2025 Speakers
Where: Blackheath Public School Hall, Leichhardt St. Blackheath or Gardners Inn, Great Western Highway, Blackheath.
Tickets for each event can be purchased online through Humanitix, the Australian owned humane event ticketing platform that donates all profits from booking fees to children’s charities. Tickets will also be available at the door. Card and cash payments accepted.
Afternoon tea at the Hall from 3.30 pm (drink/cake $3 ea.).
James Findlay: Caught on Screen – Australia’s Convict history in film and television
Sat 25th Oct 2025, 4:00 pm AEDT
Blackheath Public School Hall, Leichhardt St. Blackheath
James Findlay Caught on Screen: Australia’s Convict history in film and television
From silent films to more recent television series, screen culture has elevated the convict experience to become a key historical narrative through which filmmakers and audiences have repeatedly reframed and challenged an understanding of Australia’s colonial past. Through detailed archival research into their production and reception, this talk explores engaging case studies produced in Australia and internationally, including the work of Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jennifer Kent. They helped to direct major debates about nationalism, the legacies of colonisation, Aboriginal dispossession and the origins and character of Australian society.
James Findlay is a Lecturer in Australian history at the University of Sydney. He has a research focus on historical film and television studies, convict history, Australian popular culture, and public history. He has held the Australian Film Institute Research Collection Fellowship and before becoming a historian worked extensively in film and television production, mostly in the field of documentary.
Book through Humanitix or pay at the door. Eftpos and cash are accepted.
Hall Entry: $10 Waged; $5.00 Unwaged,
Afternoon tea from 3.30pm ($3 coffee/tea, $3 cake)
Shauna Bostock: Reaching Through Time – finding my family’s stories
Sat, 20 Sep, 4pm – 6pm AEST
Blackheath Public School Hall, Leichhardt St. Blackheath
Shauna Bostock: Reaching Through Time – finding my family’s stories
The powerful story of a Bundjalung woman’s journey to uncover her family history begins with the startling revelation that generations of her white ancestors were slave traders. Battling restrictions on access to government archives, Shauna gradually pieced together her family’s stories of dispossession and frontier violence; life on reserves under the harsh regime of the Aborigines Protection Board; a cricket match with Bradman; activism and arts in Redfern; and a surprising reconciliation. Reaching Through Time reveals the cataclysmic impact of colonisation on Aboriginal families, and how this ripples through to the present. It also shows how family research can bring a deeper understanding and healing of the wounds in our history.
A former primary school teacher, Shauna Bostock’s curiosity about her ancestors took her all the way to a PhD in Aboriginal history at ANU. Her book won the NSW Community and Regional History Prize, NSW Premier’s History Awards, 2024, and was shortlisted for the Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award, 2024. She is currently Indigenous Australian Research Editor in the National Centre of Biography at ANU.
Book through Humanitix or pay at the door. Eftpos and cash are accepted.
Hall Entry: $10 Waged; $5.00 Unwaged,
Afternoon tea from 3.30pm ($3 coffee/tea, $3 cake)
Lauren Samuelsson: Boiled Mutton to Chow Mein – The Australian Women’s Weekly and food culture
Sat 6th Sep 2025, 4:00 pm AEST
Blackheath Public School Hall, Leichhardt St. Blackheath
Lauren Samuelsson: From boiled mutton to chicken chow mein – the Australian Women’s Weekly and Australian food culture
This is an official event of History Week 2025, supported by the History Council of NSW.
Between the 1930s and the 1980s, Australia’s food culture underwent a transformation. Boiled mutton was chivvied off dinner menus nationwide by a plethora of new and exciting dishes. The Australian Women’s Weekly, Australia’s longest running and most widely read women’s magazine, was at the forefront of this culinary revolution. It introduced generations of ‘everyday Australians’ to new tastes, taught them new techniques, and encouraged them to be creative and adventurous in the kitchen. This presentation will explore some of the myriad ways that the Weekly was able to inspire an eclectic, Australian way of eating.
Dr Lauren Samuelsson holds a PhD in history from the University of Wollongong where she is an Honorary Fellow. Lauren’s research interests include cultural history, the history of food and drink, the history of popular culture and gender history. Her book, A Matter of Taste: the Australian Women’s Weekly and its Influence on Australian Food Culture was published in 2024. She has also published in The Conversation and is a regular guest on Australian radio, where she shares her love of food history with people nationwide.
History Week is the annual, state-wide celebration of History organised by the History Council of New South Wales. Initiated by the HCNSW in 1997, History Week is a fantastic opportunity for member organisations, large and small, throughout NSW to engage and educate the community about the vitality, diversity and meaning of History and its practice.
