How do you tell the story of a "warrior" without flattening him into myth? That question sits at the heart of this episode, as historian Naomi Parry Duncan talks with writer Delia Falconer about her new biography of Musquito — a warrior born around Port Jackson who lived through the first shockwaves of British invasion, was exiled to Norfolk Island, and ultimately met his end in Van Diemen's Land. Parry Duncan set out to tell his full, complicated story — not the "last stand" myth historians have leaned on for two centuries, but a life full of relationships, movement, and agency, drawn only from sources written at the time.

The conversation follows Musquito's path from Parramatta to Norfolk Island's coral stone and on to Tasmania's dolerite country, and traces the surprising thread that runs alongside it: Parry Duncan's discovery that her own convict ancestors were caught up in his story, their land grant sitting almost on top of the spot where Musquito was captured. It's a conversation about writing history that holds violence and beauty at once — and about what's owed to a story that's been misused for so long. This episode was recorded live at Gleebooks.

Voices

Dr Naomi Parry Duncan is a professional historian and president of the History Council of NSW, as well as a senior research officer with the Indigenous Land and Justice Research Group at UNSW. She holds adjunct roles at Western Sydney University and the University of Tasmania and was the 2022 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellow. She was lead writer for the NSW Centenary of Anzac publication New South Wales and the Great War (2016).

Associate Professor Delia Falconer is the author of two novels (The Service of Clouds and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers) and two works of nonfiction (Sydney and Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss), which have been shortlisted for national and international awards across the categories of fiction, nonfiction, innovation, biography, history and research. She is the editor of three cohort-defining collections: The Best Australian Stories 2008, The Best Australian Stories 2009 and The Penguin Book of the Road. Delia's short stories and essays have been widely anthologised, including in the landmark Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and The Penguin Century of Australian Stories. Delia teaches creative writing at UTS.

Further reading

Musquito: the real story of a legendary colonial warrior by Naomi Parry Duncan is published by Allen & Unwin.

A review of Musquito by Tim Rowse for The Conversation.

A review of Musquito by Kate Fullagar for Inside Story.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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%).

“Finding Eliza: power and colonial storytelling” by Larissa Behrendt (2016)

“Finding Eliza” exhibition at Hervey Bay Regional Gallery until 16 August 2026

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)

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

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

• 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)

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.

They discuss what a decolonial approach actually requires: taking positionality seriously, working across archives that are not equally preserved, and refusing to let the boundaries of the logo map define Australian history. The conversation moves through the historiography — Frantz Fanon, CLR James, the landmark work of Tracy Banivanua Mar on decolonisation as an oceanic movement — and into practical questions about how the history is made. Piccini describes working with Papua New Guinean archives and the irreducible privilege involved in that encounter, while Woollacott discusses the seminal work of Henry Reynolds and the influence of the Colonial Frontiers Massacres Map as presenting incontrovertible evidence of frontier violence.

Jon Piccini is a Senior Lecturer in History at Australian Catholic University in Brisbane/Meanjin. His work spans transnational activism, human rights history, and Australia’s colonial relationships in the Pacific. He is completing a book on Australia and decolonisation.

Angela Woollacott is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the School of History at the Australian National University, on Ngunnawal Country. Her books include Settler Society in the Australian Colonies (2015) and a biography of Don Dunstan. Her current project examines Australians who shaped the intellectual and political challenge to colonialism in the mid-twentieth century.

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.

• Tracy Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific (2016)
• CLR James, The Black Jacobins (1938; rev. ed. 1963)
• Shannyn Palmer, Unmaking Angus Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station (2022) — Prime Minister’s History Prize winner
• Jessica Urwin, Contaminated Country (forthcoming, Melbourne University Press)
• Henry Reynolds, Looking from the North (2024)

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.

In this episode, State Library Fellow Dr Liz Giuffre takes us inside her archival forays into On the Street and Drum Media, two free weekly publications held in the State Library of NSW's collection that served as the first draft of Sydney's music history from the early 1980s to the early 2010s. Combing through 375 issues of On the Street and 685 issues of Drum Media, Giuffre reconstructed the full gig history of the Hoey — a 200-capacity pub in Surry Hills that somehow managed to be the centre of a very special universe. The numbers tell part of the story: 375 slots for live music in just the first decade, the majority free, Wednesday nights the busiest, genres and genders far more diverse than the "blokey pub rock" myth would have you believe.

But archives only get you so far — the rest is memory, and this panel has plenty of it. From Machine Gun Fellatio forming almost by accident after a misprint in a gig listing, to Box the Jesuit's anatomically ambitious birthday cakes, to the gentleman's agreements between venue bookers that briefly kept Paul Kelly off the Hopetoun stage, the conversation ranges across what made the Hoey's ecosystem tick: the bands, the bookers, the barflies, the street press journos, Terry the Pieman, and Johnny's fish and chips next door. The panel also looks forward — at what's been lost to unaffordability and dispersal, what's quietly thriving in record stores and warehouse spaces and jewellery shops on Parramatta Road, and why culture, as one panellist puts it, always finds a way.

