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History Now: History Podcasts: an exciting avenue for historical research or yet more populist compromise?

• The History Council of NSW & University of Sydney • Season 2 • Episode 1

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In this episode of History Now 2025, the rising genre of History Podcasts is explored in a discussion between Geraldine Fela and Leigh Boucher from Macquarie University, chaired by Craig Barker from the University of Sydney.

In the ever-expanding podcast media universe, history is a significant player. Podcasts led by historians regularly feature in ‘top-ten’ download lists, and there is clearly an appetite amongst podcast listeners to hear experts interpret and make meaning from the past.  The contrast with declining trends in book sales by academic historians could not be sharper. Many within the discipline are understandably excited about the potential of podcasts to reach new audiences.  However, podcasting-the-past also poses big challenges.

Geraldine Fela and Leigh Boucher discuss what possibilities working in this form have opened up for historical interpretation, and how they've reached new audiences with their work.  What, if anything, did they have to ‘give up’ in the move from written history to aural storytelling, and has this been a comfortable transition? 

The History Now 2025 podcast series is brought to you by the History Council of NSW in partnership with the Chau Chak Wing Museum and the Vere Gordon Childe Centre at the University of Sydney.

This series has been supported in 2025 by the NSW Government through a grant from Create NSW.

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Catherine Shirley:

Welcome to the History Now 2025 podcast series, brought to you by the History Council of New South Wales in partnership with the Chau Chack Wing Museum and the Vere Gordon Childe Centre at the University of Sydney. In this episode, the rising genre of history podcasts is explored in a discussion between Geraldine Fela and Lee Boucher from Macquarie University, chaired by Craig Barker from the University of Sydney.

Catherine Shirley:

In the ever-expanding podcast media universe, history is a significant player. Podcasts led by historians regularly feature in top 10 download lists, and there is clearly an appetite amongst podcast listeners to hear experts interpret and make meaning from the past. The contrast with declining trends in book sales by academic historians could not be sharper. Many within the discipline are understandably excited about the potential for podcasts to reach new audiences. However, podcasting the past also poses big challenges. In this episode, Fela and Boucher discussed what possibilities working in this form have opened up for historical interpretations and how they've reached new audiences with their work. What, if anything, did they have to give up in the move from written history to oral storytelling? And has this been a comfortable transition?

Dr Craig Barker:

Welcome to the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, the custodian of the university's diverse collections of more than 450,000 cultural objects, artworks, and natural history specimens from around the globe. It's a great, great honor to have you with us this evening. Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge that we're meeting today on Gadigal land and to pay our respects to the traditional custodians, the Gaddi people of the Eoro Nation, and to acknowledge the tens of thousands of years of care for country, waters, and skies that the Gadigal people have overseen on this very land that we're meeting. And to also acknowledge that, of course, we're meeting on unceded territory as well. My name's Craig Barker. I'm an archaeologist, an educator, and I'm the head of the public engagement team here at the Chau Chak Wing Museum. And in 2025, I decided my dance card wasn't busy enough. So I'm also the program director for the 2025 series of History Now talks. History Now is the annual series of talks for the History Council of New South Wales. And this year, I'm pleased to say that the series is co-presented between the History Council of New South Wales, the Chau Chak Wing Museum, and my colleagues here, and the Vere Gordon Childes Centre at the University of Sydney, a relatively new research institute dedicated to broader historical investigation in all of its forms. This series is made possible because of Create New South Wales's support as well. It's my great honor to moderate tonight's presentations, but before I introduce our two presenters, I'd like to take this opportunity to formally introduce Catherine, Catherine Shirley, Executive and Strategic Development Officer with the History Council of New South Wales, to speak more about the supporters of the series. Catherine, please.

Catherine Shirley:

Thank you, Craig. And look, what a glorious auditorium we're in tonight. And it's absolutely fantastic. We are thrilled from the History Council of New South Wales's point of view to be partnering with the Chau Chak Wing Museum at Sydney University in this series this year. Established in 2015 when Hannah Forsyth, Anna Clark, and Melissa Bellanta took over the Australian Studies Seminar Series and renamed it History Now. The seminars have explored current and compelling issues affecting the practice of contemporary history. The series was taken up by UTS. It's a wonderful thing.

Catherine Shirley:

There's a bit of a bidding war that goes on at the beginning of every year, and everyone says, yes, we want to have this series. And so it was taken up by UTS through Paul Ashton, Anna Clark, and Paula Hamilton from 2020, with Kiera Lindsay making the link between the History Council of New South Wales in her role as the vice president at that time. From 2021 to 23, the UTS Australian Centre for Public History hosted the series with support from venue partner, the State Library of New South Wales, which continued, this is where you get the drum roll, which continued into 2024 when our then vice president Jesse Adams Stein convened History Now uh series representing both our organization and the Australian Centre for Public History.

Catherine Shirley:

In the last couple of years, we've witnessed our audience grow from about 10 people in a small university lecture room to the size of what we see tonight. And let's not forget, in 2024, we went digital. We decided to take my little iPhone into the State Library venue with a Rode neck mic, clicked to the lectern, just like that, and uh to record History Now, which we then took home and edited on free desktop software. Um, we then put it out on our platform through the History Council site, and um and it flows through to Spotify and um iHeart and a whole variety of other ones as well, Apple, et cetera, et cetera. So we've now gone global. This series is now global. And um our funding body, the Create New South Wales, you know, through the New South Wales government through Create New South Wales, can't believe their luck. They're delighted that we've actually expanded and engaged with an audience which is larger than 10 people in a room. But we couldn't have done any of this without our fantastic other partners, our cultural partners, who are so incredibly long-term supporters of the History Council of New South Wales and who contribute a lot of voluntary time to supporting us. So this is a great segue point. Back to Craig. So thank you very much.

Dr Craig Barker:

Thank you, Catherine. So on to tonight's presentation. In the ever-expanding podcast media universe, history is a significant player. Podcasts led by historians regularly feature in top 10 download lists, and there's clearly an appetite amongst podcast listeners around the globe to hear experts interpret and to make meaning from the past. I'll point you to the Wall Street Journal article of late last year that uh had the stats for the Rest is History podcast, which alone saw more than 11 million downloads per month in 2024. Irrespective of the content or the uh or your thoughts about individual podcasts, there is a clear audience that are eager to be engaged with history discussions and history presentations. The contrast with declining trends in book sales by academic historians could not be sharper. And many within the discipline of history, and indeed the broader humanities, are understandably excited about the potential of podcasts to reach new audiences. But as we're here tonight, podcasting the past also represents a series of big challenges. Geraldine Fela and Lee Boucher have worked with the UTS Impact Studio, Guardian Podcasts, and the ABC to produce history podcasts based on extensive original research. And what we're going to be hearing tonight is both their personal experiences and I think some broader observations as well about history podcasts more generally and what we may do. Lee is an associate professor of modern history at Macquarie University, where his research explores questions of race, gender, and sexuality in Australian political and social history. He's published works in a series of academic journals, and his most recent co-authored book is Personal Politics, Gender, Sexuality, and the Remaking of Australian Citizenship, published in 2024. He's currently working on a history of HIV AIDS in and around Darlinghurst, which will be the topic of a podcast released with the History Lab later this year. And I believe one of the things you'll be discussing today. Following Lee's presentation, Geraldine will then come up to the microphone.

