New research turns Tasmanian Aboriginal history on its head. The results will help care for the land

Reading time: 5 minutes American farmer and poet Wendell Berry said of the first Europeans in North America that they ...
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THE PHANTOM OLYMPICS-Why Japan Forfeited Hosting the 1940 Olympics

Reading time: 6 minutes When the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was ...
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Sudan’s ‘forgotten’ pyramids risk being buried by shifting sand dunes

Reading time: 5 minutes The word “pyramid” is synonymous with Egypt, but it is actually neighbouring Sudan that is home ...
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How our new archaeological research investigates Dark Emu’s idea of Aboriginal ‘agriculture’ and villages

Reading time: 10 minutes Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu is in the news again, with the publication of a new book ...
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In 1968, computers got personal: How the ‘mother of all demos’ changed the world

Reading time: 7 minutes A scene from Doug Engelbart’s groundbreaking 1968 computer demo. Doug Engelbart Institute On a crisp California ...
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Sardines for breakfast, hypothermia rescues: the story of the cash-strapped, post-pandemic 1920 Olympics

Reading time: 8 minutes Since the global pandemic began, debate has raged over whether Tokyo should go ahead with the ...
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The voyage of Nicolas Baudin and ‘art in the service of science’

Reading time: 9 minutes The real-life story of French navigator Nicolas Baudin’s sea voyage to map the unknown coasts of ...
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Five Great Historically Accurate Films: Part Three

Reading time: 6 minutes READ PART ONE AND PART TWO By Michael Vecchio Saving Private Ryan (1998) Dir. Steven Spielberg ...
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Book review: Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate rigorously critiques Bruce Pascoe’s argument

Reading time: 9 minutes Eminent Australian anthropologist Peter Sutton and respected field archaeologist Keryn Walshe have co-authored a meticulously researched ...
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How do archaeologists know where to dig?

Reading time: 7 minutes National Geographic magazines and Indiana Jones movies might have you picturing archaeologists excavating near Egyptian pyramids, ...
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Chickens tell tale of human migration across Pacific

Reading time: 6 minutes Holiday in Hawaii and one of the birds you’re most likely to encounter is the chicken ...
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From the Caribbean to Queensland: re-examining Australia’s ‘blackbirding’ past and its roots in the global slave trade

Reading time: 6 minutes There are moves afoot to scrub colonial businessman Benjamin Boyd’s name from the map. The owners ...
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Four of the most lethal infectious diseases of our time and how we’re overcoming them

Reading time: 10 minutes In 2013, the World Health Organisation declared antibiotic resistance was a threat to global health security ...
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CASTLES, CAVES AND ROCK SHELTERS

Reading time: 8 minutes Archaeology in the rugged landscape of Georgia reveals a medieval world where caves and underground shelters ...
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Threat or trading partner? Sailing vessels in northwestern Arnhem Land rock art reveal different attitudes to visitors

Reading time: 6 minutes The rock art of northwestern Arnhem Land is world-renowned and represents one of the world’s most ...
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A program for peace: The founding of the United Nations

Reading time: 6 minutes Achieving the elusive dream of “world peace”, has long been an idealist and collectivist goal for ...
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What wind, currents and geography tell us about how people first settled Oceania

Reading time: 8 minutes Just look at a map of Remote Oceania – the region of the Pacific that contains ...
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The Reality of Joan of Arc

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes Last spring, I found myself in the surprising position of explaining to a student sitting ...
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Caste: A Divisive Structure in the United States, India, and Nazi Germany

Reading time: 4 minutes In her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson writes that the ways ...
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How early Australian settlers drew maps to erase Indigenous people and push ideas of colonial superiority

Reading time: 6 minutes The new Netflix series Shadow and Bone opens with cartographer Alina Starkov crammed into the back ...
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Constructing Oppression: The Berlin Wall and the Literal Iron Curtain

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes 60 years after its initial construction, the memory of the Berlin Wall remains a potent ...
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OUT OF ANCIENT MARSHES

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes Archaeology at the site of the former Pontine Marshes has uncovered a massive but forgotten ...
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VICTORIA’S VOLCANIC HISTORY CONFIRMS THE STATE’S ABORIGINAL INHABITATION BEFORE 34,000 YEARS

