Introducing Emergency Exit

In the 1850s, every criminal case in New South Wales began the same way: a clerk, a sheet of foolscap and a pen. Into those depositions went the grudges and schemes of colonial life. In Orange, a woman burned her neighbour's wheat stack and tried to bribe the constable to pin it on someone else. In Balranald, a clerk underlined the key legal points before sending the papers to Sydney, as if to instruct the Attorney General in his own business. In Law in the New Democracy (ANU Press), historian Paula Jane Byrne mines these records to show how people across the colony used, bent and resisted the law. The picture that emerges is a colony run very differently from the one found in general histories, where local populations, suspicious magistrates and outspoken juries shaped how justice worked as much as the courts in Sydney did.In conversation with Rachel Franks, Byrne explains what these records reveal about how the colony worked. Women, often assumed to be on the margins, were among the most active litigants in the interior. The Supreme Court in Sydney, long seen as the seat of colonial justice, sent Aboriginal people to trial on evidence that barely held together. The result is a history that unsettles the familiar story of lawless frontier and orderly metropolis.VoicesPaula Jane Byrne is an historian, and author of Law in the New Democracy (ANU Press, 2026) and Criminal Law and Colonial Subject: New South Wales, 1810–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).Rachel Franks is a writer and researcher, author of An Uncommon Hangman: The Life and Deaths of Robert 'Nosey Bob' Howard (NewSouth, 2022) . She is the scholarships coordinator at the State Library of New South Wales.CreditsThis episode was recorded on Gadigal land in Sydney. It was edited and mixed by Lachlan A'Court.History Lab is an Impact Studios podcast. Its executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.

Following our special series, Emergency Exit, this episode of History Lab looks at what happened to those who didn't escape Nazi persecution in Europe in the 1930s and '40s.Historian Nadia Wheatley's Strange New World began with a manilla envelope: a newspaper clipping and a photograph, sent by her stepmother after her father's death, showing him as medical superintendent of a hospital in post-war Germany. What followed was a decade of research into a story Wheatley argues has never been fully told — the year after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, when the concentration camp was burned to the ground but the displaced persons camp that replaced it became home to tens of thousands of survivors who had nowhere else to go.In conversation with writer Linda Jaivin, Wheatley traces the mismanaged relief effort that cost thousands of lives in the weeks after liberation, the fraught decision to staff the camp hospital with German doctors and nurses, and the political organising that pushed the British administration toward recognising Belsen as a Jewish displaced persons camp.The conversation also follows the more hopeful undercurrent of that year: the couples who met and married at Belsen, the roughly two thousand babies born there between 1945 and 1950, and how former camp prisoners refused to be locked in again by their new overseers. Wheatley discusses returning to the site repeatedly since 2014, meeting survivors and "the babies" — some of whom she has since encountered living in Sydney, Melbourne and Toronto — and reflects on what it meant to stand, as the daughter of the hospital's superintendent, among people for whom that hospital remains a kind of sacred site. ImagesTo see the images that Nadia Wheatley refers to in her talk, visit this link.VoicesNadia Wheatley is an Australian writer whose work includes picture books, novels, biography and history. In 2014 she was admitted by the University of Sydney to the degree of Doctor of Letters (honoris causa), in recognition of her work as a creative writer and historian. Among her many beloved titles are the children's books My Place and Dancing at the Anzac Deli. For adults, she is the author of The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift , a biography (HarperCollins 2002). Strange New World is her latest book (Monash University Publishing, 2026).Linda Jaivin is an internationally published Australian author, translator, essayist, novelist and specialist writer on China. Her most recent book is The Shortest History of Madrid (Black Ink, 2026).CreditsThis episode of History Lab was recorded on Gadigal Land, Sydney, at Gleebooks. For more literary events like this one, see the Gleebooks events page.Edited and mixed by Daniel Wiggins.History Lab is brought to you by the Australian Centre for Public History and UTS Impact Studios. Executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.