Dr Craig Barker:

Geraldine is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Humanities at Macquarie University. Her research and teaching traverses histories of gender and sexuality, labor, social movements, and medicine. Her first book, Critical Care, Nurses on the Front Line of Australia's AIDS Crisis, was published last year through UNSW Press. In 2023, Geraldine was awarded a place in the ABC's annual Top Five Humanities Research Residency Program and has since developed a close working relationship or in partnership with ABC Radio National, which I know will be one of the things you'll discuss today. In 2024 and into this year, she spent a year working as a producer and an in-house historian on the six-part radio documentary series Conspiracy War on the Waterfront, based on her postdoctoral research examining the 1998 Waterfront Dispute. Can I ask everyone to give Geraldine and Lee an applause? And Leigh, I will invite you up to the microphone.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Thank you, Leigh. Thanks very much. Just to add to that acknowledgement, Geraldine and I both at Macquarie, which is on the unceded lands of the Darug peoples. That is, of course, more than an acknowledgement. It's us noting that the way we tell stories, how we present our material, has a politics, right? And that's something that Geraldine and I have been thinking a lot about over the past 12 to 18 months or so, as both of us have been involved in um collaborative projects to produce podcasts. So what I'm going to do now is just kind of give some general comments for about five minutes or so, just sketching out some general ideas about podcasting, actually defining what a podcast is, which is probably worth it. Before Geraldine and I each sort of talk about our experiences trying to produce podcasts. I'm still in the middle of mine, whereas Geraldine's at the end of hers. So take that as you will. So, and I just want to also thank um uh thank you for the opportunity. Geraldine and I have been having these conversations in corridors at work, through office doors, working through various traumas. Um it's been nice to sort of have the opportunity to think a little bit more coherently and uh kind of consistently about this. So, podcasting for academic historians, I think we could say offers a set of kind of seductive possibilities. Um, we are in the context of a declining social license for academic history, as job cuts are showing us, right, at the moment. Um uh and the podcast explosion of the past two decades and historical podcasts within it seem to offer large audiences for our work. And that seems very important right now. I think most historians are committed not just to contributing and advancing a scholarly conversation between themselves about the past, but usually to making a contribution to historical understanding beyond our disciplinary communities. We want to talk to people outside universities. I don't think many historians in universities actually see themselves inside an ivory tower. Most historians, or many, some historians in universities, I saw that look from one of my colleagues. Um, many historians in universities see themselves as working for public institutions and therefore can contributing to some form of public conversation. Right?

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Podcasts seem to offer an avenue to participate, contribute to that conversation. Um, we're also being encouraged by our institutions at the moment to disseminate our research widely and demonstrate impact. Um, so there's some kind of institutional imperatives pushing us in this direction as well. So podcasts might be our saviors, or at least that's how it can feel. And I'm reminded of some comments from Robert Rosenstone, who's a scholar who writes about historical film. He's writing about historical film in the mid-80s. And he wrote the following Enter film, The Great Temptation, film, the contemporary medium still capable of both dealing with the past and holding a large audience? How can we not suspect that this is the medium to use to create narrative histories that will touch large numbers of people? Yet, is this dream possible? Can one really put history into film? History that will satisfy those of us who devote our lives to understanding, analysing, and recreating the past in words? Or does the use of film necessitate a change in what we mean by history? And would we be willing to make such a change?

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

The issue comes down to this Is it possible to tell historical stories on film and not lose our professional and intellectual souls? That's a question Geraldine and I have been asking for the past kind of 12 months or so, but about history in MP3. What does it mean to tell oral histories, not oral histories, but oral histories for people inside people's ears? There's a lot of very optimistic writing about podcasts in general and history podcasts in particular. Um, and we remain, I think, pretty optimistic.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

But I think historians might need to take more seriously both the production and distribution landscape of podcast histories as well as the particularities of making histories for people's inside people's ears for oral histories. These questions matter as we both assess what we think podcasts can do and fantasize about what our own might do. Um so a bit of ground clearing, what is a podcast? It's a word we kind of use now in a very naturalized way, but it's actually quite a recent word where historians we probably should recognize that. It was first coined in 2004 by a British journalist. It's a very recent term, it's a very recent media form, um, to describe a form of downloadable audio that was uniquely suited to what was then a very important piece of technology, the iPod, which has now, of course, disappeared for most people, um, hence podcast. Uh a year later, the US New Oxford Dictionary just declared it word of the year. So that's 2004. It's kind of landing in this kind of moment. The downloadable, um uh these downloadable audio files had been part of the Web 2.0 revolution and had a few key characteristics.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

First, they were easy to produce and distribute and compressed large amounts of audio information into small digital footprints. So you didn't need a high level of technology, technical knowledge to record them, and they were easy to distribute and you could take them with you. So that did represent something quite new in terms of a kind of form. Um, they were downloadable and thus didn't need an internet connection to listen to them. So you could listen to them in your own time. Um, and they were distributed via RSS feeds, which might I didn't really know what that was actually myself until quite recently. But RSS stands for really simple syndication. And it meant that listeners, unlike in radio or in broadcast kind of media, subscribed directly to RSS feeds, and producers would then push content to people who subscribed to them. Podcasts still work within that that kind of that that framework of people subscribing. So they're not a broadcast medium. Broadcasters are getting involved in podcasts, but as a form, they weren't designed to broadcast. They were actually designed for specific subscriber-based audiences, and that's something I think is worth thinking about. There was a lot of early optimism about direct engagement with audiences as a consequence of this, people kind of directly engaging. Um, do-it-yourself kind of possibilities, the escape from the limitations of commercial kind of imperatives.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

There's a lot of really celebratory kind of commentary. Um, and it seemed in the first decade or so like a democratizing revolution, as all kinds of content produced by amateurs was making its way into this emerging media ecology. Laura J. Stanley described podcasting in 2016 as a lawless frontier with an ever-expanding horizon. The cumulative effect is a massive pile on piling on of audio content without a governor. It's Lord of the Flies up in here, and no one has the conch. That's 2016.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

