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.

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.

What made Australia’s fringe cultural scene so generative in the 1980s — and what can it teach us about sustaining creative industries today?

What happens to women’s art when the world stops looking?

In this episode of History Lab Live, we revisit a remarkable moment in Australian history: the 1960 visit of Paul Robeson and his wife, Eslanda Robeson.

In this episode from History Lab’s archive, we stay in Darlinghurst with the award winning Red Light Green Light story from our Listen to Darlinghurst series.

In this bonus episode, History Lab’s Tamson Pietsch speaks with historian Leigh Boucher about the making of Darlinghurst’s AIDS Crisis — our three-part History Lab series exploring one of the most intense and concentrated episodes of loss, activism, and community life in Australian history (if you haven’t listened yet, go to episodes 42-44 of History Lab).

By the early 1990s, AIDS had reached its devastating peak in Darlinghurst. Obituaries filled the pages of the Star Observer, funerals became routine. Sickness and loss touched almost every friendship and street in the neighbourhood.

By the mid-1980s, the epidemic had taken hold in Darlinghurst. Fear was rising, homophobia was intensifying, and uncertainty shaped everyday life. Who had the virus? What did a positive test mean? And could the state be trusted with that information?

In the late 1970s and early 80s, Sydney’s Darlinghurst was the place to be for queer fun, sex and joy – all bubbling alongside a measure of danger.

Australia’s response to HIV and AIDS is often remembered as a national success story — one shaped by public health policy, activism and community action.

Professor Heather Goodall was a pioneering historian whose research transformed understandings of Indigenous history, both in her field and in the broader community. Her work demonstrated a deep personal and professional commitment to social and environmental justice. In this episode we pay tribute to her and celebrate her legacy.

In this episode of History Lab Live, historians and political analysts step back from the daily churn to review the May 2025 Australian federal election through a long lens: a decisive Labor victory built on an historically low primary vote, a further erosion of the major-party duopoly, and a growing sense that Australian politics is both shifting, and hollowing out.

In this episode of History Lab Live, we bring you a conversation about the joys and challenges of translating Australian history to television.

History Lab Live presents the 2025 David Scott Mitchell Oration, delivered by Kim Williams at the State Library of New South Wales.

Caribbean Convicts weaves together the story of the Caribbean men who arrived in Sydney onboard the convict ship the Moffatt on August 30, 1836. Most had been enslaved, including William Buchanan, a Jamaican man transported for participating in the Christmas Day slave uprising in Jamaica in 1831-32.

In this special episode of Caribbean Echoes, series producers Ben Etherington and Sienna Brown are in conversation with star Jamaican-Australian actress Zahra Newman and acclaimed playwright Alana Valentine.

Hear author and historian Katherine Biber tell the story of Jimmy and Joe Governor, Wiradjuri and Wonnarua brothers, who in 1900 went on a murder spree that killed nine people and terrified countless others.

What connects a VFL “Champion of the Colony” to a woman born enslaved in Jamaica?

Who was the Caribbean-Australian cabaret star who could bring down the house — and come back at racism with a joke?

What does boxing have to do with anticolonial politics?

Did you know that the most famous Australian in the world in 1890 was from the Caribbean?

History Lab is back—refreshed and reimagined.

What is the work of truth-telling? How is evidence collected? What happens next?

This special episode from our archives speaks to this year’s NAIDOC Week themes of strength, vision and legacy.

Colonial portraits have long dictated how Indigenous people were seen. But Indigenous artists continue to challenge that power. Through satire, reinterpretation, and resistance, they’re using art to question history—and reshape the future.  

In this episode, historians Kate Fullagar and Mike McDonnell revisit Bennelong’s portraits to examine how colonial art encountered Indigenous identity. Indigenous scholar Jo Rey, a Dharug woman, challenges these depictions, questioning their accuracy and impact.  

Bennelong, a Wangal man of the Eora nation, was among the first Aboriginal people to travel to Europe and return. As a crucial interlocutor between his people and the British colonists, he navigated two worlds but the way he was depicted in colonial portraits raises complex questions. In one, he appears in traditional body paint. In another, years later, he is dressed in European clothing, his identity seemingly reshaped for a colonial gaze. Do these portraits tell us more about Bennelong or the people who painted him? 

Can colonial depictions of Indigenous people tell us anything useful about the past?   

If you’re an old friend, hello and thank you for hitting play. If you’re a new listener, welcome.

A special History Lab episode with a soundwork that explores the history of Sydney’s South Head, followed by an interview with the maker Sinead Roarty and Director of the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS, Tamson Pietsch.

