Environmental history in Australia has moved from the margins to something close to the centre of the discipline — but the path there was longer and less obvious than it might appear. Jarrod Hore and Nancy Cushing map that path from different vantage points. Hore came of age as a scholar inside the field; Cushing arrived at it gradually, via urban history, historical geography, and a childhood in Nova Scotia that made her attentive to the materialities of place.

They trace the field’s prehistory through Keith Hancock and the historical geographers, and its institutional emergence through the Green Stream at the 2016 AHA conference in Ballarat, which gave environmental historians in Australia a genuine community for the first time. The conversation turns on the field’s core contribution: refusing the false separation of humans from the environments they inhabit, and refusing equally the separation between the humanities and the sciences.

Jarrod Hore is a Scientia Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales. His research covers landscape photography, geology, and commodity histories in settler colonies. His first book is Visions of Nature (2022).

Nancy Cushing is an Associate Professor at the University of Newcastle, where she recently marked thirty years. She is a past Coral Thomas Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales and has published widely on human-animal relations in Australia.

Recorded and edited by Lachlan D’Acourt. Executive producers: Michelle Arrow and Kate Fullagar. Executive producer, Impact Studios: Sarah Gilbert. History Lab is made by UTS Impact Studios and the Australian Centre for Public History. Field Notes is made in collaboration with the Australian Historical Association.

• Katie Holmes, Andrea Gaynor and Ruth Morgan, “Doing Environmental History in Urgent Times,” History Australia (2020)
• Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011)
• Keith Hancock, Discovering Monaro (1977)
• Tom Griffiths, "Discovering Hancock: the journey to Monaro" (1999)

In this episode of Field Notes, historians Sophie Loy-Wilson and Mei-fen Kuo trace their paths into Chinese Australian history — one drawn by questions of racism and resistance, the other by the discovery of long-neglected Chinese-language newspapers and Qing Dynasty consular records. They discuss the ethical challenges of community history, the archival work required to recover women’s lives, and a question that has shadowed Chinese communities in Australia across two centuries: first, who counts as Australian, and then, after the Second World War, which China do you belong to?

The conversation is as much personal as scholarly. Kuo reflects on growing up in Taiwan at the end of martial law, a grandmother whose name will never appear in any archive, and the journey from Irish nationalism to Chinese Australian history. Loy-Wilson recalls being an eleven-year-old in Beijing when her father pointed to the crowds on Chang’an Avenue and said, everyone under forty survived the Cultural Revolution.

Sophie Loy-Wilson is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the Chinese Australian diaspora and the politics of race and labour. Her current book project examines Chinese men during the gold rushes of the 1850s to 1880s.

Mei-fen Kuo is a historian at Macquarie University specialising in Chinese Australian and Taiwanese migration history. Her archival discoveries include consular records from the Qing Dynasty period held in Melbourne’s Chinatown. Her forthcoming book traces the political life of a Taiwanese Australian intellectual and his engagement with democracy movements across the Asia-Pacific.

Recorded and edited by Lachlan D’Acourt. Executive producers: Michelle Arrow and Kate Fullagar. Executive producer, Impact Studios: Sarah Gilbert. History Lab is made by UTS Impact Studios and the Australian Centre for Public History. Field Notes is made in collaboration with the Australian Historical Association.

• John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (2007)
• Cathy May, Top Sawyers: Chinese in Cairns 1870s–1920s (1984)

Military history in Australia carries a weight that few other subfields do — it sits at the intersection of popular memory, national identity, and institutional commemoration in ways that make it both unusually accessible and unusually prone to distortion. Maggie Hutchison and Tom Rogers make a case for what serious military history looks like. It demands an active voice — soldiers don’t “lay down their lives”; they are killed by someone, with something, for reasons that can be named. And it insists on the connections between home front and battlefield that have too often been treated as separate stories.

The conversation includes the Australian War Memorial’s 2022 decision to reverse its long-standing position about the frontier wars — a change, Rogers argues, that came directly from decades of academic research, not popular opinion. They discuss the centenary wave and its aftermath, the digitisation of First World War records, and the way genealogy pulls people into military history and then requires them to understand the broader context.

Maggie Hutchison is a Senior Lecturer in History at UNSW Canberra. Her research covers war art, commemoration, and the long-term costs of military service. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary project on veteran suicide.

Tom Rogers is a historian in the Military History section at the Australian War Memorial. His research focuses on the colonial period and the frontier wars. He is currently working on soldiers’ letters published in newspapers during the South African War.

Recorded and edited by Lachlan D’Acourt. Executive producers: Michelle Arrow and Kate Fullagar. Executive producer, Impact Studios: Sarah Gilbert. History Lab is made by UTS Impact Studios and the Australian Centre for Public History. Field Notes is made in collaboration with the Australian Historical Association.

• Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (2013)
• Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (2019)
• Evan S. Connell, Son of the Morning Star (1984)
• Andrew Gordon, The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command (1996)