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes New techniques for dating volcanic eruptions, a lone axe and Indigenous oral traditions give us ...
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The First Australians grew to a population of millions, much more than previous estimates

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes We know it is more than 60,000 years since the first people entered the continent ...
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Five Great Historically Accurate Films: Part Two

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes By Michael Vecchio READ PART ONE of FIVE GREAT HISTORICAL FILMS Gandhi (1982) Dir. Richard ...
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How The Napoleonic Wars Entrenched British Rule In 19th Century South Africa

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes The battles between Britain and France following the French Revolution and into the Napoleonic Wars ...
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Who will have us? Jewish Refugees before WW2

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes The plight of Jewish refugees after the outbreak of World War II in 1939 is ...
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People gave up on flu pandemic measures a century ago when they tired of them – and paid a price

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes Picture the United States struggling to deal with a deadly pandemic. State and local officials ...
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Nikola Tesla – His Vision is our Reality

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes The legacy of one of the greatest inventors in history is some of our most ...
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The Deadliest Infectious Diseases in History and Their Prevalence Today

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes The advances in medicine and technology have helped curb the spread of one of the ...
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Picturing the unimaginable: a new look at the wreck of the Batavia

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Before dawn on the morning of June 4 1629, the Batavia, a ship of the ...
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How will our bodies be put back together? What about those eaten by cannibals? A brief history of Christian resurrection beliefs

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Easter celebrates the Christian belief that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. In so doing, ...
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Highland Clearances: Changing a Culture

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Cultures, customs and traditions change as time passes on, but sometimes this change is brought ...
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Ancient undersea middens offer clues about life before rising seas engulfed the coast. Now we have a better way to study them

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes The world’s oceans hold their secrets close, including clues about how people lived tens of ...
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Archaeologists have a lot of dates wrong for North American indigenous history – but we’re using new techniques to get it right

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes By Sturt Manning, Cornell University. Columbus famously reached the Americas in 1492. Other Europeans had ...
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Mistaken Maps and the Myths They Perpetuated

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Mapmakers in history occasionally got it wrong. Sometimes, very wrong. By Madison Moulton Maps are ...
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What is the Austronesian Expansion?

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes The mass migration of Austronesian-speaking peoples thousands of years ago still has an impact on ...
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Saint Patrick: A Story of Faith and Mythology

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes By Michael Vecchio Every year on March 17th, much of the western world celebrates “being ...
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Hidden women of history: the priestess Pythia at the Delphic Oracle, who spoke truth to power

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes By Julia Kindt, University of Sydney. In a time and place that offered few career ...
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Wise women: 6 ancient female philosophers you should know about

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes By Dawn LaValle Norman, Australian Catholic University. When we conjure up ancient philosophers the image ...
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Archaeologists determined the step-by-step path taken by the first people to settle the Caribbean islands

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes For the millions of people around the world who live on islands today, a plane ...
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Cultural diversity – the making of Rome

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes By Richard Shrubb. The Roman Empire was arguably the most successful empire in history, eclipsing ...
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This 17,500-year-old kangaroo in the Kimberley is Australia’s oldest Aboriginal rock painting

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes In Western Australia’s northeast Kimberley region, on Balanggarra Country, a two-metre-long painting of a kangaroo ...
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The West and the Rest: Deconstructing the Great Divergence Debate

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes By Madison Moulton. The causes of global inequalities between the West and the East is ...
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Mapping the World: A Short History of Cartography

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes From the cave paintings of Montignac to the Mercator Projection and beyond, maps explain how ...
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The Cold War, Churchill’s Iron Curtain, and the Power of Imagery

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes By Michael Vecchio Many years of fighting and an estimated 85 million people dead; the ...
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After Caribbean Slavery – Indentured Labour

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes By Richard Shrubb. The abolition of slavery by the British Empire would cause an economic ...
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A Brief History of Saint Valentine’s Day

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes By Michael Vecchio When one hears the word “Valentine”, many things may spring to mind, ...
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Long before GameStop, bucket shops challenged the legitimacy of Wall Street

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes By Robbie Moore, University of Tasmania. The gleeful manipulation of GameStop’s share price is not the first ...
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Australian government must negotiate a treaty with First Nations people

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes By Lidia Thorpe With 26 January looming, many Australians will be ashamed of the fact ...
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The Rise of Black Wall Street and the Race Massacre That Burned It Down

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes The Greenwood neighbourhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma was a hub for black business and wealth from ...
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Fake News, Misinformation and Propaganda Throughout History

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes By Madison Moulton Fake news has become a popular buzzword. However, the phenomenon is not ...
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What We Now Know About the Lost Colony of Roanoke

Explore the story of the Roanoke disappearance. And the latest findings and theories that have brought us a bit closer ...
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Explainer: what is radiocarbon dating and how does it work?

