Australian history, heard from the street up.
History Lab takes Australian history down to street level, building oral-history series such as Darlinghurst's AIDS Crisis from the memories of people who lived through gay Sydney's 1980s. Alongside those documentaries sit History Lab Live recordings of conversations about Australian history, held in bookshops, universities and public venues.
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History Lab is a public history podcast produced with Impact Studios, and it does its best work at close range. When a national story has settled into a tidy version, the show tends to go looking for the people it left out. The clearest case is Darlinghurst's AIDS Crisis, a three-part History Lab Originals series guided by historian Leigh Boucher. Its premise is blunt. Australia's response to AIDS is often told as a triumph of leadership and public health policy, so what did it look like up close, in the heart of gay Sydney? The answers come from oral histories. One voice remembers opening the Star Observer to pages of death notices and wondering who would be gone that week. Another recalls a first HIV test in London, taken stripped in a corridor, and the feeling of being treated as a disease. Police meet a lipstick protest outside the American Consulate with fists, and the series pauses in the waiting room of Sydney's first specialist HIV and AIDS clinic. It also credits what worked: the safe-sex campaigns, and the plain fact that condoms cut transmission. One interviewee reaches for kintsugi, the Japanese craft of mending broken pottery with gold, to describe a damaged community. A bonus conversation between Boucher and historian Tamson Pietsch steps behind the tape. They discuss shaping long, intimate interviews into audio, a single word that unlocked a flood of memory, and the interpretations that simply did not land. For anyone curious how oral history gets made, it is the episode to hear. Darlinghurst reaches back further in the feed, too. Listen to Darlinghurst, a six-part series by historian and producer Catherine Franey, includes 'Red Light, Green Light', a gold Signal Award winner on the history of sex work in the neighbourhood. A former street worker recalls being arrested for obstructing traffic even after the 1979 repeal, and tells it with a raconteur's timing. The story carried on off-air: Franey and Julie Bates, who is heard in the episode, campaigned successfully to return the statue of Joy to its original place. History Lab Live is a different animal. These are recorded conversations about Australian history in bookshops, universities and public venues. One features Ann Curthoys on Paul and Eslanda Robeson's 1960 tour of Australia and New Zealand, when reporters kept pressing the singer about the Soviet Union while he tried to talk about his music. The talk widens into a pattern of visiting artists of colour being misquoted by the Australian press. Newcomers can start with 'Under the mirror ball' and let the Darlinghurst series play in order.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants Australian social history told through first-hand testimony, particularly queer Sydney in the AIDS years, and who likes hearing how historians gather and interpret that testimony.
What sets it apart: It pairs produced oral-history documentaries about one Sydney neighbourhood with recorded public talks, and it shows its working, giving a bonus episode to how the interviews behind its AIDS series were conducted and shaped.
History Lab || exploring the gaps between us and the past || This series is made in collaboration by the Australian Centre for Public History and Impact Studios at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Darlinghurst's dance floors complicate a national success story, if you like history close enough to hurt.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A 1960 visit becomes a focused study of media pressure, cultural exchange and political imagination.
Paul and Eslanda Robeson's 1960 visit to Australia and New Zealand comes through as a story of public life under pressure. It traces their arrival after the US government had stripped Paul Robeson of his passport, then follows the way questions about communism, Hungary and the…
A candid study of oral history becoming podcast, and of how one word can open or close a difficult memory.
History Lab's bonus episode follows the making of Darlinghurst's AIDS Crisis as a careful lesson in what changes when oral history becomes podcast.
Darlinghurst's crisis comes into focus through memorial ads, funerals, protest, police violence, and the fight for drug access.
The third Darlinghurst chapter follows a community living with AIDS as loss shifts from Star Observer memorial ads and missing friends into the closest bonds of partners and best friends.
A clear history of Darlinghurst's AIDS crisis, where testing, public health, and queer-run care meet lived experience.
Darlinghurst's AIDS crisis is framed through the fear around HIV testing, advanced AIDS-defining conditions, and the community networks that formed as the illness spread.
A street-level history of Darlinghurst's AIDS years, with The Star opening onto a community under pressure.
History Lab maps Darlinghurst as a place shaped by the AIDS crisis, moving through gyms, cafes, back lanes, dance parties, and the businesses that helped define gay Sydney in the 1980s.
Vietnamese culture, argued and remembered aloud.
Systems change, told through community experience.
Phoebe Judge narrates true crime history and interviews the authors who uncovered it.
Dramatized deep dives into American history, from the Galveston hurricane to Harper Lee's Mockingbird.
Dana Schwartz narrates the violent lives of monarchs, warlords, and queens.
History Lab Live follows Paul and Eslanda Robeson's 1960 Australia-New Zealand tour after the U.S.
This episode explores the history of sex work in Darlinghurst, Sydney, through personal stories from former sex workers.
History Lab's bonus episode on Darlinghurst's AIDS Crisis features Regina Boutros in conversation with Lee Boucher and Tamsin Peach about how Boucher turned long oral histories into a podcast.
History Lab's Darlinghurst's AIDS Crisis follows the Sydney Star Observer obituary pages as they grow from a grim ritual into 20 to 25 notices every fortnight by 1993 and 1994.
["History Lab's '43.
History Lab's Darlinghurst series traces how Sydney's gay heartland, from Green Park to Oxford Street and the Paddington Town Hall, shaped the local AIDS crisis.
History Lab episode 41 features Anna Clark interviewing historian Heather Goodall about five decades of oral history, Aboriginal history, environmental activism, and anti-colonial research.
History Lab Live examines Labor’s 94-seat victory in the May 2025 Australian federal election despite a historically low primary vote and a starting majority of 77 seats out of 151.
History Lab Live records a 2025 Gleebooks conversation about adapting Julianne Schultz’s The Idea of Australia into a four-part SBS series hosted by Rachel Griffiths.
A live discussion at the Abercrombie Hotel about Caribbean Australian identity, featuring actor Zahra Newman and playwright Alana Valentine, exploring themes of belonging and the immigrant experience.
This episode of History Lab explores the reliability and uncertainties of forensic science through an interview with distinguished professor Claude Roux.
Historian Alana Piper explores the surprising history of fortune-telling in Australia, from its popularity to its criminalization.
This episode explores the intersection of law and history, discussing how both fields draw conclusions from traces of the past.