History Lab

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.

Image: Rushcutters Creek, 1870-75 (Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW - ON 4 Box 56 No 253)

Credits

This audio story is a production of the Australian Centre for Public History in partnership with the Paul Ramsay Foundation.

‍

Producer: Catherine Freyne

Sound engineer: Judy Rapley

Music: Blue Dot Sessions

Featuring:

• Saskia Schut, Landscape architect
• Ray Ingrey, Chair, Gujaga Foundation
• Mark Dunn, Historian
• Daphne Lowe-Kelly, Co-deputy Chair, Museum of Chinese in Australia
• Phil Bennett, Lead Heritage Advisor, Sydney Water
• An excerpt from E.W. West (ed) The Memoirs of Obed West: A Portrait of Early Sydney (Bowral: Barcom Press 1988), read by Russell Cheek.

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.

Image: Darlinghurst Rd 1954 by Mark Strizic (State Library of Victoria)

Credits

Producer: Catherine Freyne

Sound engineer: Judy Rapley

Music: Blue Dot Sessions

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

Joe has mostly been forgotten by history, and his presence in the archives is little more than a whisper.

From coronial records, family tales and a visit to a country pub, it becomes clear that Joe fell foul of the frontier, in life and death.

And yet, more questions remain: Was Joe Governor, an outlaw, killed lawfully?

How do his ancestral remains become another transactional asset in the murky world of race science? And why is western knowledge still entangled in its colonial past?

How does the law deal with an outlaw?

Jimmy Governor is captured and his legal case becomes a lightning rod for justice in the new federation. But how did Australia’s most-wanted murderer get one of the best lawyers in the colony?

A prison experiment begins with a diary and we find out how the present mimics the past.

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.

Jimmy and Joe Governor, two brothers from Wiradjuri and Wonnarua country, were the last proclaimed outlaws in Australia - wanted dead or alive.

120 years later we examine what has survived and what we can still learn from the Governor brothers' story.

To find out more visit: https://thelastoutlaws.com.au

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.

The trilogy podcast is based on UTS Law Professor Katherine Biber’s tenacious and careful research of Jimmy and Joe Governor, Australia’s last proclaimed outlaws.

The Governor brothers' story has been told in books and film before, but never like this.

For the Governor family descendants this is a difficult story to tell, but one that demands to be heard.

Coming September 22nd.

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.

Brought to you by the makers of History Lab.

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

The Spanish authorities found a plastic bag a few blocks away from one of the bomb sites with a single, incomplete fingerprint.

This was the trace linked to a man living 9000 kms away, a US Attorney in Oregon by the name of Brandon Mayfield.

We’ve been told that every fingerprint is unique to every finger, but what if this is the wrong question to ask?

Forensic Science was founded on the principle that ‘every contact leaves a trace’ but history shows we can’t always rely on one trace alone.

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?

The signature is a performative act, crucial to the law’s way of knowing, but it’s also been used as an instrument of power and control.

In this episode of History Lab we hear from a boy who was stolen, the man who took him away and the Judge who was asked to decide if a mother's thumbprint was a sign of consent.

The presence or absence of a signature on a legal document can speak volumes and throughout history Aboriginal people have been reclaiming this marker of individual identity to represent the many and speak back to an empire.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this episode contains the voices and names of deceased persons.

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

In the first decade of the 20th century, Australians were focused on the future. It was the dawn of a new century, and a newly-formed nation. But during this time, police were cracking down on a booming industry dominated by women—it was a service that society deemed superstitious, archaic and fraudulent and one that is unlawful to this day in some parts of Australia. This is a story of entrepreneurship, independence and the force of the law.

Why were these female fortune tellers so aggressively pursued by the police and how did they use the law to fight back?