In this bonus episode, Ana Filipa Vrdoljak speaks with Rob Quinn, executive director of Scholars at Risk, about the international network's work protecting the human rights of threatened scholars and defending academic freedom. Founded in 1999 at the University of Chicago by a group of academics moved by a radio interview with an exiled scholar, Scholars at Risk now spans more than 650 member institutions in over 40 countries. Quinn traces how the organisation's work has grown from offering individual fellowships to campaigning against wrongful imprisonment, monitoring attacks on higher education, and building international legal standards for academic freedom.The conversation connects directly to Vrdoljak's own research: an Australian Research Council-funded project on the European émigré lawyers who fled fascism in the 1930s and 40s and found refuge in Australia, soon to be released as the podcast series Emergency Exit. Quinn and Vrdoljak discuss the parallels between that earlier era and today's, the crucial distinction between academic freedom and free speech, and the stories of scholars including Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, imprisoned for defending women protesting Iran's mandatory hijab laws, whose cases show what is at stake when that freedom is denied.VoicesAna Filipa Vrdoljak is UTS Professor of Law and the UNESCO Chair in International Law and Cultural Heritage. She is co-coordinator of the UNESCO-UNITWIN Network on Culture in Emergencies.Robert Quinn is Executive Director of Scholars at Risk. He hosts the Free to Think podcast.Further reading and listening'Fighting to Protect - and Define - Academic Freedom' by Robert QuinnFind out about the work of Scholars at Risk and how you can contribute here. To listen to the ‘Free to Think’ podcast link through here.CreditsThis episode was recorded on Gadigal Land, in Sydney. It was recorded by Siobhan Moylan and edited by BLAH.Emergency Exit was supported by funding from the Australian Research Council.History Lab is an Impact Studios podcast. Its executive producer is Dr Sarah Gilbert.

In this bonus episode, employment and human rights lawyer Josh Bornstein talks with Katherine Biber about the family history that shaped his career. Bornstein's grandparents left Poland in 1933 hoping to escape, finally securing passage to Melbourne in 1938, only for his grandmother to be hospitalised under a Nazi doctor and his grandfather interrogated by German police during a stopover before they could continue the journey. Growing up in a politically engaged household — his mother a union official, his father a journalist and, for a time, a politician — Bornstein built a career defending workers and refugees against far more powerful opponents, including the Transport Workers Union's case against Qantas, which he took to a seven nil victory in the High Court and more than $200 million in combined compensation and penalties.The conversation also turns to the language used to describe how governments treat refugees. Bornstein pushes back on the term "bureaucratic violence," arguing that responsibility lies with political decisions rather than the public service, drawing on his experience acting for Shayan Badraie, the young Iranian refugee whom then immigration minister Philip Ruddock refused to refer to as anything other than "it." He also reflects on the legacy of the Tampa election, the use of refugee policy as a political weapon since, and his recent writing on international law and Israel's obligations under the ICJ's provisional measures order in the genocide case.VoicesJosh Bornstein is a lawyer who specialises in employment and labour relations law, and author of the book, Working for the Brand: how corporations are destroying free speech (Scribe, 2024). Josh’s grandparents fled Poland, arriving in Australia in 1938.Katherine Biber is a legal scholar, criminologist and historian and Professor of Law at UTS. Her latest book is The Last Outlaws (Simon & Schuster Australia, 2025). Her podcast of the same name is featured on History Lab.CreditsThis special History Lab series was made on Gadigal land, in Sydney. It was edited and mixed by BLAH.Emergency Exit was supported by funding from the Australian Research Council.History Lab is an Impact Studios podcast. Its executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.

In the aftermath of World War II, a charismatic Estonian man named Ilmar Tammelo arrived in Australia as one of more than 170,000 in the Displaced Persons Scheme. Trained as a lawyer and shaped by the upheavals of Soviet and Nazi occupation, Tammelo was assigned to manual labour in regional Australia, a condition of his participation in the DP scheme.A chance encounter brought him into the company of the leading legal theorist, Julius Stone, and Tammelo entered a small but influential circle of European émigré thinkers.Together, they challenged the narrow traditions of Australian legal education, introducing new ideas about law, justice, and society. Through Tammelo’s story and those of his contemporaries, the episode reveals both the constraints of bureaucratic systems and the resilience of those who navigated them, forging intellectual and cultural communities in an often unwelcoming environment.VoicesJosh Bornstein is a lawyer who specialises in employment and labour relations law, and author of the book, Working for the Brand: how corporations are destroying free speech (Scribe, 2024). Josh’s grandparents fled Poland, arriving in Australia in 1938.Katherine Biber is a legal scholar, criminologist and historian and Professor of Law at UTS. Her latest book is The Last Outlaws (Simon & Schuster Australia, 2025). Her podcast of the same name is featured on History Lab.The voice of Ilmar Tammelo is performed by Professor Rain Liivoja and Otto Bondy by Michael Stockenhuber. Paul McCartan voiced the Australian government officials.CreditsThis special History Lab series was made on Gadigal land, in Sydney.Writer and Producer: Olivia RosenmanCollaborating scholars: Katherine Biber, Sara Dehm, and Ana Filipa VrdoljakAdditional research: Eloise ChandlerSound design and audio engineering: Melissa MayThank you to everyone we interviewed and all the voice actors for this episode: Terry Kass, Michael Kirby, Anthony Blackshield, Arthur Glass, Eureka Henrick, Rain Livoja, Paul McCartan, and Michael Stockenhuber.Special thank you to Danny Mulheron, the grandson of Richard Fuchs, for allowing us to use his grandfather’s music in this episode. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.Emergency Exit was supported by funding from the Australian Research Council.History Lab is an Impact Studios podcast. Its executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.