I don't think it's as lawless anymore. There's been a consolidation of genre, a consolidation of studios, there's been a consolidation that's gone on. And part of that consolidation was happening actually as those words were written. And it was partly a consequence of Serial, that podcast series that really it was actually part of a whole generation of podcasts that emerged at about that time, highly very well produced, high-quality, immersive audio storytelling, um, uh very popular and that were driven by a very particular way of telling stories. They were driven by the idea of the detective kind of discovery kind of model, the narrator leading you through over a series to discover a truth at the end. Uh so while there's some podcast kind of enthusiasts who like to talk about the way in which this is a form that's very new, that's very different, in lots of ways podcasts adopt and adapt existing kind of forms of radio, existing forms of storytelling, um, but in a new form and with some new consequences. In particular, the kind of intimacy of the podcast is quite important and something that we've had to think you have to think about quite a lot.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

I'd also note that the form is still transforming, it's not stable. Um if you say the word podcast to a 22-year-old young man, he probably thinks you're talking about something on YouTube. So podcasting for lots of young men is two blokes sitting in a room on video talking to each other. So we think about podcasting as something for your ears. For it's still a form that's evolving. And for some people, podcasting means two guys chatting on a couch, probably saying some pretty anti-feminist stuff. Um uh, so it's still kind of taking shape. It's still, there's still things going on. Um the thing to note here is that history podcasts are a big part of this landscape. They're popular. There's usually one or two history podcasts in a top 10 or top 20 list.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

But in this kind, in the world that we're now in, those podcasts are usually produced by large studios or existing media companies. So the kind of DIY amateur fantasy is not borne out in where the big listenership is. Um, there's a few reasons for that, not least of which is that it's a subscriber-based medium, so it's very hard to generate an audience from scratch. So the podcasts that do really well are the podcasts that are regular, they happen every week, and they generate um audiences.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

For academic historians who are kind of dipping in and out of the form, that poses a real challenge because we fantasize about big audiences, but actually you need to work with a podcast that already maybe has a subscriber base, already has an audience built in. Um and you might know, might not know what that audience looks like or is, whereas the people who are producing the podcast will. So there's things to think about with audience there. Um, okay. That's just some things to think about. Um, we'll talk more about it. We're gonna have a bit of a conversation after we talk, but I just want to talk you through the podcast that I'm currently producing with um History Lab. Hi. Um uh, which is a podcast provisionally entitled Community Through Catastrophe. And it's a podcast about the experience of what we might call the crisis years of HIVAIDS in Darlinghurst, which is between the mid-80s and the kind of mid-90s. Um, it's going to be a multi-episode kind of audio doc um that draws on oral history interviews with people who lived, worked, and socialized in and around Darlinghurst in the 80s and 90s.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Um, this was the worst years of the epidemic in Australia, um, but this was also perhaps its epidemiological center in Australia. Okay, so about 85% of the cases before 96 of HIV and AIDS are amongst men who have sex with men. Um, around 60% of those are in New South Wales, and at least half of those are in Sydney's inner east. So this is the kind of epicenter of the epidemic. Um, and in this project, I was kind of interested in looking at this kind of local history. It's the neighborhood where I live. Um, and I was interested in kind of thinking this story is often being told in very national kind of framing in Australia, a national story of HIV. I was interested in thinking about well, what happens if we tell kind of an oral history-based story about people living through the epidemic locally? Um I was also a little troubled by what we might call a kind of almost prideful story about the Australian response to HIV, um, which is very centered on community coming together, a kind of collaboration between community and government to produce a great response, um, which gets on top of transmission rates really quickly, has whole regimes of care, all of which are in some ways true.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Um but work by people like Geraldine actually and others has really begun to trouble that story. And I wondered what would happen if we took the national out of the picture and made it a local story. What kind of what kind of narrative would emerge of those um of those years? Um, the existing oral history collections in Australia have really focused on a specific group of people. Historians tend to go and interview people they recognize or that look like them or live like lives that they recognize. They tend to go and interview people who are politically engaged, who read the newspaper, who'll turn up at a community meeting. Um, that's not most of the people who lived through the epidemic in Darlinghurst. Um, those the people I was kind of interested in capturing, at least in part, were the people who would often be described as part of the commercial scene, which is a kind of byword for not politically engaged. Um, and so I was interested in putting them at the center of the story and seeing what it kind of looked like.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

We're still in production, but the basic arc and argument for the series I think is in place. Um, and I'm gonna play you some kind of working draft excerpts. Um uh and one of the kind of things that we're kind of working through at the moment is, and one of the things that I've had to learn is that I'm gonna have to be a character in the story. Um, which you'd think I'd love, but I don't. Um, because it turns out I'm very attached to conventional notion of historians and kind of objectivity um and not having a position. So being forced to put myself into the kind of narrative has been a challenge in particular kinds of ways. Um and and we'll talk, we can talk more about um some of the things, other things that I've learned. But I just want to play you a couple of excerpts of what I think we've been able to do really well, um, or some of the things that really excite me.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Um, the first episode is going to kind of trace the emergence of what we might call a queer social and sexual world in Darlinghurst over the 70s and early 80s. So it's kind of, it's it's more about the years before the epidemic hits. And this um is some kind of incredible work that um someone on the production team, Michelle, produced um for Ep One, which weaves together a set of people reflecting on what it's like, what it was like to live in Darlinghurst in the late 70s and 80s. And I just want to kind of play that to you to give you a sense of of the way we've been able to use oral histories, but that I definitely couldn't do if I was working with the written word. Hold on, that's later. Here we go. [section of podcast is played]

Interviewee 1:

And there was a lot of movement backwards and forwards, you know, um, people walking to and from the cross to Darlinghurst. Um, I mean, you know, Darlinghurst Road, the wall, all of that. It was very cruisy, um, it was busy. Same the other way as well, walking up and down Crown Street.

Interviewee 2:

Look at where the hospice is now, that that feed. There could be 500 people there picking each other up and cruising up and down the street and and and chatting each other up and disappearing off.

Interviewee 3:

And if you live really in the inner city and you work around that area, you're walking, and so your whole life is different. You see the street in a different way. You're not in a car or a bus or on a train, you're actually living on the street as you're walking.

Interviewee 4:

You know, the street life was fabulous.

Interviewee 5:

Just, you know, like us, I guess, just groups of people doing their thing and interacting and coming together and so we used to sit down every night at the scaffold at the fountain, and the whole world would go past you from the gym. Yeah. Because Dunning has very famous for being like the plumber when you go to places like Italy, you know, and you know, everything gets done on the street.

Interviewee 3:

I mean, that's what that time was when you're walking along Oxford Street or around that area, you're bumping into people constantly.

