RAHS Upcoming Events
The Royal Australian Historical Society has an established tradition of delivering a diverse Calendar of Events throughout the year, helping make history accessible to all. This program includes lectures, skills-based workshops, regional seminars, tours and book launches.
The annual RAHS Conference is a highlight of the Society’s activities. It provides an opportunity for the RAHS and its Affiliated Societies to network at a conference dedicated to promoting local and community history, showcasing the research of individuals and societies.
April 2026
RAHS-WEA Workshop – What Lies Beneath: A Deeper Dig into the Archives
Randwick Public School, portable classroom, 1913 (Museums of History NSW)
Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 29 April 2026 @ 11.00 am – 1.00 pm
Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000 (hybrid)
Cost: RAHS Members $35 | Non-Members $39
Event Description:
This course will offer practical guidance on how to unlock the rich resources of the NSW State Archives Collection, now part of Museums of History NSW, using a selection of case studies. The session will highlight strategies for navigating and interpreting archival records, focusing on stories of individuals, communities, and institutions. Participants will learn how to combine traditional archival research with online tools and resources such as Ancestry and Find My Past, gaining insights into records ranging from immigration and convict history to land, education, and family life. The presentation will empower researchers to confidently trace and contextualise the past.
About the speaker:
Christine Yeats is an archivist and historical researcher with 35 years’ experience, including senior roles at Museums of History NSW (formerly State Records NSW). She managed access to the State’s archives, outreach, and public programs until her retirement in 2012. A past President of both the RAHS and the Federation of Australian Historical Societies, she is also a member of the Australian Dictionary of Biography’s Revision Sub-Committee. In 2023, she was awarded a RAHS Fellowship for her outstanding contributions to Australian history.
May 2026
RAHS Day Lecture – Local History, Family History, Personal History, National History: Case studies and the complexity of Australia’s European Past
William Waterhouse (Supplied: Richard Waterhouse)
Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 6 May 2026 @ 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm
Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000 (hybrid)
Cost: Free
Event Description:
This presentation will explore how these four historical approaches can be combined to establish more complex understandings not only of the history of individual families but also of the histories of localities and the nation. To illustrate these arguments, I will present four examples.
The first focuses on the Entwistle family, including Martha and her son William, both convicted of forgery, who arrived in NSW as convicts and succeeded in creating new lives for themselves and their families. The second deals with William and Mary Susannah Waterhouse, respectable citizens of nineteenth-century Grafton, who lived with a deeply buried secret- they were not married, and their two children’s real father was a man Susannah had abandoned in Melbourne. Victorian respectability, it seems, was not always what it claimed to be. The third example focuses on Earle Waterhouse, a Mudgee schoolteacher who joined the RAAF in World War II and rose to the rank of Squadron Leader. Although he experienced a series of major traumas during the war, he also made a significant contribution to Allied success in the Pacific through his role in organising all Allied mine-laying missions in the period from June 1944 through to the end of the war. His life is a case study in the enduring cost of war.
About the speaker:
Richard Waterhouse is Emeritus Professor of History, School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Sydney. He was formerly Bicentennial Professor of Australian History and Head of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the same institution. He is the author of six books and more than 70 articles and chapters on aspects of Australian and United States history. His most recent book is Land of Promise: a history of European Australia through the lives of seven generations of my family (Kerr Publishing, 2025).
RAHS Walking Tour – South Eveleigh Locomotive Workshops
NSWGR Class O-446 Class No. 4474-6-0 at Eveleigh Workshops, c. 1920s (Image from the ARHS Collection courtesy of the University of Newcastle Library’s Special Collections)
This event is held as part of the Australian Heritage Festival
Event Date & Time: Friday, 15 May 2026 @ 11.00 am – 12.00 pm and 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm
Event Location: South Eveleigh, 2 Locomotive St, Eveleigh NSW 2015
Cost: $20
Event Description:
This walking tour introduces visitors to the history of the NSW Railways and to the heritage adaptive re-use of the former Eveleigh Locomotive Workshops into a brilliant commercial and leisure hub. First called the Australian Technology Park and now known as South Eveleigh, the place features awesome industrial architecture and astonishing remnants of industrial machinery, as well as a proud legacy of industrial activism.
About the tour guide:
Dr Bronwyn Hanna is a heritage consultant who spent 15 years in academia, including writing a PhD and two co-authored books on women architects in NSW. She has since worked for 22 years as a heritage professional with government, industry and community groups. Her favourite job was five years with Sydney Trains Heritage, helping conserve and interpret their 200 heritage-listed railway stations in NSW.
June 2026
RAHS Day Lecture – Historical Implications of the Life of Sir Gerard Brennan
Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 3 June 2026 @ 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm
Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000 (hybrid)
Cost: Free
Event Description:
Sir Gerard Brennan’s life provides a powerful lens through which to view the transformation of Australia during the twentieth century – and it illuminates two compelling paradoxes. The first is how one man was both shaped by history and played a crucial role in shaping it. The second concerns the judiciary itself: its twin responsibilities to secure the legitimacy of law by ensuring it faithfully reflects society’s fundamental values, and simultaneously to guide society through changed circumstances.
