Making Public Histories

While the idea of Cold War-era spies often evokes cliched images of James Bond or John La Carré, the reality of spies and surveillance in Cold War Australia was far […]

Over the best part of a decade, we've been researching the history of Australian fathering and family life, from 1919 to the present day, working alongside a team that's also included John Murphy, Johnny Bell and Mike Roper. Drawing upon hundreds of oral history interviews from several national collections, as well as memoirs, wartime letters […]

Heatwaves are forgotten killers as deaths occur silently, in homes and institutions. In urban and temperate areas heatwaves evaporate from our memory, erased by the drama of fire, flood and […]

Women were outsiders in the criminal justice system for most of the nineteenth century. Unable to practice law, sit on juries or serve in the police force, they were subject to the operation of a masculine legal system. But this did not mean that they were without agency. Through the lives of three very different […]

Threats to democratic and republican regimes in the contemporary world have caused historians to reflect on how they fail. Are they vulnerable to authoritarian and military threats, or are they victims of their own shortcomings? Three historians of very different periods in world history join with host Peter McPhee to discuss this fundamental issue. Host: […]