Book through Humanitix or pay at the door. Eftpos and cash are accepted.
Hall Entry: $10 Waged; $5.00 Unwaged,
Afternoon tea from 3.30pm ($3 coffee/tea, $3 cake)
Andrew Ford: The Shortest History of Music
Sat 16th Aug 2025, 4:00 pm AEST
Blackheath Public School Hall, Leichhardt St. Blackheath
Andrew Ford: The Shortest History of Music
How do you write the history of an art, which is also a human impulse, that has been happening everywhere, all the time since before humans even existed? In particular, how do you do it in only 50,000 words? Composer and broadcaster Andrew Ford will attempt to explain.
Andrew Ford OAM is a composer, writer and broadcaster who has won national awards in each of those capacities. He has been composer-in-residence for the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Australian National Academy of Music, Poynter Fellow and visiting composer at Yale University, visiting lecturer at Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University. Ford has written widely on all manner of music and published eleven books, most recently The Shortest History of Music (Black Inc., July 2024). Since 1995, he has presented The Music Show each weekend on ABC Radio National.
Book through Humanitix or pay at the door. Eftpos and cash are accepted.
Hall Entry: $10 Waged; $5.00 Unwaged,
Afternoon tea from 3.30pm ($3 coffee/tea, $3 cake)
Trish FitzSimons and Madelyn Shaw: Fleeced – Unraveling the history of wool and war
Sunday, 10 August 2025, 4pm – 6pm
Gardner’s Inn Hotel, Blackheath NSW, Australia
Madelyn Shaw & Trish FitzSimons: Fleeced – Unraveling the history of wool and war – an odyssey
Not everything about wool is warm and fuzzy … Fleeced exposes how heightened demand for wool in wartime existed historically in an international vortex of negotiation, intrigue and anxiety, and the way that this contributes to today’s disastrous reliance on synthetic textiles and fast fashion. The 19th century rise of industrial manufacture of woolen fabrics and Southern hemisphere sheep husbandry underpinned an enormous increase in the size of 20th century armies. Wool was also central to frontier wars. Pulling at threads of family history and exploring objects to reveal nuances of our story are key strategies of Fleeced.
Madelyn Shaw is a curator and author specialising in the exploration of American culture and history, and its international connections, through textiles and dress. She was textile curator of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian until 2021. She has curated more than 50 exhibitions and published widely, including Homefront and Battlefield: Quilts and Context in the Civil War.
Trish FitzSimons is a documentary filmmaker and curator with a passion for social history, and an adjunct professor, Griffith University. Interview has been a defining component of her practice for the last 40 years, in documentary films, a book and exhibitions.
Pub talks – $15 (includes one drink), Sunday 10 August 2025 4 pm
Book through Humanitix or pay at the door. Eftpos and cash are accepted.
Enjoy interesting conversation along with good food and drink at Gardner’s Inn, Blackheath, the oldest continuously licensed hotel still trading in the Blue Mountains. After the talk stay for a meal at one of the best Pub Food locations in the area, their Beef & Guinness Pot Pie is a signature treat.
Vere Gordon Childe Memorial Lecture
Anne Coote: A Foot in the Door – Women, Science and the Royal Society of NSW
Saturday, 26 July 2025, 4pm.
Blackheath Public School Hall, Leichhardt St. Blackheath
Knowledge for a Nation: Origins of the Royal Society of New South Wales tells the early history of a learned society still active in the intellectual culture of twenty-first century Australia. The book begins with an account of Australia’s first learned society, the Philosophical Society of Australasia (1821-1822), which is the Royal Society’s enduring inspiration, if not its earliest incarnation. The Royal Society evolved from the Australian Philosophical Society (1850-1), through the Philosophical Society of New South Wales, which was re-badged Royal in 1866. Successfully reorganised a decade later, the Royal Society reached the zenith of its influence on the development of a colonial science community in New South Wales
Book through Humanitix or pay at the door. Eftpos and cash are accepted.
Hall Entry: $10 Waged; $5.00 Unwaged,
Afternoon tea from 3.30pm ($3 coffee/tea, $3 cake)
Linda Jaivin: Shades of the Cultural Revolution – From Mao to Musk
Sat 28th June 2025, 4:00 pm
Blackheath Public School Hall, Leichhardt St. Blackheath
Linda Jaivin Shades of the Cultural Revolution: from Mao to Musk
It would have been the furthest thing from Elon Musk’s mind, but his call for Americans to denounce public servants they think should be fired on the social media platform X is a perfect example of what Mao Zedong, in his analogue world, called ‘mass dictatorship’. In China, mass dictatorship reached its apotheosis in the Cultural Revolution from 1966-1976, which resulted in nearly two million deaths and incalculable damage to China’s culture and heritage as well as the collapse of political and economic institutions. To know the history of the Cultural Revolution is to better understand the world today, from Beijing to Washington.
