlan A Court, Zlata Maltceva, Rosa Ellen, and Kate Lawrence.
All That We Touch artwork by Alexandra Morris. Episode tiles by Jane Curtis.
Bell music composition by Maksim Voloshin-Cleary.
Executive Producer of UTS Impact Studios is Sarah Gilbert.
It’s produced on Gadigal Country in Sydney Australia.
wikihistories is supported by Australian Research Council Grant DP220100662, ‘Wikipedia and the Nation’s Story: Towards Equity in Knowledge Production’.
Find out more at wikihistories.net
Transcripts
Wikipedia and Australia: the bias in the map Transcript Word doc
Wikipedia and Australia: the bias in the map Transcript PDF

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 that path from different vantage points. Hore came of age as a scholar inside the field; Cushing arrived at it gradually, via urban history, historical geography, and a childhood in Nova Scotia that made her attentive to the materialities of place.
They trace the field’s prehistory through Keith Hancock and the historical geographers, and its institutional emergence through the Green Stream at the 2016 AHA conference in Ballarat, which gave environmental historians in Australia a genuine community for the first time. The conversation turns on the field’s core contribution: refusing the false separation of humans from the environments they inhabit, and refusing equally the separation between the humanities and the sciences.
Voices
Jarrod Hore is a Scientia Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales. His research covers landscape photography, geology, and commodity histories in settler colonies. His first book is Visions of Nature (2022).
Nancy Cushing is an Associate Professor at the University of Newcastle, where she recently marked thirty years. She is a past Coral Thomas Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales and has published widely on human-animal relations in Australia.
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
Katie Holmes, Andrea Gaynor and Ruth Morgan, “Doing Environmental History in Urgent Times,” History Australia (2020)
Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011)
Keith Hancock, Discovering Monaro (1977)
Tom Griffiths, "Discovering Hancock: the journey to Monaro" (1999)

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 long-neglected Chinese-language newspapers and Qing Dynasty consular records. They discuss the ethical challenges of community history, the archival work required to recover women’s lives, and a question that has shadowed Chinese communities in Australia across two centuries: first, who counts as Australian, and then, after the Second World War, which China do you belong to?
The conversation is as much personal as scholarly. Kuo reflects on growing up in Taiwan at the end of martial law, a grandmother whose name will never appear in any archive, and the journey from Irish nationalism to Chinese Australian history. Loy-Wilson recalls being an eleven-year-old in Beijing when her father pointed to the crowds on Chang’an Avenue and said, everyone under forty survived the Cultural Revolution.
Voices
Sophie Loy-Wilson is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the Chinese Australian diaspora and the politics of race and labour. Her current book project examines Chinese men during the gold rushes of the 1850s to 1880s.
Mei-fen Kuo is a historian at Macquarie University specialising in Chinese Australian and Taiwanese migration history. Her archival discoveries include consular records from the Qing Dynasty period held in Melbourne’s Chinatown. Her forthcoming book traces the political life of a Taiwanese Australian intellectual and his engagement with democracy movements across the Asia-Pacific.
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
John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (2007)
Cathy May, Top Sawyers: Chinese in Cairns 1870s–1920s (1984)

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)