Archive Fever is a new Australian history podcast featuring intimate conversations with writers, artists, curators, fellow historians and other victims of the research bug. Each episode, co-hosts Clare Wright and Yves Rees talk to archive addicts about what kind of archives they use, how often they use them, when they got their first hit. Join us as we ask: what madness is this?
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In the final episode for Season 5, Yves and Clare are joined by filmmaker, conservationist and adventurer, Oliver Cassidy, on a meandering journey from the fires of archival passions to the watery depths of the Franklin River and its deep time. Oliver takes us through the research and emotional backstory to his stunning documentary film, FRANKLIN, …
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Can historians kick off the shackles of footnotes and approach the past in the spirit of play? This week on Archive Fever, Clare and Yves are joined by Dr Nadia Rhook, a historian and poet whose most recent collection is Second Fleet Baby (Freemantle Press, 2022). In a conversation that tackles the limitations of the history discipline, Nadia share…
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Luke Watt and Nigel Wearne performing 'Needle and the Fray', inspired by Clare Wright's book 'The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka'.By Claire Wright and Yves Rees
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This week, an Archive Fever first: live music! Clare and Yves are joined in studio by acclaimed musicians Nigel Wearne and Luke Watt, who collectively record as Above the Bit. Their debut self-titled album is a feast of revisionist storytelling, featuring lyrical tales of mutineers, rebels, warriors and wayfarers in Australia’s history. How can tra…
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Bonjour Australie! This week, Clare and Yves put on their berets and grab a baguette to talk Australian history through a French lens with Dr Alexis Bergantz, historian at RMIT University and author of the award-winning French Connection: Australia’s Cosmopolitan Ambition (NewSouth, 2021). How does being an outsider give one fresh eyes on a nation’…
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This week on Archive Fever, Clare and Yves dive down into the archival underbelly of 1930s queer, criminal Sydney, with author, performance and activist, Fiona Kelly Macgregor, whose recent novel Iris is a stunner. Why does holding the bullets from a woman’s gun – trial evidence – compel you to spend twenty years writing a book? How do you get a vo…
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Who said archives had to be on planet earth? This week on Archive Fever, Clare and Yves are joined by Kamilaroi woman Krystal de Napoli, an astrophysicist, advocate for Indigenous astronomy and co-author of the award-winning book Astronomy: Sky Country (2022). How does the sky function as an archive for Indigenous knowledges? Why does light polluti…
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This week is a first for Archive Fever: a lawyer in the hot seat! Clare and Yves are joined by Professor Kate Auty, barrister, magistrate, law reformer and, with the 2023 release of her book O’Leary of the Underworld, historian. What are the differences between legal research and historical research? What happens when an archivist turns informer? W…
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Clare and Yves are joined by Zoe Coombs Marr, comedian, actor and creator of the ABC TV history documentary Queerstralia (2023). How does foraging and research shape the process of making comedy? What are queer temporalities and why was Queerstralia made as a looping metanarrative? What does it look like inside Zoe’s brain? Plus: a cameo appearance…
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Clare and Yves are joined by Emeritus Professor Judith Brett, scholar of Australian politics and political history and author of such award-winning books as Robert Menzies: Forgotten People (2016) and The Enigmatic Mr Deakin (2017) and most recently, Doing Politics: Writing on Public Life (2022). What does it feel like to be obsessed with the past?…
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Yves and Clare are joined by British historian and disability scholar Lauren Pikó, whose work explores the cultural histories of landscape. Lauren is the author of Milton Keynes in British Culture: Imagining England (2019). How does one look at archives and research through a disability lens? The group discusses the importance of presence and absen…
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Clare and Yves are joined by Dr Lauren Burns, aeronautical engineer and author of Triple Helix: My Donor-Conceived Story (2022). How do you move forward when you hit the research brick wall again and again? What if your greatest archive is your own DNA? The group discusses carbon fibre, what was hidden becoming obvious, and genetic bewilderment.…
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Yves and Clare are joined by Dr Mike Jones, archivist, historian, deputy director of the ANU’s research centre for deep history, and author of Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum (2021). What dangers lie in sacralizing the archive? Is it truly possible to allow everyone control over their own story? The group discusses t…
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Clare and Yves are joined by journalist and broadcaster Tamara Oudyn whose latest ABC podcast series, ‘The Good Divorce’, tells the story of the seemingly elusive good divorce. Where does the research begin for a topic that’s still so taboo? The group discusses the key ingredients that make good talent, sources as a human archive, and balancing the…
