Nations are often remade through close attention to detail. In this episode, historian Dr James Finlay reflects on how Australia’s convict past has been represented on screen, tracing shifts from early cinematic melodrama through to television drama and contemporary film, and considering how these visual narratives continue to shape national memory.

Drawing on archival research, James introduces an unexpected case study: a 1937 German musical set in the Parramatta Female Factory. The discussion uses this example to examine how convict stories circulated internationally, serving different political and cultural purposes, from critiques of empire to narratives of migration and settlement. We then move into the mid-twentieth century, exploring Australian television dramas such as The Outcasts and their role in reframing transported convicts as emancipist nation builders, before turning to Against the Wind and its enduring influence on popular understandings of colonial Sydney, Irish rebellion, and family history.

The conversation then addresses the limits of these narratives. We consider what is obscured when convict suffering is foregrounded at the expense of Aboriginal presence, and how this tension plays out in documentaries such as The Last Tasmanian and the ABC’s Frontier. Later works including Banished, The Secret River, and The Nightingale provide a framework for discussing divergent audience responses, the politics of recognition, and the uncomfortable reality that shared trauma does not equate to shared position within a settler-colonial society.

Across these examples, the episode reflects on the representation of convict women, the persistence of bushranger mythology, and the reappearance of convict symbolism in contemporary political discourse. Taken together, the discussion underscores the role of film and television not simply as mirrors of the past, but as active producers of historical memory. Attentive, historically grounded storytelling—one that keeps Country in view and acknowledges violence and dispossession—offers a pathway toward a more honest and inclusive national narrative.

Listeners interested in Australian history, screen culture, and the politics of memory are invited to join the conversation.

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Waramah/Cockatoo Island is one of Sydney Harbour’s most complex historical sites. Shaped by layers of incarceration, labour, industry, and governance, the island offers a rare opportunity to examine how power, punishment, and productivity were engineered into a single landscape—and how those histories are interpreted today.

This episode brings together curators, historians, archaeologists, and digital specialists to explore Cockatoo Island’s past and present. We begin with its global significance as part of Australia’s World Heritage–listed convict sites, tracing how solitary confinement, labour yards, reform institutions, and shipbuilding transformed the island into a microcosm of colonial authority and industrial ambition. From there, we turn to contemporary stewardship, discussing how the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust balances free public access with conservation, and how light-touch interpretation allows the island’s material textures to remain visible.

A central focus of the conversation is method. New technologies—LiDAR, aerial and confined-space drones, and bathymetric survey—are revealing features that are otherwise inaccessible, from tunnel interiors and dock geometry to the harbour floor itself. These tools are creating detailed digital records that support conservation planning, risk management, and education, while limiting physical intervention in fragile spaces. We consider how these datasets intersect with maps, photographs, archival sources, oral histories, and First Nations-led storytelling, and what it means for humans and machines to work together in the production of historical knowledge.

This episode invites listeners interested in Sydney Harbour, heritage practice, and historical method to reflect on how the past can be documented, preserved, and shared with care.

This event is in the 2025 History Now series. History Now is presented by the History Council of NSW in conjunction with the Chau Chak Wing Museum and the Vere Gordon Childe Centre.

History Now 2025 was supported by Create NSW.

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In this History Now/Wood Memorial Lecture event, Dr. Sophie Loy-Wilson from the discipline of History at the University of Sydney sits down with three extraordinary scholars who have drawn on lived experiences and diverse methodologies to produce creative histories that have made an impact on how we think about and do history.

Shauna Bostock, André Dao, and Katerina Teaiwa discuss their past and future projects, challenging us to imagine new ways of approaching, practicing, and presenting history in Australia today.

The Wood Memorial Lecture is funded by a generous endowment to the discipline of History in the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney to facilitate a public Lecture in Australian History.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Dr Shauna Bostock is currently the Indigenous Australian Research Editor at the National Centre of Biography at ANU. A former primary school teacher, Shauna Bostock's curiosity about her ancestors took her all the way to a PhD in Aboriginal history, which turned into a book entitled Reaching Through Time: Finding my family’s stories(Allen & Unwin). The book was awarded the NSW Community and Regional History Prize in 2024, and praised as a 'compelling blend of Indigenous history, community history and the history of colonial settlement.'

André Dao is an author and researcher from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. His debut novel, Anam, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Voss Literary Award. In 2024, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. André was awarded the 2024 Pascall Prize for Cultural Criticism for essays published in The Saturday Paper, Meanjin and Liminal. He is a postdoctoral fellow with the ARC Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law at Melbourne Law School, where is working on a history of how the computing company, IBM, travelled to the Global South.

Katerina Teaiwa is Professor of Pacific Studies in the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University. She is a scholar, artist, activist and nationally award-winning teacher of Banaban, I-Kiribati (Tabiteuean) and African American heritage born and raised in Fiji. Her exhibition "Dance Protest" is currently showing at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney.

This event is in the 2025 History Now series. History Now is presented by the History Council of NSW in conjunction with the Chau Chak Wing Museum and the Vere Gordon Childe Centre.

History Now 2025 has been supported by Create NSW.

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