We’ve got a new history podcast for you and the kids in your life, called Hey History! 

In 1887 there were no less than 22 hotels in Darlinghurst. Over the next century and a half, the character, culture and clientele of Darlinghurst pubs evolved. This story explores the impact on Darlinghurst of two episodes of liquor licensing restrictions in NSW: six o’clock closing and the Sydney lockout laws. 

Terraces, flats, squats, bedsits, mansions, towers, camps and hostels: in Darlinghurst, housing is a mixed bag. This audio story explores the range of lifestyles afforded by Darlinghurst’s dense diversity of dwellings.

At St Vincent’s Hospital, the Sisters of Charity have been delivering care to the people of Darlinghurst since 1857. This audio story visits St Vincent’s during three historic public health emergencies: the Spanish Flu, the HIV/AIDS crisis and COVID-19. 

In the rapidly gentrifying Darlinghurst of the 1980s, a turf war raged over one of its earliest trades. In this story, we visit the street corners and safe houses where sex workers competed for customers, looked out for each other and stood their ground. Along the way, veterans of the street-based trade describe a changing industry, sharing stories from the frontline of the fight for law reform and workers’ rights.

Darlinghurst has always been a magnet and a haven for exiles and misfits. With writer and Darlo-phile Sunil Badami as guide, this audio story celebrates a handful of local characters and eccentrics, reflecting on the material conditions that enable unconventional people to thrive.    

If you listen after rain, you can still hear the rush of water that used to flow from the sandstone ridge at the apex of Darlinghurst down to the harbour. This audio story goes in search of the creeks and cascades that sustained life and industry for Gadigal people, colonists and Chinese market gardeners, before being covered over by the concrete and tarmac of the modern city. 

Welcome to a special History Lab series, Listen to Darlinghurst. In this mini episode, History Lab host Anna Clark and Listen to Darlinghurst producer Catherine Freyne introduce the series, which runs from Episodes 18 to 23 on the History Lab feed. 

After Jimmy’s trial, what happened to his brother Joe?

How does the law deal with an outlaw?

This is the tale of a prison colony trying to become a country and the murder case that stood in its way, but this is not a true crime podcast.

The Last Outlaws is the latest audio series to be released by Impact Studios, an audio production house embedded in the University of Technology Sydney.

How will Australian universities fare in a post-pandemic world? It depends on an influential but rarely talked about relationship between the state, its institutions, and the public. Discover more in the first podcast episode of The New Social Contract.

Three days before Spain’s general elections in 2004 a series of bombs exploded on crowded Madrid commuter trains, killing almost 200 people.

When was the last time you were asked to sign something and did you stop to think how the strange squiggly mark you make on a page could be used?

‘Making a Fortune’ looks at the popularity and persecution of two of the most formidable fortune tellers of Federation Australia.

History Lab host Dr Tamson Pietsch hands over the mic to Dr Alecia Simmonds, an interdisciplinary scholar of law and history at the University of Technology Sydney. In this bonus episode they dissect how it is the law ‘knows’ and discuss how both history and the law rely on traces from the past to draw conclusions in the present. If truth is uncertain in historical archives – is it even harder to find in the courtroom?

Death, money and family are the key ingredients in any last will and testament. They also make a killer cocktail that unleashes a special force not present in any other part of the law.

History Lab is back for a third season, fresh from wins at the New York Radio Festival Awards and the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia.

History Lab audio makers explore how we’ve tried to understand the past through sound in season two

In the aftermath of World War One, nations came together in an attempt to ensure war on the same devastating scale could never occur again. The result? The League of Nations: a revolutionary idea to form the world’s first international organisation. But clearly it did not stop the world from going to war.

Where do jelly babies come from?

In 1817, the Bank of New South Wales opened as the first financial institution in the Australian colonies. But when the first customers arrived for the grand opening, they found someone had already made a deposit. Where did the money come from? Our producers, Jason and Nicole, follow the record trail and discover the uncertain foundations of Australia’s first bank.

Sydney’s iconic Opera House plays host to musicians and dancers, actors and singers. But beneath the notes of their voices, another song echoes across the city’s waters.

What does it take to make History Lab?

In the middle of a mining town in outback Australia, over 400 kilometres from the closest ocean, stands a monument dedicated to the memory of the Titanic.

Quietly buried away in Western Sydney’s state archives is a secret history of love.

What happens to evidence after a criminal trial?

History Lab explores the gaps between us and the past.