History Lab

In the 1850s, every criminal case in New South Wales began the same way: a clerk, a sheet of foolscap and a pen. Into those depositions went the grudges and schemes of colonial life. In Orange, a woman burned her neighbour's wheat stack and tried to bribe the constable to pin it on someone else. In Balranald, a clerk underlined the key legal points before sending the papers to Sydney, as if to instruct the Attorney General in his own business. In Law in the New Democracy (ANU Press), historian Paula Jane Byrne mines these records to show how people across the colony used, bent and resisted the law. The picture that emerges is a colony run very differently from the one found in general histories, where local populations, suspicious magistrates and outspoken juries shaped how justice worked as much as the courts in Sydney did.
In conversation with Rachel Franks, Byrne explains what these records reveal about how the colony worked. Women, often assumed to be on the margins, were among the most active litigants in the interior. The Supreme Court in Sydney, long seen as the seat of colonial justice, sent Aboriginal people to trial on evidence that barely held together. The result is a history that unsettles the familiar story of lawless frontier and orderly metropolis.
Voices
Paula Jane Byrne is an historian, and author of Law in the New Democracy (ANU Press, 2026) and Criminal Law and Colonial Subject: New South Wales, 1810–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Rachel Franks is a writer and researcher, author of An Uncommon Hangman: The Life and Deaths of Robert 'Nosey Bob' Howard (NewSouth, 2022) . She is the scholarships coordinator at the State Library of New South Wales.
Credits
This episode was recorded on Gadigal land in Sydney. It was edited and mixed by Lachlan A'Court.
History Lab is an Impact Studios podcast. Its executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.

Following our special series, Emergency Exit, this episode of History Lab looks at what happened to those who didn't escape Nazi persecution in Europe in the 1930s and '40s.
Historian Nadia Wheatley's Strange New World began with a manilla envelope: a newspaper clipping and a photograph, sent by her stepmother after her father's death, showing him as medical superintendent of a hospital in post-war Germany. What followed was a decade of research into a story Wheatley argues has never been fully told — the year after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, when the concentration camp was burned to the ground but the displaced persons camp that replaced it became home to tens of thousands of survivors who had nowhere else to go.
In conversation with writer Linda Jaivin, Wheatley traces the mismanaged relief effort that cost thousands of lives in the weeks after liberation, the fraught decision to staff the camp hospital with German doctors and nurses, and the political organising that pushed the British administration toward recognising Belsen as a Jewish displaced persons camp.
The conversation also follows the more hopeful undercurrent of that year: the couples who met and married at Belsen, the roughly two thousand babies born there between 1945 and 1950, and how former camp prisoners refused to be locked in again by their new overseers. Wheatley discusses returning to the site repeatedly since 2014, meeting survivors and "the babies" — some of whom she has since encountered living in Sydney, Melbourne and Toronto — and reflects on what it meant to stand, as the daughter of the hospital's superintendent, among people for whom that hospital remains a kind of sacred site.
Images
To see the images that Nadia Wheatley refers to in her talk, visit this link.
Voices
Nadia Wheatley is an Australian writer whose work includes picture books, novels, biography and history. In 2014 she was admitted by the University of Sydney to the degree of Doctor of Letters (honoris causa), in recognition of her work as a creative writer and historian. Among her many beloved titles are the children's books My Place and Dancing at the Anzac Deli. For adults, she is the author of The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift , a biography (HarperCollins 2002). Strange New World is her latest book (Monash University Publishing, 2026).
Linda Jaivin is an internationally published Australian author, translator, essayist, novelist and specialist writer on China. Her most recent book is The Shortest History of Madrid (Black Ink, 2026).
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.

In this bonus episode, Ana Filipa Vrdoljak speaks with Rob Quinn, executive director of Scholars at Risk, about the international network's work protecting the human rights of threatened scholars and defending academic freedom. Founded in 1999 at the University of Chicago by a group of academics moved by a radio interview with an exiled scholar, Scholars at Risk now spans more than 650 member institutions in over 40 countries. Quinn traces how the organisation's work has grown from offering individual fellowships to campaigning against wrongful imprisonment, monitoring attacks on higher education, and building international legal standards for academic freedom.
The conversation connects directly to Vrdoljak's own research: an Australian Research Council-funded project on the European émigré lawyers who fled fascism in the 1930s and 40s and found refuge in Australia, soon to be released as the podcast series Emergency Exit. Quinn and Vrdoljak discuss the parallels between that earlier era and today's, the crucial distinction between academic freedom and free speech, and the stories of scholars including Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, imprisoned for defending women protesting Iran's mandatory hijab laws, whose cases show what is at stake when that freedom is denied.
Voices
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.
Robert Quinn is Executive Director of Scholars at Risk. He hosts the Free to Think podcast.
Further reading and listening
'Fighting to Protect - and Define - Academic Freedom' by Robert Quinn
Find out about the work of Scholars at Risk and how you can contribute here.
To listen to the ‘Free to Think’ podcast link through here.
Credits
This episode was recorded on Gadigal Land, in Sydney. It was recorded by Siobhan Moylan and edited by BLAH.
Emergency Exit was supported by funding from the Australian Research Council.
History Lab is an Impact Studios podcast. Its executive producer is Dr Sarah Gilbert.

In this bonus episode, employment and human rights lawyer Josh Bornstein talks with Katherine Biber about the family history that shaped his career. Bornstein's grandparents left Poland in 1933 hoping to escape, finally securing passage to Melbourne in 1938, only for his grandmother to be hospitalised under a Nazi doctor and his grandfather interrogated by German police during a stopover before they could continue the journey. Growing up in a politically engaged household — his mother a union official, his father a journalist and, for a time, a politician — Bornstein built a career defending workers and refugees against far more powerful opponents, including the Transport Workers Union's case against Qantas, which he took to a seven nil victory in the High Court and more than $200 million in combined compensation and penalties.
The conversation also turns to the language used to describe how governments treat refugees. Bornstein pushes back on the term "bureaucratic violence," arguing that responsibility lies with political decisions rather than the public service, drawing on his experience acting for Shayan Badraie, the young Iranian refugee whom then immigration minister Philip Ruddock refused to refer to as anything other than "it." He also reflects on the legacy of the Tampa election, the use of refugee policy as a political weapon since, and his recent writing on international law and Israel's obligations under the ICJ's provisional measures order in the genocide case.
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.
Credits
This special History Lab series was made on Gadigal land, in Sydney. It was edited and mixed by BLAH.
Emergency Exit was supported by funding from the Australian Research Council.
History Lab is an Impact Studios podcast. Its executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.

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.