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Clare and Yves are joined by Duane Hamacher, a cultural astronomer from the University of Melbourne, specialising in Indigenous astronomy. Duane’s book, The First Astronomers: How Indigenous Elders Read the Stars (2022), is the product of 10 years of collaborative research with Indigenous elders. How does a boy from Missouri wind up reading the ant…
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Clare and Yves are joined by Associate Professor Anna Clark, historian and author of Making Australian History (2022). How does one tell the history of history itself? Can we expand the very notion of the archive with a leap of imagination? The group discusses fateful timetable clashes, the opaqueness of deep time, and the limitations of a chronolo…
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Clare and Yves are joined by the spectacular Kate Grenville to discuss searching for secrets, fictionalising colonial history and Kate's latest non-fiction book, Elizabeth Macarthur's Letters.By Claire Wright and Yves Rees
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26 | Strong Female Leads (Live at the Sydney Writers' Festival)
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Yves and Clare are joined by literary biographer Bernadette Brennan and documentary filmmaker Tosca Looby, who have recently documented the life and times of two of the most influential women in recent Australian history, to learn how the archive shapes and limits the stories we tell about powerful women.…
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25 | Who is the Expert? (Live at the Adelaide Writers' Festival)
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Yves and Clare are joined by Professor John Carty and Dr Jared Thomas from the South Australia Museum to learn how the museum is grappling with its collection of unidentified Indigenous human remains — an archive of bones — and explore how the museum’s historical artefacts can operate as a “cultural seedbank” to facilitate the memory of and reconne…
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Yves and Clare are joined by Catherine Dwyer, the filmmaker behind Brazen Hussies (2020), a history of the rebels and activists who brought the women’s liberation movement to Australia. What happens when someone’s story is in contention with the archive? What do you do with the footage left on the cutting room floor? The group discusses uncovering …
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Yves and Clare are joined by Samia Khatun, historian, filmmaker, and senior lecturer at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Samia’s latest book, Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia (2019) takes aim at the claim that the knowledge traditions of Enlightened man have superseded the epistemologies of peopl…
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Clare and Yves are joined by medical historian and public history advocate extraordinaire, Dr Peter Hobbins. In 2020 Peter’s expertise surrounding the influenza pandemic of 1918 came into play as the world grappled with the Covid-19 crisis. What can we learn from the past? Is history really cyclical, or more parallel? The group discusses an archiva…
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21 | You Wouldn't Blow up the National Library
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Yves and Clare are joined by Lynne Kelly and Margo Neale, co-authors of Songlines: The Power and Promise (2020), the first in a ground-breaking series on “First Knowledges”. How do songlines, visualized as pathways of knowledge that crisscross the continent, act as an embodied knowledge system? What is the connection between memory and place? The g…
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Yves and Clare are joined by Mark McKenna, historian and award-winning author whose latest book Return to Uluru (2021) tells the hidden history of a story at the heart of the nation. Does the contemporary white historian present themselves in the role of a savior figure? The group discusses the emotional and ethical difficulties of working with per…
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Clare and Yves are joined by international archive addict, academic, and author of the new novel Take Me Apart (2020), Sarah Sligar. How significant is the role of interpretation in an archive, and does a work of fiction allow for a greater exploration of meaning? The group discusses what personality type predisposes one to become an archive addict…
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Clare and Yves are joined by interdisciplinary contemporary Australian artist Brook Andrew, whose work converses with the archives in an interrogation of the legacies of colonialism and modernism. Can confronting the trauma of the archives take us to places of freedom and healing? Where is the line between critique and trauma porn? The group discus…
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Clare and Yves are joined by Jess Hill, award-winning journalist, television presenter, and author of the 2020 Stella Prize winner See What You Made Me Do (2019). Hill’s book puts perpetrators - and the systems that enable them - in the spotlight. Too often, Hill writes, “we ask the wrong question: Why didn’t she leave? We should be asking: Why did…
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16 | They Are Not Their Deaths (Live)
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Clare and Yves are joined by Gideon Haigh for a special live episode. Gideon opens the batting for Season 3 with an eloquent ramble through cricket, inquests, insanity, activism, what happens when you turn up on descendants’ doorsteps unannounced and how, once seen, certain things you find in the archives can never be unseen. Archive Fever diagnosi…
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Clare and Yves are joined by Associate Professor Michelle Arrow, historian of modern Australia at Sydney’s Macquarie University and author of The Seventies: The Personal, the Political and the Making of Modern Australia (NewSouth Publishing, 2019). Is there a power behind romanticizing the archive, or the cliche of playing archival detective? Miche…