Interviewee 5:

That's the word bump. A bump into. You know, so you know when you see that person, oh Peter told me you bump into him. I bump into Peter, he's got a terrible haircut.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

It's really sad to me because the next line he says, and then you bump into him later on the dance floor. But that's ended up not in that edit, but it's definitely going to come back in. Um uh, so you know, that first episode basically traces this story of this intense world of kind of social connection with people living in a neighborhood deeply connected with and to each other. Um uh something I still experience in in some ways today, I think.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Um the second episode looks at what happened when the epidemic hit, that incredibly connected and intensely kind of networked community. And it turns out that thinking about that local networked kind of dimension of the story really helped me to explain how the epidemic unfolded because it created a certain kind of intensity and a certain kind of capacity for invention um and uh uh experimentation. And one of the really surprising things, I've discovered lots of surprising things in conducting these oral history interviews. Um, but one of the surprising things that I discovered, in part because of who I chose to interview was a widespread use of steroids by gay men early on in the epidemic to treat AIDS wastage, which becomes an established medical treatment in the mid to late 90s. But I discovered a whole bunch of guys talking about how they were doing it with each other because they used steroids for bodybuilding and they thought it would help, and it turns out that it did.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

And so there's this kind of queer experimentation with care going on. This is a really interesting example of that. Um, I'm aware of time, so I'm not gonna play the audio, but I've got some lovely kind of uh accounts of people talking about steroid use amongst bodybuilders sliding into steroid use as a way to treat AIDS wastage. Um, and and I we kind of use that to think through kind of queer experiments with care. Um, and the final episode or two um actually makes an argument about the kind of the ways in which that um incredible intensity and set of networked connections became something that was difficult to bear in the worst years of death. That actually that this um intensely networked community um became it became something that was almost too much to bear and impossible to escape. So the actual epidemic itself, the thing that had made it bearable became ironically the thing that made it unbearable when the death rates really rose.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

So that's kind of where we end, which is a very depressing place to end. Um and it's a depressing place for me to end right now. Um but I'm gonna turn over to Geraldine, who's gonna talk about hers. There we go.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Hi everyone, um I'm just gonna set a timer on my phone so I don't sorry, I've just lost my slide. There we go. Um hi everyone. Um thank you so much, Lee. Um, I feel like I've got to, you know, a lot to kind of bounce off from there and really looking forward to our conversation. Um, but first of all, I'll talk you through a little bit about my project and my work.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

So um my podcast is called well, not mine, the the podcast I worked on was called Conspiracy War on the Waterfront, and it was pretty Produced by the Features Unit at ABC Radio National as part of the Rewind program. So it's part of a six-part historical investigation, which tells the story of the 1998 Patrick's dispute between the Maritime Union of Australia and Patrick Stevedors. So to make the podcast, I was on leave from Macquarie for a year and employed full-time as a producer and a kind of expert historian on the series. So it was a little bit of a different experience from Lee kind of from the outset. So I had kind of two roles. I was actually learning the nuts and bolts of radio production, scripting and audio editing. And I um was also, I appear on the series in conversation with the um with the narrator Jan Fran, and I also was doing historical research for it.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

So the series is based off my postdoctoral research, which is a national history of the dispute. And I'm an oral historian by method, like Lee. So you can imagine that I was very excited to uh embark on this project with the ABC. And the idea in particular for me of being able to maintain the orality of the sources that I gather and use in history making was very, very exciting. Um though, of course, it's not so straightforward as that. And I'm sure we'll we'll talk a little bit more about that. Um but before I get into the podcasting bit, um I just want to talk you through a little bit the kind of story because not everyone in the room will be familiar with this dispute. Um so for those who aren't, it was a huge industrial and political confrontation in the late 90s, 1998, often likened to the miners' strike in the UK and the um and Reagan's sacking of the air traffic controllers in the US. It's kind of the great Australia's great sort of showdown between labor and capital of the neoliberal age. Um and to summarize it really quickly, on April 7, 1998, 1400 warfees, all of the members of the Maritime Union of Australia, were sacked and locked out of their workplace by Chris Corrigan, who is the managing director of Patrick Stevedors.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Um to describe him in today's language, he was kind of move fast, break things, disruptor, um, but like less cool. Like that was that was kind of his vibe. Um and he had trained an alternative non-union or scab workforce with which to replace the MUA on dramatically reduced wages and conditions. He was ultimately unsuccessful. Uh, there was a huge industrial and political campaign and response from the wider community and trade union movement, huge mass acts of civil disobedience, demonstrations, picket lines. Um, and the the sackings were challenged in court by the union. They also alleged that the Howard government and the company had illegally conspired to sack the workforce. And ultimately the MUA got back to work, but they took some really big blows. So hundreds of jobs were lost and working conditions were severely diminished.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

So the series tells this story, beginning with the lead-up and the planning that did happen in offices of the Howard government. Um, and it takes the audience, you know, through the lockout, the picket lines, the court case, the return to work, and the kind of mop-up afterwards.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

So, in one sense, Conspiracy is quite a straightforward audio documentary program. We interviewed people who are involved on both sides. So, Warfees, union officials like Greg Combe and MUA officials, also members of the non-union or SCAB workforce, uh John Howard, Chris Corrigan, um, Peter Reith is dead, but we spoke to some members of his staff. And these cut these interviews are cut together with really incredible material from the ABC archives, which you can imagine was just a gold mine, like a pleasure to go through.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Uh, and Jan Fran narrates the story. Uh, each episode has a number of conversations between myself and Jan, where I kind of explain historical context, some of the research I've done, and sometimes offer some interpretation.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

I'm going to play you a clip from the first episode, um, which is my absolute favorite kind of two minutes. Um, I didn't cut this audio. Uh, my colleague at the ABC, Kirsty Melville, did. I think it's absolutely beautiful. Um, and a really good example, I think, of what we as historians and especially, especially oral historians, kind of hope for when we're thinking about podcasting history, what we find so seductive about the idea of it. So I'll just play it now. Bear with me because I don't have the original audio because it's owned by the ABC. So I have to play from here. So apologies about that. Listen to the ABC ad.

Dr Craig Barker:

ABC listen.

ABC Announcer:

Podcasts, radio, news, music, and more. A warning that this episode of Rewind contains strong language. It's 6 a.m. on the 8th of April, 1998. Twenty-one-year-old Michelle Emmett is on her way to work at Melbourne's East Swanson job. She doesn't love the early starts, but she does love her job.

