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)

What does decolonisation mean as a field of historical inquiry — and what does it demand of the historians who work in it? Jon Piccini and Angela Woollacott approach these questions from different generations and starting points. Woollacott came to postcolonial thinking through the new imperial history in 1990s American universities, where the field felt genuinely revolutionary. Piccini came through the study of 1960s transnational activism, and found his way to decolonisation proper only when a supervisor’s question stuck with him long enough to send him back to sources he thought he’d already exhausted.

They discuss what a decolonial approach actually requires: taking positionality seriously, working across archives that are not equally preserved, and refusing to let the boundaries of the logo map define Australian history. The conversation moves through the historiography — Frantz Fanon, CLR James, the landmark work of Tracy Banivanua Mar on decolonisation as an oceanic movement — and into practical questions about how the history is made. Piccini describes working with Papua New Guinean archives and the irreducible privilege involved in that encounter, while Woollacott discusses the seminal work of Henry Reynolds and the influence of the Colonial Frontiers Massacres Map as presenting incontrovertible evidence of frontier violence.

Jon Piccini is a Senior Lecturer in History at Australian Catholic University in Brisbane/Meanjin. His work spans transnational activism, human rights history, and Australia’s colonial relationships in the Pacific. He is completing a book on Australia and decolonisation.

Angela Woollacott is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the School of History at the Australian National University, on Ngunnawal Country. Her books include Settler Society in the Australian Colonies (2015) and a biography of Don Dunstan. Her current project examines Australians who shaped the intellectual and political challenge to colonialism in the mid-twentieth century.

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.

• Tracy Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific (2016)
• CLR James, The Black Jacobins (1938; rev. ed. 1963)
• Shannyn Palmer, Unmaking Angus Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station (2022) — Prime Minister’s History Prize winner
• Jessica Urwin, Contaminated Country (forthcoming, Melbourne University Press)
• Henry Reynolds, Looking from the North (2024)