Leonhard Adam’s life was twice transformed by bureaucratic categories. Declared a “non-Aryan” by Nazi rules, he was forced out of his career and from his home in Germany. He fled to England in search of safety, only to be classified as an “enemy alien”, a category formed in panicked haste as Europe descended into war. Adam was swept up in a wave of mass internment that made little distinction between refugees and real threats.From there, his world shrank to barbed wire and bureaucracy. Arrested, detained, and then deported on the infamous HMT Dunera, Adam was transported across the world to an internment camp in rural Australia. Yet even within the confines of captivity, Adam refused to be defined by the labels imposed on him. He taught, lectured, and helped build a vibrant intellectual community among fellow internees.Through Adam’s extraordinary journey, this episode reveals how abstract legal categories can upend lives and how, even in the harshest conditions, people resist, adapt, and hold onto their humanity.VoicesJosh Bornstein is a lawyer who specialises in employment and labour relations law, and author of the book, Working for the Brand: how corporations are destroying free speech (Scribe, 2024). Josh’s grandparents fled Poland, arriving in Australia in 1938.Katherine Biber is a legal scholar, criminologist and historian and Professor of Law at UTS. Her latest book is The Last Outlaws (Simon & Schuster Australia, 2025). Her podcast of the same name is featured on History Lab.Sara Dehm is Associate Professor of Law at UTS, where she teaches and researches in the areas of public international law, legal history, international migration and refugee law, and the law of international organisations. She is also a co-convener of the advocacy network Academics for Refugees.Ana Filipa Vrdoljak is UTS Professor of Law and the UNESCO Chair in International Law and Cultural Heritage. She is co-coordinator of the UNESCO-UNITWIN Network on Culture in Emergencies.The voice of Leonherd Adam was performed by Thorsten Kostulski, Carl Wehner by Andreas Bork, Robert Ranulph Marett by Alistair Senior, and Esther Simpson by Toni Johnson. Winston Churchill's voice was generated by a bot. Olivia Rosenman reads the news articles.CreditsThis special History Lab series was made on Gadigal land, in Sydney.Writer and Producer: Olivia RosenmanCollaborating scholars: Katherine Biber, Sara Dehm, and Ana Filipa VrdoljakAdditional research: Eloise ChandlerSound design and audio engineering: Melissa MayThank you to everyone we interviewed and all the voice actors for this episode. Mary-Clare Adam, Andreas Bork, Alistair Senior, Toni Johnson, and Thorsten Kostulski who also provided invaluable assistance as a talent scout.The music in this episode included recordings of the Dunera Mass, composed by Max-Peter Meyer on the ship as it sailed for Australia. It was performed by the Luminescence Chamber Singers and The Oriana Chorale, directed by Roland Peelman A.M. with sound engineering and production Jim Atkins. It was recorded at the Wesley Music Centre Chapel in Canberra in 2024 with the support of Creative Australia.Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.Emergency Exit was supported by funding from the Australian Research Council.History Lab is an Impact Studios podcast. Its executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.