ABC Interviewee 1:

I was an electrician for Patrick's Stevadors, and I was a fourth-year apprentice, just coming out of my time. She's this close to finishing her apprenticeship. I was the first female apprentice at Patrick's. I've always been a little bit out of the box. I'll never forget my first day walking into a really big mess room of blogs. And there was lots of pictures on the wall of females. They weren't expecting me. It was quite a funny looking map. They quickly closed the door and said, You can come back in half an hour. I was driving to work down the football room, and I was listening to the radio as you do. It was 6 30 a.m. in the morning. And on the radio they they had said something about look-up on the docks, and I thought, turn the radio. And turned around the corner and Billy fellow. There was just cars everywhere, people everywhere, and I thought this is this is real. And I tried to drive up through the boom gate and they said, no, no, you you can't come in here. And I just I was in shock.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

So for me, what I love about this clip, there's a few things. I mean, it packs so much in. Like you, this would take you like three pages minimum. I mean, not even a whole book, basically. Like, there is so much information in that. It sets the historical scene in a very visceral embodied way, I think, which is I think what we're we're hoping for. But I also love Michelle's voice, a woman's voice, starting a story about the MUA. Um, and we use that to kind of jar the listener into attention. It's a way to bring or hint at the complexity of the past and the complexity of this story. And her voice sits alongside these more expected voices of the men shouting on the picket line. It's also a bit disorientating. We're a bit confused about what's going on in the same way that Michelle is confused.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

So for me, it kind of encourages historical empathy. We want to empathize with Michelle, but it also makes the past a bit of a foreign country. Like what is happening? Who is she? And you know, it's just we we have this sense of confusion and curiosity. And this could only be done in an oral medium. You just could not do that on paper. Um, so you know, this I think is what we are hoping for in a lot of ways. Um, it's a it's an engaging recreation of the past, which is built from this composite of oral sources or materials. There are all kinds of complications associated with this, which I'm sure we'll get to into the in the discussion. But I think you can kind of see what I'm getting at in terms of what we're kind of hoping for.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

There's another hope that we invest in podcasting history that comes up a lot in the scholarship and in discussions um between historians. And this one I want to unpack a little bit more. And this is the idea that this kind of history making might draw or show the audience into the archive and into the historical process. Um, and this I think is very different and much harder to do. And I'm not convinced that we can do it. We might be able to, I'm just not a hundred percent convinced.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Um, so I'm gonna play you another clip, but before I do a bit of background. So, as the title of the podcast suggests, there was an element of conspiracy in this whole story. It seemed at the time that Howard, um that the Howard government, who were kind of newly elected, you know, very hyped up to pursue their radical agenda, were intricately involved in this plan to sack the MUA. And in the course of researching for the podcast, I did find some new documentary evidence in the National Archives that supported the allegation of conspiracy and further implicated the government and John Howard in some of the more controversial uh episodes, in particular the training of serving and ex-military personnel uh in Dubai to replace the MUA.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

So, in the final episode, we do a reveal of this kind of smoking gun. And I'm gonna begin, I'm gonna play you a clip that kind of takes you into the reveal. It starts in the archive in a kind of general overview of the archive and then takes you there. Um I'm interested to hear what people think.

Interviewee 6:

Um look, Jen, I think it's really unlikely. Um, from going through his diaries, it's pretty clear that Peter Reith was all over every stage of this: the planning, the execution, the outcome. This was not a ministerial office, this was not a minister that was waiting in the wings for the Stephen Oz to move on reform. And it's my view that at points they were actually initiating and leading the strategy for reform, a process that resulted in the Dubai Affair and the sacking of the 1400 MUA members in April. So long before the lockout, he's constantly talking to people about how to make big change on the wharves. He's talking to all kinds of big business names like Dick Pratt about exactly what should happen. And then once we get to the dispute, his granular detail of what is happening is incredible. Like he knows the exact road that the police are gonna marshal on to try and break the picket line on the 17th of April in Melbourne. Um, he has this very kind of intricate, detailed knowledge of exactly what's happening on the ground. This is, you know, a minister who is certainly not waiting in the wings. And I think that the diary has some real insights into, I guess, the kind of mindset or what I might call the kind of ideological position of the government on this dispute and on the MUA. And I think the really clear example of that for me was as the dispute is wrapping up, Reith and Corrigan are in constant communication. And when Reith finally gets the numbers about how many wharfies will be made redundant, he scribbles in his diary 700 bludgers weeded out. And he used that word bludgers. He did. Yeah. Well, that's telling, isn't it? I think it's really telling. And I think it's important because the government always claimed that this wasn't ideological, that this dispute was just a kind of technical question around efficiency. Um, but saying 700 bludgers weeded out is a pretty ideological statement, and it says a lot about how that government viewed the Maritime Union of Australia and viewed Wharfies.

ABC Interviewee 2:

Yeah, bludgers is very different to workers and very differet to wharfies. That's right, it's a very demeaning term. There's one more document we've uncovered, and it's one that goes all the way to the top.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

I found a letter buried in some correspondence files. It's a letter from late September 1997. And in it, it kind of outlines the state of play and waterfront reform. It says the Webster report is coming, it outlines the strategy that will we know will play out in the first quarter of '98 with the lockout of Web Dock, and then in April the lockout of Patrick's workers across the country. And it talks about reactivating the training of Australians offshore.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

But this isn't the most interesting part of the letter. What's most interesting is who it's addressed to, and who's that? John Howard. So I'll wrap up and we can kind of talk about this more in the the um the discussion.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

But I guess the two things that I think from that is one, the kind of very long discussion of Reese's diary, which is like a little bit boring at times. That's the reality of historical research, right? The big find, the kind of smoking gun, very rare, only relevant to very particular histories. But necessarily through because of the nature of the podcasting form, that that gets elevated. And it makes sense in this story. Um, absolutely. But it's um, you know, it is something for us to grapple with, I think, in terms of when when we're communicating the historical process, are we communicating what we actually do? Um but I'll leave it there for for discussion.

Dr Craig Barker:

So firstly, thank you very much for both of those presentations, which were fantastic. Thank you for giving me the mental image of Chris Corrigan as the uncool disruptor as well. Um, it's a name I haven't thought about for a very long time. Um, the aim is we'll have a short chat, and then if we have some time, I will invite some questions from the floor as well. So start having a think about if there's anything that's popped up in your mind.

Dr Craig Barker:

But the one clear thing from both your presentations is how excited you are about podcasting as a possibility. And I think that's come uh across clearly in both of the recordings as well. What excites you in terms of the form uh and its capacity to actually really um expand uh history engagement? How do you how do you see, you know, what excites you about it's it as a form of communicating history?