Voices

Dr Liz Giuffre is a Senior Lecturer in Communications at UTS, a music and arts journalist, and a fan. Her work has been published widely for academic and general audiences, and she is still an active commentator online and on radio via TheMusic, 2SER FM and ABC Radio Sydney. She was one of the Library’s Visiting Fellows in 2024. Her new book, Spirits of the Hoey, is a love letter to the iconic Hopetoun Hotel.

Chit Chat von Loopin Stab is a filmmaker, lyricist, music producer, TV presenter, radio announcer, film score composer and gardener. He cowrote The Whitlams’ hit song ‘No Aphrodisiac’, which was voted number one on the Hottest 100 of 1997 and won the 1998 ARIA Award for Song of the Year. Chit Chat is also founding member, producer, manager, keyboardist and occasional vocalist for Machine Gun Fellatio, as well as a music TV presenter on Foxtel’s Max for 12 years. His score for the 2003 Australian crime film Getting Square won multiple awards. Chit Chat’s first band Vrag were regulars at the Hopetoun, as was Machine Gun Fellatio.

Emily Collins is a seasoned music industry leader with deep expertise in strategy, policy and program development. Prior to her appointment as Head of Sound NSW, Emily served for eight years as the Managing Director of MusicNSW, where she played a pivotal role in strengthening the state’s contemporary music sector. Emily’s career began in major music festivals, including the Cockatoo Island Festival and the Great Escape Festival, before expanding into marketing roles at Underbelly Arts Festival, Sydney Writers’ Festival and Darwin Festival. A long-standing champion of the NSW music industry, she has been a prominent advocate for the sector and continues to support artists, venues, festivals and industry organisations across the state through her leadership at Sound NSW.

Lex Davidson is the manager of Cultural Strategy for the City of Sydney and the Chairperson of the Music Cities Network, a global network of music policy professionals. Under his stage name Lex Lindsay, he is a multidisciplinary artist, theatre maker and music composer with a background in directing film and music festivals. Lex has produced work for two Biennales of Sydney and is a contributing artist to pieces in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). His current project, composing choral works for CREATION, a speculative queer climate action religion, has been performed at the Sydney Opera House, Art Gallery of NSW, Carriageworks, and will feature in the grand reopening of the renovated Newcastle Art Gallery in 2026.

Susie Beauchamp is half of the songwriting/performance powerhouse Box The Jesuit, an incredible live and recorded Sydney band from the mid 1980s until early 1990s. They supported Nirvana at the first Big Day Out and, more importantly, gave Hoey patrons all singing, all dancing, all death-defying, all pornographic cake eating nights to remember! The band ended when Susie’s partner in music and life, Goose (Stephen Gray) passed away. The legend remains, and the music remains completely captivating.

Tamson Pietsch is director of the Australian Centre for Public History and History Lab's presenter.

Credits

This episode of History Lab was recorded on Gadigal Land, Sydney, at the State Library of New South Wales. For more literary events like this one, see the library's What's On page.

Edited and mixed by Lachlan A'Court.

History Lab is brought to you by the Australian Centre for Public History and UTS Impact Studios. Executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.

Further reading and listening

Explore the Spirits of the Hoey web page.

Buy Spirits of the Hoey at Melbourne Books.

For more Hoey memories, listen to another Impact Studios podcast ep featuring authors Liz Giuffre and Greg Ferris speaking with singer-songwriters Sarah Blasko and Sally Seltman, along with Hoodoo Gurus bassist Clyde Bramley about the life and times of 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?

Tony Moore and Mark Gibson, co-authors with Chris McAuliffe and Maura Edmond) join Reg Mombassa (of Mental as Anything and Mambo fame) to launch their book Fringe to Famous: Cultural Production in Australia After the Creative Industries. In a wide-ranging discussion, hosted by journalist and academic Catharine Lumby, the panel examines how music, comedy, film and design crossed over from fringe scenes into the mainstream — and why that transition was never a sellout, but a negotiation.

The discussion ranges from the Sydney pub rock circuit and the role of Countdown, to the institutional infrastructure — public broadcasters, independent labels, accessible welfare — that quietly made it all possible. And they ask the harder question: without that scaffolding, what does the future of Australian creative life actually look like? Enjoy a cameo appearance from Paul Fenech, actor, director, producer and comedian (Pizza, Fat Pizza and Housos).

Fringe to Famous is published by Bloomsbury Academic, and the launch was held on Gadigal land, at Sydney's Gleebooks.

Voices

Tony Moore is a cultural historian and Professor of Media and Communications at Monash University, where he leads major ARC-funded projects on Australian comedy and the convict roots of democracy. A former ABC documentary maker and book publisher, his previous books include Dancing with Empty Pockets: Australia's Bohemians, Death or Liberty: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia, and The Barry McKenzie Movies. He is co-author of Fringe to Famous: Cultural Production in Australia After the Creative Industries.