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Yves and Clare are joined by Dr Natalie Harkin, a Narungga woman, writer, poet, and author of Archival-Poetics (Vagabond Press, 2019). How do we weave our histories, our stories? Natalie talks about piecing together her family narrative through state Aboriginal records and archives in order to make sense of a fractured history and create a new spac…
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Clare and Yves are joined by environmental historian Dr Alessandro (Sandro) Antonello, senior research fellow at Flinders University and author of The Greening of Antarctica: Assembling an International Environment (Oxford University Press, 2019). What’s a historian to do when their archive is disappearing before their very eyes? Sandro discusses h…
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Yves and Clare are joined by internationally renowned space archeologist Alice Gorman, who you may also know as Dr Space Junk, author of Dr Space Junk Vs The Universe: Archaeology and the Future (MIT Press, 2019). How do we catalog, access, and work in an archive suspended in the stars above our heads? Alice discusses her journey from indigenous he…
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Clare and Yves are joined by author Helen Garner, whose latest book The Yellow Notebook (Text, 2020) is an edited collection of the author’s diaries--or what you might call a self-archive. Helen explores the psychic necessity of diary keeping, the tendency of memory to smooth over our own crimes, and the truth to be found in self-research. The grou…
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For a special live launch of season 2, Clare and Yves are joined by Professor Jenny Hocking, the driving force behind the campaign to unlock the Palace Letters and expose the truth about the Dismissal. Jenny reveals how she contracted archive fever from writing biographies of powerful men, and explains why the history revealed by the letters betwee…
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09 | Queering the Archives (Live in Melbourne)
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What do we know about queer lives and stories from the past? At this special live recording at the Wheeler Centre, hosts Clare Wright and Yves Rees are joined by historian Noah Riseman and trans scholar and activist Julie Peters to discuss the absence of queer people, especially trans and gender diverse people, from conventional records and histori…
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How might we decolonize the archive? Clare and Yves are joined by Paul Daley, Walkley award-winning journalist and author whose work includes the column “Postcolonial” in the Guardian. Paul shares his forays into archives of colonial destruction and reflects on his addiction to the paper trail, before grappling with some thorny human questions. Wha…
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Clare and Yves are joined by Rachel Buchanan, journalist, historian, writer and chief archivist of the Germaine Greer Archive at the University of Melbourne. How does an archivist build an archive? Who has the right to feast on these stories? And what on earth do cryogenics, radioactive waste and bread have to do with archival work? In this episode…
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Clare and Yves are joined by Billy Griffiths, historian and author of the award-winning Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia. Can an archive exist in the ground beneath our feet? The group talks archaeology—a discipline which startles the border between the sciences and the humanities—as archival research, the archive as contested space…
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How do historical novelists mix research and imagination to bring stories to life? Do they get anxious about wading into academic turf? To investigate these questions, Clare and Yves chat to Jock Serong, award-winning novelist and author of Preservation—a captivating thriller based on the true story of a shipwreck in colonial Australia. Jock reflec…
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Clare and Yves are joined by Gwenda Tavan, Associate Professor of Politics at La Trobe University, and one of Australia’s foremost experts in the history and politics of immigration and multiculturalism. How do we find the human face of bureaucratic archives? Can researchers’ detective work impact lives and policies in the present? The group discus…
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Clare and Yves are joined by author Chloe Hooper, whose latest book The Arsonist (2018) weaves together the story of the Black Saturday Fires out of the threads of a living archive. Can the landscape and its scars reveal a true history? The group discusses paper trails in the legal system, the question of trust, and engaging in the physical archive…
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02 | Looking for the Right Truck to Pass By
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Clare and Yves are joined by author Chloe Hooper, whose latest book The Arsonist (2018) weaves together the story of the Black Saturday Fires out of the threads of a living archive. Can the landscape and its scars reveal a true history? The group discusses paper trails in the legal system, the question of trust, and engaging in the physical archive…
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Clare Wright and Yves Rees expose their archive addict underbellies, pay tribute to Jacques Derrida, the patron saint of Archive Fever, and share stories of catching the research bug. The first session of Archives Anonymous meets here, welcome to the group.By Claire Wright and Yves Rees
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