Making Public Histories is a webinar series offered jointly by the Monash University History Program, the History Council of Victoria and the Old Treasury Building. Each event aims to explore issues and approaches in making public histories. The webinars are open to anyone interested in the creation and impact of history in contemporary society.
Keep an eye on our social media channels or sign up to our newsletter to be the first to register for our next webinar on 14 May!
Australian Legacies of British Slavery - 14 May, 5:00pm-6:30pm
Register here
Recent research has revealed the myriad connections – encompassing people, capital, labour practices and ideologies – between Australia’s colonisation and chattel slavery in the Atlantic World. People who had benefitted from owning enslaved people or investing in the slave economy, or who had themselves been enslaved, became equally entangled in colonisation in the Australian colonies.
This history is intriguing and important, but also challenges received understandings of Australia’s past – which rightly focus on the impact of colonisation on the Indigenous peoples of Australia, but do not always recognise the role of slavery, whether in the Atlantic world or on this continent. In this seminar, Professors Lydon and Laidlaw discuss how they have opened up important historical themes by tracing individuals and cohorts between the Atlantic World and Australia’s colonies and reflect on the challenges of communicating their findings to the public and applying them to contemporary conversations about heritage, identity and citizenship.
Our convenor:
Kate Rivington (Monash University)
Kate Rivington is a lecturer at Monash University. She received her PhD from Monash University in 2023. Her dissertation was entitled “I have done a good deal in private, as well as in public, to advance the great object”: Antislavery Networks in the Atlantic World, 1830-1865. In 2018 she completed her Master of Arts (Research) at the University of Melbourne.
Our speakers:
Professor Zoë Laidlaw (University of Melbourne)
Zoë Laidlaw is Professor of History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, who specialises in the history of nineteenth-century colonialism and imperialism
She grew up on Gunditjmara Country and was educated at the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford, returning to Australia in 2018 after spending twenty years in UK academia. She has published widely on settler colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, imperial humanitarianism and colonial networks. Her co-edited (with Jane Lydon) volume, Legacies of British Slavery in Australia and New Zealand will be published in March 2026.
Professor Jane Lydon (University of Western Australia)
Jane Lydon is the Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at the University of Western Australia. Her research centres upon Australia’s colonial past and its legacies in the present. In particular, she is concerned with the history of Australia’s engagement with anti-slavery, humanitarianism, and ultimately human rights.
She is a white settler scholar who aims to carry out politically located research that respects Indigenous sovereignty. Her work has contributed to decolonizing heritage and academic practice, and particularly debates regarding colonialism and Australian legacies of imperialism and slavery. Her co-edited (with Zoë Laidlaw) volume, Legacies of British Slavery in Australia and New Zealand will be published in March 2026.
Past events
You can view past MPH events below, or view all of our past seminars on YouTube.
Making Public Histories—Women and the Criminal Justice System in Australia, Thursday 26 March
Watch:
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 women, this seminar explores women’s interactions with an evolving criminal justice system, struggling to come to terms with new (and assertive) women as citizens.
Our speakers:
Dr Jennifer Anderson is a managing lawyer at Women’s Legal Service Victoria. Her PhD examined the creation of the Children’s Court jurisdiction in Victoria in the early twentieth century. Her research explores the experiences of children and women in the early Victorian criminal justice and social welfare systems.
Lucy Sussex is an Honorary Fellow at La Trobe University. Her award-winning fiction includes novels and five short story collections. She has examined crime fiction’s origins in: Women Writers and Detectives in the Nineteenth Century (2012); Blockbuster (2015); and with Megan Brown, Outrageous Fortunes (2025), about Mary and George Fortune.
Dr Lainie Anderson OAM is a writer whose 35-year career in journalism and public relations includes 17 years as a columnist with Adelaide’s Sunday Mail as well as stints at the Herald Sun and London’s The Times. In 2024, Lainie completed a PhD with the University of South Australia, researching the life of Kate Cocks, the inspiration behind her best-selling historical cosy crime, The Death of Dora Black. Lainie is vice-president of the History Council of South Australia, board trustee with the History Trust of South Australia and a South Australian representative on the Federation of Australian Historical Societies.
Making Public Histories—Thinking about the weather: Heatwaves and history in twentieth century Australia, Thursday 27 November
Watch: https://youtu.be/tV9xJunq_RE?si=BII7c_MhqRkPd1Yq
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 storm.
Environmental historians recognise the importance of climate as not simply a “backdrop against which history is played out” but an active force in Australian life. Through hospital records, diaries and press reports, we examine daily life in the mid-twentieth century as heatwaves unfold, finding that decisions about sleep, food, housing, clothing and social interaction, as well as professional and domestic labour, were disrupted and negotiated.
By uncovering the everyday practices by which people negotiate weather, in urban, regional and remote areas, we reveal how heatwaves have been crucial in shaping the Australian idea and experience of climate.
Our panel:
MANDY PAUL: ‘Fearful heat’: the January 1939 heatwave in Tarntanya/Adelaide
ROCHELLE SCHOFF: Thermometer conscious: keeping an eye on the mercury in everyday life
REBECCA JONES: Living with heat in arid Australia
Making Public Histories—Australian Fatherhood and family life: Learning lessons from history, Thursday 25 September
Watch: https://youtu.be/jKqvmE8LOUU
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 and submissions to Royal Commissions and government inquiries, we've explored how family life and fathering (and mothering) have been shaped by shifting structural forces and cultural expectations, and how diverse Australian families have negotiated those expectations and forces in varying ways, influenced by personal character and family circumstances (see our co-authored book, Fathering: An Australian History, MUP, 2025). In this webinar we'll each focus on an aspect of the research and reflect on lessons we've learnt from the past that might be useful for contemporary families and social policy.