Mark Gibson is Professor in the School of Media and Communications at RMIT University. His research spans cultural and creative industries, the history of cultural studies, comedy and the role of audiences in cultural production. He is the author of Culture and Power: A History of Cultural Studies and co-author of Fringe to Famous: Cultural Production in Australia After the Creative Industries.

Reg Mombassa is a New Zealand-born Australian artist and musician. A founding member of Mental as Anything — inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2009 — he is also a member of Dog Trumpet alongside his brother Peter. As principal artist and designer for Mambo Graphics, his work helped define the visual identity of one of Australia's most iconic and irreverent surf and streetwear labels. He continues to work as a visual artist and musician.

Catharine Lumby (host) is Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney and foundation chair of its Media and Communications Department. The author and co-author of six books, she writes regularly for The Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald and the ABC, and has advised the public and private sectors on cultural diversity, bullying prevention and social media. She is a leading public intellectual on media, culture and gender in Australia.

Paul Fenech is an Australian filmmaker, writer, director, producer and actor. After winning Tropfest in 1998, he was able to parlayed his 1995 third-place entry, about his life as a pizza delivery driver, into the SBS series Pizza, which ran for five seasons from 2000. He went on to create Housos — winner of the Logie for Most Outstanding Light Entertainment Program in 2014.

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.

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

That's the question at the heart of A Woman's Eye: Her Art, Drusilla Modjeska's book about a century of women artists who made radical, visionary work — and were then, largely, forgotten. Recorded live at Gleebooks before a packed house, this is a conversation about art history as a political act: who gets remembered, who gets written out, and why it keeps happening.

In conversation with literary biographer Bernadette Brennan — who is currently writing Modjeska's own biography — and joined by artist Julie Rrap, Modjeska moves from Wilhelmine Germany to 1920s Paris to the liberation of Dachau, tracing the lives of women who saw things their own way.

Voices

Drusilla Modjeska is the author of Poppy, Stravinsky's Lunch, The Orchid, The Mountain, Second Half First, and A Woman's Eye: Her Art, published by Penguin Books Australia.

Bernadette Brennan is a literary critic and the author of A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work and Leaping into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears. She is currently writing a biography of Drusilla Modjeska.

Julie Rrap is one of Australia's most significant contemporary artists. Her survey exhibition Past Continuous, centred on SOMOS, was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in 2024–25. SOMOS is now in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

A Woman's Eye: Her Art is published by Penguin Books Australia.

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 Maksim Voloshin-Cleary.

History Lab is brought to you by the Australian Centre for Public History and UTS Impact Studios. Executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.

Works mentioned

Paula Modersohn-Becker

Self-Portrait on the Sixth Wedding Anniversary (1906) — nude self-portrait depicted as pregnant Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen https://online-sammlung.hamburger-kunsthalle.de | Google Arts & Culture entry from the Böttcherstraße Museums: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/IwVRLMk5ACZUJQ

Lying Mother with Child II (1906) — nude mother reclining with child Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum / Museen Böttcherstraße, Bremen Google Arts & Culture: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/lying-mother-with-child-ii-paula-modersohn-becker/LgGzY69gnE9o7Q

Portrait of Clara Rilke-Westhoff (1905) — Clara with rose Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg Collection record: https://online-sammlung.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/de/objekt/HK-2362

Claude Cahun

I Am in Training, Don't Kiss Me (c.1927) — self-portrait with pursed lips and curls Jersey Heritage Collection Jersey Heritage page on Cahun: https://www.jerseyheritage.org/history/claude-cahun-and-jersey/

Que me veux-tu? / What Do You Want From Me? (1928) — double-exposure composite self-portrait Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Also held in the Met collection: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/838682

Self-portrait in jester jacket (c.1928) — catching the viewer's gaze Jersey Heritage Collection (as above)

Dora Maar

Untitled [Assia] (1934) — model casting dramatic shadow Centre Pompidou, Paris (various versions held there and elsewhere) Pompidou reproduction page: https://editions.centrepompidou.fr/en/home-decor/dora-maar-reproduction-untitled-assia/1577.html

Nusch Éluard on the beach (c.1935) — photograph of Éluard lying on beach Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris AWARE Women Artists entry with collection details: https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/dora-maar/

Lee Miller

Tanja Ramm under a Bell Jar (1931) — woman's head enclosed in glass bell jar Lee Miller Archives (Farley Farm, Sussex); widely reproduced but not in a single permanent public collection page — the Lee Miller Archives hold the primary rights: https://www.leemiller.co.uk

Lee Miller in Hitler's Bathtub, Munich (1945) — photographed by David Scherman Held at Tate Britain Tate collection record: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/miller-scherman-lee-miller-in-hitlers-bathtub-munich-x100252

Julie Rrap

SOMOS (Standing On My Own Shoulders) (2023) — life-sized bronze, artist standing on her own shoulders Permanent collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia; also shown at MCA Sydney Ocula interview with full context: https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/julie-rrap-standing-on-her-own-shoulders/ MCA exhibition page: https://www.mca.com.au (search "Julie Rrap Past Continuous")