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Turn that on. Um you know, if you're working with uh oral histories and then writing about them, you're turning an uh oral source into a written source and you lose an incredible amount in that moment of turning it into something on the page. So the possibility of working uh in the form that you've collected the material in uh feels pretty magical and uh something that's pretty amazing to share with the kind of audiences or consumers or the people who who are kind of listening to the history as opposed to reading it. So that that does feel incredibly exciting. That's particular to kind of oral history. Um and also the capacity to communicate um emotional complexity, breaks in voices, ambivalence, uncertainty. Um there's a lot that you can kind of communicate very quickly, um, which on the written page, you might be able to communicate that kind of complexity, but someone won't feel it. Um so the the idea that you can make your listener feel complexity um is very, very, very exciting. Um, and particularly if you're working with oral histories where that's actually what you're trying to do. Um so it feels like a kind of natural home for that that that mode of storytelling.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Um yeah, it's the same for me, absolutely. Like the frustration of taking a beautiful, like beautiful piece of audio that you heard and were moved in the moment, and then putting it on the page and it just being like nothing. It's really hard to deal with, you know. Um, so that's very exciting.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

I guess the other thing I which I realized working at the ABC is the the ability to actually, you know, to create this collage of source material, um, which we do in the written word in a different way, um, but you can do it so succinctly um in in the um in podcasting, which is yeah, really, really exciting.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Um the form also comes with with challenges that Lee and I have discussed. Um, you know, there's I I guess I kind of alluded to one there um uh uh with that final clip where the you know the the drive for for narrative and for attention, which is all right, like that's not incorrect in any way, but that is part of the form, is like looking for audience, grabbing people's attention, holding their attention in, you know, in in very particular ways, does bend the way we tell histories. So, you know, in in that example, it bends it towards the smoking gun, um, which is, like I said, not really the reality of history making was very satisfying to be able to say Howard's a liar. Don't get me wrong. Like I was absolutely thrilled. I was like, we're putting that in. But, you know, what are we actually communicating about the historical process? It's not necessarily, you know, very accurate. I'm not sure it is actually bringing people into the process in the way that we think it might be.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Yeah, I'm just gonna follow up with that. I think um the kind of true crime detective genre that's come to dominate the podcast in general as the kind of, you know, the detective taking you through the story as they discover the truth. Um uh lots of history podcasts follow that model. You know, the kind of chitty chat rested history model where it's two blokes talking, pontificating about the past isn't that.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Um, but the kind of immersive audio storytelling that we're talking about has sort of adopted fully and and really lent hard into this um narrator as detective, um, which actually, again, really, really bends. That's a great way of putting it, it really bends an understanding of what the historical process is.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

We think, you know, I had assumed that that genre, kind of reflexively, I had assumed, oh, that's really exciting because it means we get to talk about our process, right? It means we get to talk about the complexity of interpreting evidence. It means you might have a conversation about, oh, some scholars say this, some you know, like, no, no, no, no, no, no. That genre is about a detective following something and finding out the truth. And and you can do things with that, but that's kind of the way that genre of storytelling tends. Um, and so you're you're kind of wrestling with that a little bit.

Dr Craig Barker:

Well, there's a degree of audience expectation because of the boundaries of the media as well, isn't there?

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Yeah, I really do. I think you know the consolidation of history of podcasts in general and history podcasts in particular in the past kind of 10 years has meant that audiences have come to expect certain certain ways of presenting stories. Um and uh if you're having a fantasy about going into that space, you need to know how those storytelling conventions are working. Yeah.

Dr Craig Barker:

So I'd I'd like to pick up on that conversation because during your presentation you talked about the challenges of the the traditional notion of the historian as the uh as the uh the observer. Um, I mean, you know, how did you both reconcile those notions with this dramatic narrative storytelling element that both of your sets of podcasts have lent into?

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

I'll at least start with that one. Um damn it, I was gonna let you go first. Um uh I have a I have a few thoughts about that. Um uh one of the things I am still struggling with is voice. Um and the ways in which uh I have learnt to understand that if I'm gonna be a voice in someone's ear for three hours, then they're probably gonna imagine me as a human. Um and my training as an historian has not set me up to think about that at all.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Um and actually, when you go and listen to a lot of history podcasts, the voices that you're hearing are straight white men. Um that's what we generally speaking associate with historical expertise and authority. Um, so I'm finding myself really conflicted about how gay to sound. Right? I'm just gonna like put it that bluntly. Um, which is you know, uh is that gonna undermine my authority with particular audiences because they are going to not see that as hear that as the voice that has historical authority. Um I know when I walk in to give a lecture, I straighten my voice out. It's what you do to 18-year-olds. You do it in a really unconscious way. So doing this podcast has really forced me to confront those questions, and I don't know what my answer is yet.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Um I was very lucky in that I got to be um kind of one step removed as a as a um kind of expert that came in and chitty-chatted with Jan, um, which was a really good format, and I I would I would always prefer to do that. Um, with and I'm very glad that that was the role that that I had. Um, because it did allow me as well to be a historian a little bit more, I think. Um so that was very good.

Dr Craig Barker:

I think in a sense that you've been cast in that role, if we're thinking of it as sort of a a traditional dramatic narrative storytelling format.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Yeah, that's right. Um so that that was that was really good. Um, and I think partly as well, just but you know, to touch on Lee's earlier point about the changing nature of the podcasting landscape, the ABC and Radio National in particular has this history of social history there. Like the people I was working with, a lot of them have a social history background. Some of them have multiple PhDs, like more than one, which I'm like that's crazy. Um, but so that that that kind of you do have um, you know, there's an appreciation then for the historian's role that you know, obviously UTS um history lab has as well, but not all platforms or production houses do. And I think that's really historians need to understand that.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

It's really important. Um the the other, but but in terms of the kind of the casting of the the yourself. So that was very positive. One um experience I have had that I was a bit shocked by was um on a different podcast that I did where I found myself cast as kind of yes, historian, but also approachable millennial. And I just it felt very gendered. Um, like they left some little jokes I'd made in there that I kind of didn't expect would make um the cart um that I thought really diminished my authority in in the whole setting. And I just thought at the time, like, I don't think they would have done that if I was a man. Like I think I couldn't have authority on my own, so I had to be approachable. Um, and that, yeah, that's something that I think we kind of need to grapple with a bit as well.

Dr Craig Barker:

So a question of editorial control to some degree then, or at least editorial input.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

It was yeah, perhaps. It was more just I guess it goes back to Lee's point about voice. Like when we enter into this space, we we get we get produced, I think. And we're academics, so we're like, we don't get that at all.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

I think uh you know there's a tension here. There's a tension between the way uh historians are trained to think about expertise and authority and the podcast as a form that's about intimacy and connection. And those two things don't always match up. So how we might understand someone being uh compelled to feel intimately connected with you as a listener might be quite different to how historians think about objectivity and expertise or not objectivity but expertise. Um and those two things they don't sit cleanly on top of each other. Um and so they require some thought about how am I gonna how how might I do both of those at once? Um, which I think is a it's a question, you know, it's a question to think through and and think about.

