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.
July 2025
RAHS Day Lecture – Worlds of Vulnerability: Vagrancy in nineteenth-century Australia and New Zealand
‘Here and there; or, emigration a remedy’. Punch (London), 8 July 1848. Ref: PUBL-0043-1848-15. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 2 July 2025 @ 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm
Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000
Cost: Free
Event Description:
Historians have used vagrancy as a window onto historical processes, including economic processes, labour and human migration, urbanisation, and responses to poverty, such as welfare and legislation. Patterns of vulnerability were based on social difference and the politics of mobility and identity. These have become deeply entrenched in the social and cultural order over time. Using the theme of vulnerability in histories of vagrancy and the regulation of mobility helps to create a stronger relationship between law and the social institutions of the period, such as asylums, benevolent homes, immigrants’ homes, hospitals, charities and other places. This presentation describes the different aspects of the profile of those more vulnerable to police surveillance and regulation and offers a reminder of the socio-economic factors at play in creating definitions of unauthorised mobility that are also relevant in our present moment.
About the speaker:
Catharine Coleborne is a Professor of History at the University of Newcastle. Her most recent book examines the histories of colonial vagrancy across different Australian colonies and New Zealand: Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia: Regulating Mobility, 1840–1910 (Bloomsbury). Her scholarly work has ranged across histories of mental illness and institutions, colonial families and health, and museums, collections and exhibitions of psychiatric histories and objects. With Dr Effie Karageorgos, she is pursuing a new history of mental health aftercare funded by the Australian Research Council. In 2025 she is a Visiting Fellow at the State Library of NSW and later in the year will be a Fellow at the National Library of Australia.
RAHS-RSNSW Lecture – Not just another gentlemen’s club: The nineteenth-century origins and significance of the Royal Society of NSW
This event is in partnership with the Royal Society of NSW
Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 16 July 2025 @ 1.00 pm – 3.00 pm
Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000
Cost: RAHS/RSNSW members $10 | Non-members $15 (includes afternoon tea)
Event Description:
The Royal Society of NSW is a twenty-first-century organisation with a long history in the intellectual culture of Sydney and beyond. In this talk, Anne Coote will discuss the origins of this learned society, its character and social position in nineteenth-century NSW, and the significant contribution it made to the development of an active colonial research community.
About the speaker:
Dr Anne Coote is a professional historian and an associate of Macquarie University’s Centre for Applied History. One of her research interests is the cultural history of science in colonial Australia. Anne has published academically on popular science journalism, the trade in natural history specimens at a local and global level, and the intersection of commercial species collecting with ideas about class. Her book, Knowledge for a Nation: Origins of the Royal Society of New South Wales, was published in 2024.
Port Macquarie Lecture – Symbols of Australia: A Look at the Icons That Shape Us
Event Date & Time: Saturday, 19 July 2025 @ 10.00 am – 12.00 pm (bookings will close 14 July)
Event Location: MacAdams Music Centre, Port Macquarie NSW 2444
Cost: Members $10 | Non-members $15 (includes morning tea)
Event Description:
Why do we wear a sprig of wattle, queue for a democracy sausage, or argue about flags?
Join acclaimed historian Richard White, co-author of Symbols of Australia: Imagining a Nation, for an engaging talk that explores the familiar symbols that shape how we see ourselves as a nation. From Uluru to the Australian flag, Vegemite to the Akubra, these symbols reflect our evolving national identity — sometimes inspiring, sometimes surprising.
Presented by the Royal Australian Historical Society, supported by Create NSW, and held in collaboration with the Port Macquarie Historical Society, this event is part of the RAHS regional outreach program.
The event will include a morning tea and a Q&A session with Richard White.
About the speaker:
Richard White retired from the University of Sydney in 2013, having taught Australian history and the history of travel and tourism there since 1989. He is a Councillor of the RAHS and initiated the establishment of the History Council of NSW. His publications include Inventing Australia, On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia and Symbols of Australia (new edition 2020).
