50 years ago, there wasn’t a single women’s shelter in Australia. Then feminists squatted two terraces in Sydney, opening “Elsie”, Australia’s first domestic and family violence refuge. Commissioned by Elsie co-founder Anne Summers, I’ve recorded oral histories with the women who built and sustained Australia’s refuge movement. Australia’s refuge movement is a story of courageous grassroots feminist activism. Read more: The Whitlam government gave us no-fault divorce, women's refuges and childcare. Australia needs another feminist revolution Choose to act In the 1970s in Australia, there was n ..read more

Author provided, CC BY-ND Can you imagine a scientist who could neither read nor write, who spoke their wisdom in riddles, in tales of fantastic beings flying through the sky, fighting each another furiously and noisily, drinking the ocean dry, and throwing giant spears with force enough to leave massive holes in rocky headlands? Our newly published research in the journal Oral Tradition shows memories of a volcanic eruption in Fiji some 2,500 years ago were encoded in oral traditions in precisely these ways. They were never intended as fanciful stories, but rather as the pragmatic foundation ..read more

Shutterstock Content note: this article mentions genocide and acts of colonial violence against Aboriginal people. How long do you think stories can be passed down, generation to generation? Hundreds of years? Thousands? Today, we publish new research in the Journal of Archaeological Science demonstrating that traditional stories from Tasmania have been passed down for more than 12,000 years. And we use multiple lines of evidence to show it. Read more: The Memory Code: how oral cultures memorise so much information Tasmania’s violent colonial history Within months of establishing a colonial ou ..read more

On August 29 1938, in the build-up to the second world war, a now-defunct London newspaper asserted that Europe was tensely watching the crisis over Czechoslovakia unfold. But how could a newspaper know what a population was feeling? What if some people, even lots of people, were tensely watching “the racing news and daily horoscope”? This is the question posed by Mass-Observation at the start of the 1939 book, Britain. Mass-Observation was established as a social movement in 1937 by Tom Harrisson, an ornithologist and self-taught ethnographer, surrealist poet and Daily Mirror journalist Charl ..read more

The 800 West Indians who walked down the gangway at Tilbury to make new lives in England in June 1948 had been encouraged to think of the country as their motherland. The literary contribution of the Windrush generation is just one example of how Caribbean-British people enriched the nation, but it offers an important opportunity to witness the transformative moment when empire came home, changing stories of Britain forever. With their colonial education, these British subjects were already familiar with Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, and could likely have recited poems by Wordsworth, Shelley ..read more

In 2021, trend forecaster Mandy Lee predicted the return of “indie sleaze”, referring to the hedonistic and unfiltered UK and US indie music scene which stretched from 2006 to 2012. As of March 2023, the Instagram account “@indiesleaze”, which shares images of “the decadence of the mid-late aughts and the indie sleaze party that died in 2012”, has amassed over 135,000 followers. The appetite is there, then, for Meet Me in the Bathroom. Based on the 2017 book of the same name, the documentary is an oral history of and an “immersive journey through” the New York scene. The trailer for Meet Me i ..read more

Hajja Nuzha Al-Najjar in her cave-home in Masafer Yatta. In an oral history interview, she describes being shot in the leg by an Israeli settler in 2005. Mahmoud Makhamra, Author provided The people of Masafer Yatta are determined to hold on to their cave-dwelling lifestyle. “I was born in this cave and gave birth to all 12 of my children here,” says Hajja Halima Abu Younis, an 82-year-old woman from Jinba, one of 33 villages in this semi-desert region at the southern tip of the occupied West Bank. Masafer Yatta is the only Palestinian territory where many caves are used as homes – some 200 of ..read more

Deportation of Tantura's women and children, from Fureidis to Tulkarm, three weeks after the Israeli takeover. The documentary, Tantura, aims to shed light on the destruction of the Palestinian village in 1948. (Israel State Archive, Benno Rothenberg collection) A new documentary, released earlier this year, is shining light on a violent and controversial episode in Israeli and Palestinian history. Tantura tells the story of the Palestinian village and the immediate events following its capturing in 1948. It has reopened the wound of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) while sparking debate su ..read more

2SLGBTQQIA+ history cannot be complete without the stories of lesbian women. (Shutterstock) Many older lesbians sought out invisibility, they called each other “friends” or “career girls” or “not the marrying kind.” These terms worked as camouflage and helped many women feel safe during a time where their sexuality wasn’t accepted. And while invisibility was at times a “necessary fiction,” there were many other factors that contributed, including lesbophobia. Lesbophobia is a type of discrimination affecting women who are attracted to women because of their sexual orientation. Over the past se ..read more

Many Holocaust plays feature Jewish teenagers coming of age in the shadow of the death camps. Yet these works often present sentimentalised, redemptive stories, such as the 1950s production of The Diary of Anne Frank. They foreground certain narratives to the exclusion of others, such as queer experiences. Speaking testimony, however, can bring such stories back into the present. How might we use the stage to tell a different story about the Holocaust to young adults? This was the conversation with which we – Anna Hájková, a Holocaust historian, and Erika Hughes, a scholar and director of Holo ..read more