Dr Craig Barker:

You've you've alluded to my next question a little bit, both in your presentations and in some of your answers now, but what did you both feel that you had to learn the hard way in the process of uh of uh creating a history-based podcast?

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Um the hardest thing for me, and and you mentioned this earlier, Craig, was editorial control. Um, because if you're an academic, you're really used to this thing called academic freedom. Um, but it turns out you don't have that elsewhere. And you know, it was it it was quite like the I guess the first big like moment I had was when someone started talking about both sides of the dispute, and I was like, there aren't two.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

But the ABC has an editorial policy that governs that organization, and everyone works within that. They have to, it's not you know the choice of the journalists. Um, so that was I found that a constant source of sleepless nights. Um, and you know, ultimately what we said went through legal and it went through a kind of Ed Pol's person, and they severely watered down what we were able to say about Howard to the point where I said this is no longer accurate. Um, but actually the editorial uh that that was actually about a piece of writing that was kind of attached to to the podcast. But that was very, very hard as a historian to to kind of make to experience that, to see that happen. And it was absolutely not about the people who made the podcast, it was about, you know, another section of the ABC.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Um, but that that was the biggest lesson for me to learn was this you had to make a decision, like, is it better that this goes out in the world, not perfect, not what I want it to be, or is it better that it doesn't, you know? And that was that was a hard decision to make.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Um well, we're not being balanced. Um uh in fact, uh the podcast we're producing is probably gonna be all about position, right? So it's gonna have a really different feel to it, I suspect. Um, but one of the there's been lots of things that I've learned, um, some harder than others, but um one of the things I've I've learned is that what an oral historian thinks about as a great interview and a podcast producer thinks about as a great interview are two really different things. Like really, really different things.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

And so interviews that I think are wonderful and I'm deeply attached to, it actually takes the person five minutes to get to the point, and you just can't have five minutes of audio of someone talking to get to it, like that's just not sustainable in terms of a podcast model. So there's been some real moments where interviews that I think are incredibly powerful communicators of complexity don't turn out to make good audio for a listener. So figuring that out and realizing that um, and realizing that I can hear a voice of someone who I've spent six months with in my ears, so I hear their voice and know their story instantly. Um, whereas the listeners, I have to remember the listen, you know, learning to listen freshly to material you know very well has been really interesting. But one of the other things um that's been difficult to learn or difficult to uh negotiate is that uh oral historians as a rule, not as a rule, but generally speaking, have a pretty careful framework in which to uh acquit our ethical obligations to the people we interview. And that includes checking back with them about what you do with their stories, right? So people who write history up in in in written form, if they're using oral histories, will often check back with the people they've interviewed and say and show them this is what I'm this is what I'm doing with your story. What do you think? Are you okay with it? And we call that sharing authority that is almost impossible to do in the podcast production process.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

And so that's a really as someone who conducted a set of interviews on the basis of an oral history ethical framework, only to discover afterwards that I was engaging with them in a very particular kind of intimate way, kind of searching for cracks, kind of trying to break them open in some ways. Um on the assumption that's part of my training that it's okay, I'm gonna check back later. And so there's all kinds of disclosures that I I now wonder if I'd been in. Interviewing as a radio producer, I wonder if I would have interviewed them in the same way. And I don't know.

Dr Craig Barker:

It it's funny you say that because one of the questions I was going to ask is, I guess, the line between journalist and historian in this context, and particularly for podcasts, you know, with The Guardian and ABC, so traditional media outlets as well. But I mean, do you think your subjects respond differently, A, for a podcast, as opposed to an oral history? And do you think that they're thinking historical context rather than I'm just telling a good story?

Dr Geraldine Fela:

It's a really good question. I think it depends a little bit who you're talking to. And the other thing that's important there is, I think setting matters. Like the moment you bring someone into the ABC studio, it's not an oral history anymore. It's an interview, it's tape, it's an interview for a program. So that that's important, I think. Um I like on the ethical question, it's something I kind of struggled with a little bit as well. Um, I kind of came to the position that I don't like you're not share, there's no sharing of authority with John Howard. You know, like he he's got he's got enough. Um, but also he like he is saying exactly what he is saying. He is like he he's he's not he he is approaching that interview very, very consciously, and I don't need to go back to John Henry.

Dr Craig Barker:

He's a had a lot more media training than the average person that's being interviewed today.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Exactly, exactly. So I think for me, I kind of came to a position of like with my that there are some interviews that I did in that time that I'll use in my further work, and I'll use those ones with the politicians as well. I'll share authority with Michelle, but I won't be going back to John Howard. Um, and that I think is something we kind of have to um, you know, in some ways we have to make it up a little bit because it's new. Um, yeah, I don't know if that answers your question. It does, it does.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

No, thank you. I just I think you know, uh a way to understand this is that uh people who work in a kind of radio broadcast landscape have an idea of being on the record, right? And if you say to someone this is on the record, ethical obligations complete. Right? On the record done. I don't have to, I don't have to worry. You've you've consented to whatever's gonna happen to this because it's on the record. An oral history interview does not work that way. Um they are if they're going well, they're very intimate, relational, um, and and they develop in in quite beautiful and lovely ways. Um uh it's pretty hard to consent to them beforehand because you don't know what's gonna happen. Like it's impossible I think it's impossible to consent to a oral history interview because you don't know what's gonna happen. Um so it's it's issues of consent and ethics I think are really complex.

Dr Craig Barker:

Do you think podcasts democratize history? Coming back to an earlier comment.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Okay, okay. Um such an annoying answer. Um I think we fantasize that podcasts are a way for academic historians to contribute to public conversations. We kind of imagine a public, right? And we imagine a public in a kind of liberal democratic way. So we think, oh, this is a democratizing project. I'm coming, I'm actually contributing to our democratic health in that kind of way. We think it, you know, we all probably think that history is an important part of those conversations. I am quite unconvinced that podcasts do that. I don't think that means they don't have value, right? But they're a narrow cast form. They're a subscriber form. They're not actually about the public, they're about particular audiences, particular groups of people. Um, and we communicate to them. And so it's not actually a it's not a collective public in the way that we might want or fantasize it to be. Yeah.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

I think I think that's true. And I think in some ways we've like thinking about something like um social history at Radio National, actually, there's less now. There's less being broadcast to the public um because they the ABC has sliced and diced that unit for decades and decades. So, and and pushed increasingly in the direction of, you know, much less historical content, even if it's labeled as historical. Um, so you know, that's a bit depressing, but I think it's true.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Um I think the other element of it of it is that like Lee and I were talking about this a little bit um the last few days. Like I think there's this idea that if something happens outside of a university, it's democratizing. Um, or like I'd it's very I find it very weird. Um, because I my view is like, let's bring more things into the university, actually. Like let's have like what why do we think that it's better if it's not being done by historians or if anyone can do it? Like maybe it would be better. I mean, it'd be better if there were more historians, full stop in my opinion. I'm sure many people share that view in this room. But um, like I I guess what I'm what am I trying to get at?