August 2025
RAHS Day Lecture – Eight Early Women Architects in Australia
Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 6 August 2025 @ 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm
Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000
Cost: Free
Event Description:
This lecture offers short, illustrated summaries of the lives and careers of eight of the most prominent and interesting early women architects to practice in NSW before 1960, as discovered in my PhD research (University of NSW, 2000). Florence Taylor, Marion Mahony Griffin, Ellice Nosworthy, Rosette Edmunds, Heather Sutherland, Winsome Hall Andrew, Eleanor Cullis-Hill and Eva Buhrich. Women architects can disappear from history, but they can also be recovered.
About the speaker:
Dr Bronwyn Hanna is a heritage consultant who trained as an Australian architectural historian in Sydney. She has worked for government, industry and community groups on the history and significance of many heritage places, including the Sydney Opera House and Hyde Park Barracks. She has published two co-authored books about women architects, two long art history reports about heritage places (Hill End and the Dandenong Ranges), and many shorter articles on the built environment. More recently, she undertook 23 oral history interviews with pioneering heritage professionals about their contributions to the Burra Charter for the National Library of Australia.
RAHS Special Lecture – Fleeced: Unraveling the History of Wool and War
Event Date & Time: Monday, 11 August 2025 @ 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm
Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000
Cost: Free
Event Description:
Not all 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 unexpected effects of all this on how we dress today. The nineteenth-century rise of industrial manufacture of woollen fabrics and Southern Hemisphere sheep husbandry supported an enormous increase in the size of twentieth-century armies. Wool was also central to frontier war in Australia and elsewhere. By the dawn of the twentieth century, Sydney was the centre of the world’s wool market, and this trade shaped the fabric of the city. Pulling at threads of family history and finding objects that let us unpick the nuances of our story are key strategies of Fleeced.
About the speaker:
Trish FitzSimons is Adjunct Professor at the Griffith Film School, Griffith University. She is a documentary filmmaker and exhibition curator with a passion for social and cultural history. Her intellectual and creative interests had not included textile history prior to this shared research project with Madelyn Shaw. Letters written by her grandfather between 1904–07 to her great-grandparents in Australia as he learned the wool trade in the UK and the US were one impetus to this book. Interview has been a defining component of her practice for the last 40 years, in documentary films, books and exhibitions.
RAHS-WEA Workshop – The Historical Land Records Viewer: Searching for Individuals
This event is in partnership with WEA Sydney
Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 27 August 2025 @ 11.00 am – 1.00 pm
Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000
Cost: Members $35 | Non-members $39
Event Description:
Join us for a course on using the Historical Land Records Viewer (HLRV) to research individuals and properties. This course will guide participants through the process of accessing and interpreting historical land records, parish maps, and other key documents. Ideal for family historians, local researchers, and anyone interested in land ownership and settlement patterns, the course offers step-by-step instruction, research tips, and real-life examples. No prior experience is necessary. By the end of the course, participants will be equipped with the skills to explore land history and uncover valuable insights into the lives of past individuals and families.
About the speaker:
Christine Yeats (FRAHS, BA, Dip Lib, Dip Arch Admin) is an archivist and historical researcher, with particular interest in women’s history. Her research interests include attempts to introduce a silk industry into the Australian colonies and the history of the Romani (Gypsies) in nineteenth-century Australia. She is the Immediate Past President of the Federation of Australian Historical Societies; RAHS Councillor 2012–25 (Senior Vice President 2012–18, 2022–, President 2018–21; Convenor Events Committee 2012–); President Randwick & District Historical Society; Convenor, Assessment Sub-Committee UNESCO AMOW Committee and Chair of the Jessie Street National Women’s Library.
September 2025
RAHS Day Lecture – Finding the Outrageous Fortunes: Detecting the adventures of crime writer, Mary Fortune, and her criminal son, George
Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 3 September 2025 @ 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm
Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000
Cost: Free
Event Description:
The saga of journalist and crime writer Mary Fortune and her criminal son, George, forms a most unusual chapter in Australian history. Mary was a woman of mystery, her life adventurous, to say the least. It spanned several continents and included long stints on the Victorian goldfields and ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ from 1853 to 1911. It included a bigamous marriage to a police trooper. She was gaoled for drunkenness. She had a long, prolific career writing crime fiction (in addition to various genres of journalism). Her illegitimate son, George, became a career criminal – meaning that while Mary was writing about crime, George was committing it.
