Announcer: Head’s up, if you are Australian Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, you should be aware that this trailer contains the voices and names of deceased persons.

Tamson Pietsch: This season on History Lab we’re delving into the traces left by the law

Claude Roux: we work with a lot of shades of grey. We work with a lot of uncertainties here right from the beginning

Tamson Pietsch: And this means we’ll be looking at the ‘law’s way of knowing’

Alicia Simmonds: I think that the law is sometimes the worst place to look for the truth or is certainly not the only place…

Katherine: One thing I’ve observed is that death, money and family together are some kind of special cocktail

Tamson Pietsch: Fortunes will be made…

Samadhi: They talk about tins of gold… she used to hide her wealth in the backyard.

Tamson Pietsch: And forgotten

Actor: “Mrs Scales…  was one of the most remarkable figures in the legal history of the State”.

Tamson Pietsch:  but you’ve probably never heard of her

Samadhi: and he said “oh you know we have a psychic ancestor?” and I said what we have a what?”

Tamson Pietsch: We’ll be looking at how the law knows YOU.

Olivia Rosenmann: What exactly is a signature?

Trish: Well, the more I research signatures, the more difficult that question becomes.

Tamson Pietsch: And revisit a theft of the most intimate kind, sealed by a thumb mark and settled by the courts…

NEWS: …the decision a devastation for those determined that justice would be their’s.

News: (ABC Kerry O’Brien) After sitting for 107 days… Justice Maurice O’Laughlin dismissed the landmark compensation case based on claims relating to the removal of two children from their Aboriginal communities … in Mr Gunner’s case the Judge accepted his mother’s thumbprint as evidence she had authorised his removal…

Tamson Pietsch: And, we’ll hear about the 16 words scratched into a tractor fender by a dying man

Geoff Ellwand: he scrawled on the tractor will a very simple message “in case I die in this mess. I leave all to the wife”. And he signed it

Tamson Pietsch: that would change the way courts across the world think about what makes something a legal document

Tamson Pietsch: So strap in as we take you into places you’ve possibly never been before.

Tammy: I’d like you to shuffle these for me… just shuffle shuffle until one falls out and then stop shuffling …. I like to call these my inner purpose cards…

Tamson Pietsch:  Where we’ve definitely never been before

Xanthe: So we are going into the wet lab….

Xanthe: … pour out some of the iodine and iron zinc solution into a tray and will soak the document. We let it air dry a little bit until it no longer smells like salt and vinegar chips.

Tamson Pietsch: Now if we could only get this tape to play ….

Olivia Rosenmann: Oh shit…

Emma Lancaster: what does the beeping mean?

Tamson Pietsch: History Lab season three lands December 12. ‘The Law’s way of knowing’ is a special four-part series (with a bonus ep), where we look at histories that intersect with the law.

Claude Roux: everything leaves a trace

Tamson Pietsch: History Lab is made on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation whose land was never ceded.

Announcer: This award winning podcast is a collaboration by the Australian Centre for Public History, Impact Studios a new audio initiative at the University of Technology Sydney and our media partner 2SER.