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Sometimes I think that argument around democratizing history or whatever it, you know, the the kind of flavor of it is, is actually a diminishing of expertise and an argument around an argument that diminishes the importance of expertise. And I just wonder if it, yeah, yeah, I I I question that, I suppose. I'm not sure it's great for history if anyone can get on a mic and talk about what they think about the French Revolution. I'm not sure that's democratizing history. Democratizing history is making sure more people know more about the French Revolution, but I don't think the mic does that necessarily.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

And there is actually a reason to be optimistic, right? I'm gonna end, I'm gonna put something optimistic here, which is if you look at the top 20 list of podcasts and history podcasts, they are generally speaking people with expertise. There is appetite for expertise. So the idea that people don't want to consume good podcasts from people with expertise um is a bit bunk. And David Runciman, who you know does past, present, future, he basically gives his Oxford lecture. He just basically gives a lecture as a podcast and he says, I can't believe it. I just give my lectures and people want to listen. He says it in a posh British accent. Um I can't believe it.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Um uh so you know there's all kinds of things to talk about studios and how those get distributed, and and and there's some things to think about there. But those popular podcasts often, some of them have expertise at their center, some of them don't. Some of them are media personalities pretending to have expertise, but some of them do, and and I think we should um be excited by that too.

Dr Craig Barker:

I'm conscious we're running out of time, but I would like to invite one or two questions from the floor if anybody would like to ask anything. Here we go. First up.

Audience Question 1:

Thanks both so much. Can can you say a little bit more about the target audience? Do we know who these people are? And can you say a bit more about that? Because that frames what you do, right? And what's saleable.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Okay. Um uh I think podcasts are often produced with an audience in mind. So there's an imagined listener, right? And that imagined listener is usually a pretty blunt marketing term about identity, age, gender. Like, you know, it's a 20 to 35 year old man. You know, like actually a lot of the way that um the production landscape around podcasts uses those kinds of ideas to think about its listener. Um as far as actual stats on who is listening to history podcasts go, I actually don't know. Yeah, I actually don't know.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Yeah, I don't we we got the breakdown for the waterfront, but we don't have that much information about where the listeners come from. Um what was interesting, so Jan, who people know who Jan Fran is, kind of comedian, journalist, very, very like amazing. Um, she did a whole bunch of promos on her social media about it. And I and we got a big boost from that. And that really excited me because I think we genuinely got new listeners with that. Um and people who wouldn't usually have listened to something about the waterfront dispute. So that that was very exciting. Um, but beyond that, it's like very it's very imagined, like they said, I think the the kind of the listenership.

Dr Craig Barker:

All right. Any last question from the floor? Thank you.

Audience Question 2:

Hi, um, it's a little bit specific. Um, and it's going back to the um turning an oral history interview into, you know, grabs or quotes for the podcast. Um, did you find yourself asked or doing the oral histories in such a way to elicit that particular quote in that particular way?

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Yeah, yeah, I did. Um and I and in fact I was kind of trained to by my colleagues at the ABC because we had we had to for for the the program. Um and it's a totally different way of interviewing. In fact, most of my oral histories, I'd done 20. I think we used a 10-second grab from one in the entire series. Like they were not fit for purpose. Um, so yeah, it was it's it's a whole it was a completely new style. Looking for asking people to rephrase, ask asking people to say it again, asking people to not use pronouns, to use the name, like all of that stuff that the radio people in the room will be familiar with that totally changes the dynamic of the interview.

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

Not fit for purpose. But were, you know, um, and also though that style of interviewing, it might produce better audio, but it produces worse history. Right. So the historical insight that you get from those interviews because you're interrupting and you're asking people, you're not letting people wander off, you know, and you're not circling back to an idea they raised 40 minutes ago and just coming at it again because you think there's something else in it, you know, which is what often an oral history interview is you coming back to something and kind of just sort of sitting with them, going, Oh, there's something here. And I think you want to say it, let's um and uh for a bit. Um that's not great. That's not great radio or podcasting content, or it can be, but it often isn't. So um, I did a set of oral history interviews and then I did a set of second interviews, and the second interviews were much, I hope. I'll let my producers tell me that, but they were they they felt really different.

Dr Craig Barker:

Well, look, I think we're at the point of the evening where we can do some adverts. So to listen, so conspiracy is available on ABC Radio National's website for us to listen. If you can find it.

Dr Geraldine Fela:

Um, I would recommend actually getting it through Spotify. This is terrible. Don't tell anyone at the ABC I said this Spotify or or Apple, because the listen app is very hard to find and to navigate. Sorry, the ABC.

Dr Craig Barker:

And then Lee, what's the timeline for your podcast?

A/Prof Leigh Boucher:

We are released as part of History Lab in about November this year. And I think we're going to make it. Um, I'm pretty sure. So go and subscribe to History Lab. It's a great series. So there's lots of content for you to listen to between now and then. And by about November, you'll be ready to listen to ours.

Dr Craig Barker:

Yes, and well done to the History Lab team. Some some fantastic, fantastic content. Well, can I ask you all to join me in thanking Geraldine and Lee? Thank you for sharing your insights this evening. It's been fascinating. I've learned a lot, and um, and it's it's I think all some amazing ideas of of just what podcasting can do. If anyone would like to continue the conversation, we're gonna microphone works, we're gonna head over to the Forest Lodge pub if anyone would like to have a drink and sort of continue the conversation. So you're almost welcome to join us.

Dr Craig Barker:

Um, on behalf of the museum, on behalf of the uh Vere Gordon Childe Centre, and on behalf of the History Council of New South Wales, uh, thank you very much for joining us this evening. Um, the uh uh there'll be announcements about the July History Now series, but uh spoilers, Jonathan Dalymore, who's in the room tonight, and Timothy Allen from uh the University of Sydney will be speaking on the 29th of July about history teaching and the next generation of historians. And I'm also going to squeeze in, I haven't told the History Council people this yet, but I'm gonna squeeze in one about cultural heritage destruction. Uh so there'll be announcements about both of those events on both the History Council website and the Chau Chak Wing Museum website very, very soon. Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you, Lee. Thank you, Geraldine.

Catherine Shirley:

Thank you for joining us for this podcast. If you'd like to hear more, subscribe to our series via your favorite streaming platform. And join us for our next History Now episode, Cultural Heritage in Danger, current crises and practical solutions. For a full list of History Council cultural partners, along with a list of other podcasts produced by us, please visit our website History Councilnsw.org.au forward slash podcasts. I'm Catherine Shirley. Thank you.