In the field of crime fiction, Mary was a true pioneer, with no role models to emulate. Only a decade after the establishment of the Victoria Police, she was referencing cutting-edge technologies and detective methodologies. Many of the devices and conventions we take for granted are to be found in her stories, predating the work of Arthur Conan Doyle by some thirty years. Despite all this, she was almost forgotten after her death, her identity and the scope of her achievements being obscured by the multiple pseudonyms she used during her lifetime. Meanwhile, her son George become ‘famous’ for pulling off one of Melbourne’s most notorious bank robberies. His troubled life became something of a classic tragicomedy.
Uncovering the mysteries of Mary and George has been a lengthy adventure in literary detection for co-authors Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown, with the 2025 publication of Outrageous Fortunes being the culmination of the last ten years of their quest. This lecture will offer a glimpse of their discoveries about Mary and George and highlight the literary and historical significance of their respective stories.
About the speaker:
Megan Brown completed her PhD at the University of Wollongong, examining the work of Mary Fortune. She has contributed chapters to The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature and The Unsocial Sociability of Women’s Life Writing.
RAHS Special Lecture – Dangerous Passage: A Maritime History of the Torres Strait
This event takes place during History Week 2025
Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 10 September 2025 @ 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm
Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000
Cost: Free
Event Description:
The reef-strewn passage between the Australian mainland and Papua New Guinea remains the most hazardous of all the major Straits in the world. It is 270 kilometres long and only 150 kilometres wide, but it contains over 274 islands, islets, coral reefs, and coral cays. Its waters are full of potential hazards separated by narrow and often dangerous channels. The Torres Strait Islanders knew these waters well because voyaging and trade were part of their lives and livelihoods, but early European explorers like Luis Vas de Torres and James Cook were forced to find their route through the Strait without any previous maps. Early navigators such as Torres, Cook, Bligh, and Flinders contributed to the charting of this dangerous passage. However, it was not until the completion of detailed hydrographic surveys by the British Admiralty in the 1840s, the advent of steamships, and the introduction of Torres Strait Pilots that it could ultimately be used as a major shipping route. Readers should be advised that this history will include stories of murder, mayhem, mutiny, disastrous shipwrecks, desperate voyages of survival in open boats, headhunting and hurricanes.
About the speaker:
Ian Burnet grew up in South Gippsland in Victoria and graduated with a combined major in Geology and Geophysics from the University of Melbourne. His books show his fascination with the diverse history of the Indonesian archipelago to the north of Australia. Ian is the author of seven books on maritime history, the spice trade and the vast archipelago to the north of Australia. These include Spice Islands, East Indies, Archipelago, Where Australia Collides with Asia, The Tasman Map, Joseph Conrad’s Eastern Voyages and Dangerous Passage. Details can be found on his website – www.ianburnetbooks.com.
October 2025
RAHS Day Lecture – A (Virtual) Walk Around Sydney in June 1790
Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 1 October 2025 @ 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm
Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000
Cost: Free
Event Description:
Gary Sturgess takes us on a virtual walk around the settlement in Sydney Cove at the end of the First Fleet period, just before the Second Fleet arrived. Using contemporary paintings, charts and documentary sources, he recreates the physical environment of ‘the camp’, enabling us to better understand key events in the early settlement, and the shape of Georgian Sydney today.
About the speaker:
Gary L. Sturgess is an academic and former public servant who has closely studied the legal, financial and managerial foundations of the transportation system. In preparing to write a social history of the First Fleet period, he has explored the physical layout of the early settlement. Sturgess is the author of numerous articles on the convict system in peer-reviewed journals, and much of his work is published on his website, BotanyBaymen.com.