Al Thomson will introduce the project's aims, approaches and sources, and note key findings about fathering and family life.
Kate Murphy will focus on the Royal Commission on Human Relationships (1974-77) and what we learnt from individual and institutional submissions about family life and fathering in the 1970s.
Jill Barnard will discuss how an oral history collection sheds light on the family lives of Forgotten Australians.
Hearing the news: how ballad singers, pampheteers and orators took the news to the people in the pre-modern world, Thursday 24 July
WATCH: https://youtu.be/uGVz26DOYcM
In an age when we are, literally, bombarded with news from multiple forms of ‘mass media’, it is hard to imagine a time when news was scarce. Before newspapers were published, how did the people find out what was happening in their world? In this seminar we explore the fascinating world of the pre-modern newshound — the ballad singer, the pamphleteer and the public orator. Were there limits to ‘free speech’, and how were they overcome? Historians Una McIlvenna and Ruby Lowe combine analysis and performance as they explore this fascinating topic.
Spies and Cold War Australia, Thursday 29 May
WATCH NOW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpJ-gxU20v8&t=5s
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 stranger and far more interesting than any spy novel. Historians working with restricted or highly redacted material have increasingly shed light on these real life spy stories, from installing bugs in apartment ceilings to rendezvous in cemeteries and draining a beer at the pub opposite the Soviet embassy. In this seminar, two of Australia’s foremost intelligence historians will discuss espionage and counter-espionage in Australia during the Cold War, share some of the fascinating stories they’ve encountered in their research, and reflect on the unique challenges of creating history based on intelligence records.
The Glass Ceiling: Shattered, cracked or subbornly intact? Thursday 27 March
As women joined the paid workforce in increasing numbers in the twentieth century they battled long-established discrimination. Low pay, exclusion from jobs defined as ‘men’s work’, and forced ‘retirement’ on marriage were just a few of the barriers in place. In the 1970s feminists identified a less-visible form of discrimination — the ‘glass ceiling’, the invisible, but equally-powerful set of assumptions that blocked women from promotion and from appointment to senior management. Many companies now promote their commitment to gender equity, but how real is it? Have women really shattered the glass ceiling, or does it continue to block women’s progress?
WATCH: https://youtu.be/M22GGrXx4I0?si=Vos88XUll0M1OWqm
Histories of Australian Childhood, with Isobelle Barrett Meyering (Macquarie), Catherine Gay (Melbourne) and Emily Gallagher (ANU).
WATCH: https://youtu.be/fgtnPGZg1LA
Oral History, Migration, Generations, with Francesco Ricatti (ANU), Tanya Evans (Macquarie), Alexandra Dellios (ANU).
WATCH: https://youtu.be/gaH4kJdgVkM
History in Film, with Peter McPhee (Chair, HCV) and James Findlay (Sydney).
Watch: https://youtu.be/zMl2M1dDtbs?si=2yuhQKeB1StvyxvS
Energy Transitions: Historicising Australia's Nuclear Debate
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttpiMQh1WN0&t=18s
Australia's Housing Crisis
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv35Dy3C-us
2023 events
Behind the Scenes: Making History Exhibitions
Culture in Overseas Embassies: Buildings that Evoke Australia
Australia's Broken Years? Joan Beaumont & Alastair Thomson
2022 events
Refugee Lives, Memories and Communities, November 2022
Doing Environmental History in Urgent Times, September 2022
Making Australian History, July 2022
Historians on Australian Politics, May 2022
Unpicking the gendered body: new research in the history and material culture of clothes, March 2022
2021 events
Child Labour and Slavery - Thursday 25 November at 5pm
Women's Lives, Women's Bodies - Thursday 23 September at 5pm
Populism, Democracy and Covid-19 on Thursday 27 May, 2021 from 5pm - 6:30pm
Teasing Women's Stories from the Archives on Thursday March 04, 2021 from 5pm - 6:30pm
Admission is free of charge but we ask you to RSVP to register your participation. For the webinars, a Zoom link will be sent by email to all who register.
We acknowledge our partners and the generous sponsorship provided by Old Treasury Building, the Monash University History Program and Monash University Publishing.
and the support offered by our event sponsors, Monash University Publishing.
Making Public Histories explores contemporary issues in historical research and production. The audience is diverse, ranging from professional, academic and community historians through to anyone interested in the creation, use and impact of history. The seminars respond to themes such as: new exhibitions or historical anniversaries; historical controversies; innovative ways of researching, producing and disseminating history; and history in different media. From time to time the seminars showcase visiting historians from overseas or interstate whose work will engage a Victorian audience.
Over time, Making Public Histories has explored a range of issues and approaches in the making of public histories. The program was initiated in 2008 by Monash University, State Library Victoria and the History Council of Victoria. From 2008 to 2016, the seminars were presented at State Library Victoria. Since 2017, the Old Treasury Building has been the venue for all face-to-face seminars.
To read about past programs, click the year: 2014 / 2015 / 2016 / 2017 / 2018 / 2019 / 2020
To find out how to stay in touch with the three organisations that present these events, click HERE.
The chair, Alison Inglis, congratulates panellists
(L-R) Sasha Grishin, Jan Croggon and Andrew Lemon
at the conclusion of the ST Gill seminar
at State Library Victoria, 29 September 2015.
Photo credit: History Council of Victoria