Rachel Wood, Australian National University Radiocarbon dating has transformed our understanding of the past 50,000 years. Professor Willard Libby produced ...
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Magic, culture and stalactites: how Aboriginal perspectives are transforming archaeological histories

New collaborative work at an Aboriginal cave in eastern Victoria, published today, shows the stark difference between contemporary archaeological research ...
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french fur trade

The Changing Relationship Between the US Government and Native Americans

The Civilisation Program, the Indian Removal Act and the Cherokee Trail of Tears, 1776 - 1860. By Caitlan Hester The ...
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Decking the halls of history: the origins of Christmas decorations

By Anne Lawrence-Mathers, University of Reading The idea of hanging up decorations in the middle of winter is older than ...
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Best Historical Films 2010-2020

There may be many historically based films, but only a few can be rightfully called striking, emotional, and informative. As ...
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Sir Paul Edmund Strzelecki, Explorer and Scientist

The Incredible Life of Paul Strzelecki

Explorer, Scientist, and Humanitarian Hero By Caitlan Hester. Sir Paul Strzelecki (1797-1873) spent over four years exploring 7,000 miles of ...
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Hidden women of history: Wauba Debar, an Indigenous swimmer from Tasmania who saved her captors

Though her brave acts were acknowledged after her death, Wauba Debar’s grave was later robbed in the name of “science” ...
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Got your bag? The critical place of mobile containers in human evolution

By Thomas Suddendorf, The University of Queensland and Michelle Langley, Griffith University Today, bags are everywhere — from cheap canvas ...
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Hawa Mahal Amer Fort

Decolonialising India’s Persianate Age

By Richard Shrubb. For the last 1,000 years and until very recently, scholars have held that the Indian sub-continent was ...
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Secondary school textbooks teach our kids the myth that Aboriginal Australians were nomadic hunter-gatherers

Robyn Moore, University of Tasmania In his book Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe writes that settler Australians wilfully misunderstood, hid and ...
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Doggerland: The Lost World Beneath the North Sea

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes By Madison Moulton Looking out at the North Sea – the body of water dividing ...
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Hidden women of history: Millicent Bryant, the first Australian woman to get a pilot’s licence

By James Vicars, University of New England. Before the glamorous flyers of the 1930s like Amelia Earhart, “Chubby” Miller and ...
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Five Great Historically Accurate Films

By Michael Vecchio. Most history enthusiasts will eye the release of a new film on a historical topic somewhat sceptically, ...
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What Hamilton Got Wrong

By Carolyn Comeau. It’s important to take historically-based art, whether a painting that condenses a battle or the acclaimed Broadway ...
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Five of the Most Historically Accurate PC Games

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Plenty of video games are marketed as being historically accurate, but few truly are. In ...
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Why Do We Have an 8-Hour Working Day?

By Anna McEvinney. The working day as we now know it was the result of international, cross-industry labour efforts from ...
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Interesting Stories of the Mound-Building Native American Civilizations of the Midwest

By Caitlan Hester. Native American Mound-Building Civilizations For over 5,000 years the Eastern, Southeastern, and the Midwestern U.S. were populated ...
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Slavery Compensation: Who Got Paid?

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes By Richard Shrubb. With the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834 the ...
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The Bantu Expansion: How Bantu People Changed Sub-Saharan Africa

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes By Madison Moulton. About 3500 years ago, an event began that changed the demographic, linguistic, ...
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Battle of One Tree Hill, Australian Frontier Wars

The Battle of One Tree Hill in 1843 was one of the largest battles in the Australian frontier wars, taking ...
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A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World – Audiobook

On his first journey Cook mapped the east coast of Australia, on his second the British Admiralty sent him into ...
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Cook – Man or Myth

2020 marks the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook and the HMB Endeavour charted the East Coast of Australia. The ...
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