The Nazi rise to power looms over Europe in the 1930s, causing an exodus of emigrants seeking refuge from persecution. But fleeing fascism involves contending with the arcane - and often arbitrary - immigration systems of other countries who turn a blind eye to the unfolding crisis. Some escape; most do not.In Australia, a woman named Camilla Wedgwood works tirelessly, trying to help refugees navigate the requirements for would-be immigrants. Through her letters, archival records and personal stories, we meet individuals like German architect Richard Fuchs and Austrian lawyer Eduard Korten, whose futures were shaped by bureaucratic rules about money, age, profession and race.The episode reveals how seemingly neutral systems such as immigration permits, professional admissions and citizenship rules, can shape lives in profound and unequal ways. What happens when rigid categories fail to reflect the complexity of human lives? How do lawyers - who are pivotal in forming bureaucratic rules - respond when they become the victims of them? Through the stories of real people whose survival hinged on bureaucratic decisions, this podcast introduces the concept of bureaucratic violence: a quiet but devastating force that determines who is allowed to belong, and who is left behind.VoicesJosh Bornstein is a lawyer who specialises in employment and labour relations law, and author of the book, Working for the Brand: how corporations are destroying free speech (Scribe, 2024). Josh’s grandparents fled Poland, arriving in Australia in 1938.Katherine Biber is a legal scholar, criminologist and historian and Professor of Law at UTS. Her latest book is The Last Outlaws (Simon & Schuster Australia, 2025). Her podcast of the same name is featured on History Lab.Sara Dehm is Associate Professor of Law at UTS, where she teaches and researches in the areas of public international law, legal history, international migration and refugee law, and the law of international organisations. She is also a co-convener of the advocacy network Academics for Refugees.Camilla Wedgewood is voiced by Phoebe Borwick, Josiah Wedgewood by Jonty Claypole, Edward Korten by Bernhard Schmitz, Margaret Hay by Rosa Saladino and Doc Evatt by Gideon Haigh. The voices of Colonel TW White, CH Herbert and the Australian government official were all performed by Paul McCartan. Olivia Rosenman reads the news articles.CreditsThis special History Lab series was made on Gadigal land, in Sydney.Writer and Producer: Olivia RosenmanCollaborating scholars: Katherine Biber, Sara Dehm, and Ana Filipa VrdoljakAdditional research: Eloise ChandlerSound design and audio engineering: Melissa MayThank you to everyone we interviewed and all the voice actors for this episode. Dr. Eureka Henrich, Justice Hament Dhanji, Professor Steve Hochstadt, Carina Camamile, Phoebe Borwick, Gideon Haigh, Bernhard Schmitz, Jonty Claypole, Rosa Saladino, and Paul McCartan.Special thank you to Danny Mulheron, the grandson of Richard Fuchs, for allowing us to use his grandfather’s music throughout this episode.Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.Emergency Exit was supported by funding from the Australian Research Council.History Lab is an Impact Studios podcast. Its executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.

Coming October 1st - this special History Lab series explores the stories of European refugees who escaped Nazi persecution, only to confront new forms of exclusion through Australia’s legal and bureaucratic systems.Hosted by lawyer Josh Bornstein, with UTS researchers Katherine Biber, Sara Dehm and Ana Filipa Vrdoljak.

How do you tell the story of a "warrior" without flattening him into myth? Associate Professor Delia Falconer talks with historian Dr Naomi Parry Duncan about her new biography of Musquito — a warrior born around Port Jackson who lived through the first shockwaves of British invasion, was exiled to Norfolk Island, and ultimately met his end in Van Diemen's Land. Parry Duncan set out to tell his full, complicated story — not the "last stand" myth historians have leaned on for two centuries, but a life full of relationships, movement, and agency, drawn only from sources written at the time.The conversation follows Musquito's path from Parramatta to Norfolk Island's coral stone and on to Tasmania's dolerite country, and traces the surprising thread that runs alongside it: Parry Duncan's discovery that her own convict ancestors were caught up in his story, their land grant sitting almost on top of the spot where Musquito was captured. It's a conversation about writing history that holds violence and beauty at once — and about what's owed to a story that's been misused for so long. This episode was recorded live at Gleebooks.VoicesDr Naomi Parry Duncan is a professional historian and president of the History Council of NSW, as well as a senior research officer with the Indigenous Land and Justice Research Group at UNSW. She holds adjunct roles at Western Sydney University and the University of Tasmania and was the 2022 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellow. She was lead writer for the NSW Centenary of Anzac publication New South Wales and the Great War (2016).Associate Professor Delia Falconer is the author of two novels (The Service of Clouds and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers) and two works of nonfiction (Sydney and Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss), which have been shortlisted for national and international awards across the categories of fiction, nonfiction, innovation, biography, history and research. She is the editor of three cohort-defining collections: The Best Australian Stories 2008, The Best Australian Stories 2009 and The Penguin Book of the Road. Delia's short stories and essays have been widely anthologised, including in the landmark Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and The Penguin Century of Australian Stories. Delia teaches creative writing at UTS.Further readingMusquito: the real story of a legendary colonial warrior by Naomi Parry Duncan is published by Allen & Unwin.A review of Musquito by Tim Rowse for The Conversation.A review of Musquito by Kate Fullagar for Inside Story.CreditsThis episode of History Lab was recorded on Gadigal Land, Sydney, at Gleebooks. For more literary events like this one, see the Gleebooks events page.Edited and mixed by Daniel Wiggins.History Lab is brought to you by the Australian Centre for Public History and UTS Impact Studios. Executive producer is Sarah Gilbert.