Linda Jaivin is a prolific cultural commentator, essayist and the internationally published author of thirteen books, including The Shortest History of China, which has been published in 23 countries and counting, and her latest, Bombard the Headquarters: China’s Cultural Revolution. She studied Asian History at Brown University in the US and has studied and lived in and reported from Hong Kong, Taiwan and China. She is also a translator of film subtitles for Chinese films and has been an editor of The China Story Yearbook (published by the Australian Centre in the World at the ANU). She lives in Sydney.
Photo credit Anna Hay
Book through Humanitix or pay at the door. Eftpos and cash are accepted.
Hall Entry: $10 Waged; $5.00 Unwaged,
Afternoon tea from 3.30pm ($3 coffee/tea, $3 cake)
Stephen Gapps in conversation with Naomi Parry Duncan. Uprising: War in the Colony of New South Wales, 1838–1844
Sat 24th May 2025, 4:00 pm
Blackheath Public School Hall, Leichhardt St. Blackheath
In his latest book Uprising: War in the Colony of NSW 1838-1844 Stephen Gapps outlines an intense period of resistance warfare largely directed at the influx of squatters and their tens of thousands of cattle and sheep. These wars occurred across a vast terrain – from Port Phillip to Moreton Bay. They were seen by contemporaries as a ‘great uprising’ or rebellion.
This huge arc of conflict stretched along the eastern edge of the Murray-Darling river system. In this talk Stephen will explore the tactical and strategic importance of waterways in defending River Country.
Stephen Gapps is an historian working to bring broader public recognition and commemoration of Australia’s Frontier Wars. In 2018 Stephen published The Sydney Wars – Conflict in the early colony 1788-1817, inaugural winner of the Les Carlyon Award for the writing of military history. In 2021 he published Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance – The Bathurst War, 1822–1824. Stephen’s third book with NewSouth press is Uprising: War in the Colony of NSW 1838-1844 and was published in April 2025. He is currently an editor and contributor to a forthcoming book of the acclaimed documentary series The Australian Wars.
Book through Humanitix or pay at the door. Eftpos and cash are accepted.
Hall Entry: $10 Waged; $5.00 Unwaged,
Afternoon tea from 3.30pm ($3 coffee/tea, $3 cake)
Josh Wodak: Petrified – Living during a rupture of life on Earth
Gardner’s Inn Hotel – Sunday 4 May 2025, 4pm
A rupture of life on Earth is currently unfolding. What, then, does this rupture signify, not only in terms of being alive during such an upheaval, but also in terms of being alive to upheaval itself? Lyrical, playful, and deadly serious, Joshua Wodak’s Petrified: Living During a Rupture of Life on Earth takes the reader on a journey deep into the nature of our home, to give us the tools to learn how, in the middle of that rupture, to comport ourselves with honesty, clarity, culpability and intelligence.
This talk will provide an overview of the book, following its March 2025 publication by De Gruyter.
Dr Joshua Wodak is a researcher, writer, and artist whose work explores what it means to not only be alive during the current upheaval (climate crisis, Anthropocene, Sixth Extinction Event et. al.), but to be alive to upheaval itself. That is: how to live on an inherently unstable Earth, and in an inherently catastrophic cosmos. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. His first book is Petrified: Living During a Rupture of Life on Earth, published in the Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies series by Heidelberg University (De Gruyter, 2025).
Pub talks – $15 (includes one drink)
Book through Humanitix or pay at the door. Eftpos and cash are accepted.
Peter Stanley: Communicating History – Thoughts of an historical butterfly
Gardner’s Inn Hotel – Sunday 6 April 2025 4 pm
Peter Stanley’s recent Beyond The Broken Years is the first history of the writing of Australian military history. His The Sherrin, a novel set in ‘the Islands’ in 1945, explores the way we understand war (and that war). Peter reflects on how Australians have and can understand their military history.
Professor Peter Stanley retired from UNSW Canberra two years ago, after a career as a public historian, including becoming Principal Historian at the Australian War Memorial, where he worked from 1980 to 2007. Peter is one of Australia’s most active military historians, having published fifty non-fiction and fiction books, including the PM’s Prize-winning Bad Characters. His Beyond The Broken Years is the first history of the writing of Australian military history, one of his three books in 2024-25. An activist, he is a founder and principal of several historical lobby groups including Honest History and Defending Country.
Pub talks – $15 (includes one drink),
Book through Humanitix or pay at the door. Eftpos and cash are accepted.