Brennan’s Queensland Catholic upbringing, his father’s career in politics and on the Supreme Court, and his own experiences at the Bar during the Bjelke-Petersen era rooted him in a legal world still essentially British in orientation – yet those same experiences sharpened his conviction about what the Rule of Law truly demands of a civilised society. Moving to the federal sphere in the mid-1970s, as inaugural President of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal he developed a distinctive and enduring approach to securing Administrative Justice. He joined the High Court in 1981 and in conjunction with the other judges, played a pivotal role in ‘Australianising’ the law – in parallel with the Australia Acts, the republican debate, and a broader search for national identity.
The talk focuses on three landmarks of that transformation: the Mabo judgment, which rewrote the nation’s relationship with its own past; Marion’s case, in which Brennan enunciated a compelling and profound legal approach to the protection of the dignity of people with disabilities; and the Constitution’s implied protection of political communication – a doctrine that continues to shape Australian public life. The underlying theme is that Brennan was no revolutionary. He believed in precedent, incremental change, and service. Yet this modest, traditional man – a Sunday-night volunteer at St Vincent de Paul – helped shape the law to secure a more just Australia. His life illustrates how History is often made by conservators, not crusaders.
About the speaker:
Jeff FitzGerald obtained an Honours degree in Law from Melbourne University and a PhD in the Sociology of Law from Northwestern University in the USA. He then taught Sociology and Legal Studies at La Trobe University, provided policy advice in the justice and governance areas in the Victorian Premier’s Department, and was Deputy Secretary in the Victorian Attorney-General’s Department. He then spent 10 years as Registrar at the University of Technology Sydney. Following his retirement at the end of 2006, he has acted as a consultant in the area of Higher Education governance and has served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the AustLII Foundation, which provides free online access to a very broad range of legal authorities, writings and other related material.
RAHS Special Lecture – Playtime: A History of Australian Childhood
Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 17 June 2026, 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm
Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000 (hybrid)
Cost: Free
Event Description:
Wattle fairies, talking magpies, excursions to the South Pole, unbreakable dolls, flesh-eating monsters, and toddler kings. Is there anywhere the childhood imagination cannot take us? In her recent book Playtime, Emily Gallagher explores children’s play and imaginative lives in the half-century before the Second World War. Often overlooked in Australian history, children were a significant demographic group throughout this period, and they deserve to be taken seriously as historical subjects. This lecture will explore some of the creative and surprising ways that young people navigated their changing world. It is a story about young dreamers and aspiring journalists, old schoolrooms and backyard cubbies, war and modernity, and the enduring power of the imagination to defy the routine and powerlessness of everyday life.
About the speaker:
Dr Emily Gallagher is a historian at the Australian National University. She began her career as a teacher in Sydney before deciding to pursue her passion for history and writing in Canberra. Playtime: A History of Australian Childhood (La Trobe, 2025) is her first book. Emily is also a research editor for the Australian Dictionary of Biography and a research fellow on an ARC-funded project writing the first history of grandparenting in Australia.
July 2026
RAHS Day Lecture – In Arnhem Land with the ‘Clever Men’: On researching the story of the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948
Howell Walker (photographer), ‘Aborigines and C.P.M. [Charles Pearcy Mountford] with bark paintings’ (original caption), 1948. Collection of the State Library of South Australia.
Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000 (hybrid)
Cost: Free
Event Description:
In this richly illustrated presentation, Martin Thomas tells the story of how he came to write about one of Australia’s most controversial research ventures, the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. Thomas will talk about his own response to some of the deeply unethical practices of the original expedition and the ways in which he worked collaboratively with Indigenous communities to understand how they regarded an expedition that collected thousands of ethnographic objects, natural history specimens, and human remains.
About the speaker:
Martin Thomas is Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University and a scholar of cross-cultural interaction and exchange. He is a broadcaster, occasional filmmaker, essayist, and oral historian. His books include The Artificial Horizon: Imagining the Blue Mountains, The Many Worlds of R.H. Mathews: In search of an Australian anthropologist, and Clever Men: How worlds collided on the Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948, winner of the 2025 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award.
August 2026
RAHS Day Lecture – A.D. Hope: A Poet in History
Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 5 August 2026 @ 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm
Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000 (hybrid)
Cost: Free
Event Description:
The poet Alec Derwent Hope (1907–2000) lived for all but seven years of the twentieth century. He was acutely aware of the changes in technology over his lifetime, moving from the horse-and-cart days of his childhood to seeing the live television relay of a rocket ship reaching the moon on his sixty-second birthday. This paper will trace the way his poetry responded to change and his growing concern about the way that humans destroy the world around them.
About the speaker:
Dr Susan Lever OAM taught literature for many years at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, and she is the author and editor of several books, including A Question of Commitment: Australian Literature in the Twenty Years after the War. She became a friend of Alec Hope in the 1980s when she taught at the Australian National University.