Wikipedia doesn't set out to play favourites. But when a made-up Melbourne suburb has more history than real Australian places, something is shaping what gets written.Who - or what - decides which Australian places matter on Wikipedia?Hosts Heather Ford and Francesca Sidoti go looking, through a map of 35,000 places, a street corner in Penrith, and a fight over one island's name.How is Wikipedia biased, and why? The answer will surprise you.This episode comes to History Lab from All That We Touch, a brand new Impact Studios podcast about the entangled relationships between humans, technology, nature and politics. Its inaugural takes a close look at Wikipedia - what it knows, and how it shapes what we know. Subscribe or follow All That We Touch to hear more.VoicesHeather Ford is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the School of Communication and Social Sciences at UTS. She is the author of “Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age” published by MIT Press.Dr Francesca Sidoti is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the ARC Discovery project ‘Wikipedia and the nation’s story: towards equity in knowledge production’ in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.Dr Michael Falk is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Melbourne, and is a computational literary scholar, data scientist, speaker and writer. In all his work, he aims to combine the creativity of the arts with the rigour and precision of data science.Research linksAustralian places and WikipediaMap of Australian places on Wikipedia (Wikihistories: 2025)Map showing Edit intensity of Australian place articles: English Wikipedia (Wikihistories: 2025)Full report: How Australian places are represented on Wikipedia (Wikihistories: 2025)We analysed 35,000 Wikipedia entries about Australian places. Some of them sanitise history (The Conversation: 2024)Erinsborough Wikipedia PagePenrith Wikipedia pageK'gari Wikipedia pageBias and WikipediaCan History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past by Roy Rosenzweig (The Journal of American History Volume 2006)Wikipedia's known unknowns (The Guardian 2009) The earliest geographical analyses of Wikipedia’s geographical biases is described Professor Mark Graham. ‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia’s infrastructure and the gender gap ( Social Studies of Science 2017) How Wikipedia’s infrastructure introduces new and less visible sources of gender disparity, by Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman.Who Gets To Be Notable And Who Doesn't: Gender Bias On Wiki (NPR All Things Considered 2021) On Wikipedia, gender inequality is hiding in plain sight. Of more than a million and a half biographies - that's on the English-language version - fewer than 19% are about women. A recent study by Francesca Tripodi brings some new insight into why that is.Demographic disparity in Wikipedia coverage: a global perspective (EPJ Data Sci. 2025)Even though people identifying as female and non-binary genders have been better represented in terms of the number of Wikipedia language editions over time, and they are currently better covered than males, current global coverage of people on Wikipedia still shows disparities in both gender and geographical location of biographical subjects in various dimensions.Wikipedia editorsWho is contributing to Wikimedia projects? (Wikimedia Foundation, nd) The Wikipedia “Change the Stats” page that collates research into the Wikipedia editor base as a baseline for increasing the diversity of Wikipedia editors.Community Insights Report (Wikimedia Foundation, 2020) A survey with 2500 Wikimedians looking at their demographics, social and technological experiences. Findings from the survey included:Wikimedia contributors are 87% male. Almost half live in Europe and one-fifth in Northern America, as compared to 9.7% and 4.8% of the global population.Fewer than 1% of Wikipedia’s editor base in the U.S. identify as Black or African American.Although women were still markedly underrepresented among contributors, there was a modest increase in women contributors between 2019 (11.5%) and 2020 (15.0%).Further reading“Finding Eliza: power and colonial storytelling” by Larissa Behrendt (2016)“Finding Eliza” exhibition at Hervey Bay Regional Gallery until 16 August 2026ClipsJimmy Wales on bias: Lex Fridman podcast 19 June 2023Comedian Guy Williams on visiting Rottnest IslandHerbs French Letter World Heritage Fraser Island officially restored to Indigenous name, K'gari, supported by public (ABC News 7 June 2023)CreditsThe executive producer of this series is Heather Ford.The series is hosted by Heather Ford, Francesca Sidoti and Richard Cooke.Produced by Jane Curtis. Associate producer is Francesa Sidoti.Story consultant is Rachael Cusick. Sound by John Jacobs.Thanks for feedback from Sarah Gilbert, Regina Botros, Celine Teo-Blockey, Siobhan Moylan, Lachlan A Court, Zlata Maltceva, Rosa Ellen, and Kate Lawrence.All That We Touch artwork by Alexandra Morris. Episode tiles by Jane Curtis.Bell music composition by Maksim Voloshin-Cleary.Executive Producer of UTS Impact Studios is Sarah Gilbert.It’s produced on Gadigal Country in Sydney Australia.wikihistories is supported by Australian Research Council Grant DP220100662, ‘Wikipedia and the Nation’s Story: Towards Equity in Knowledge Production’.Find out more at wikihistories.netTranscriptsWikipedia and Australia: the bias in the map Transcript Word docWikipedia and Australia: the bias in the map Transcript PDF