Speakers

Keynote Speaker: Simon Potter 

Simon J. Potter is Professor of Modern History at the University of Bristol. He has published widely on the history of the media, empire, and global communications networks, with books including News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876-1922 (OUP, 2003); Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British world, 1922-1970 (OUP, 2012); and Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920-39 (OUP, 2020). He has also published a centenary history of the BBC, This the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain, 1922-2022 (OUP, 2022) and is co-author of The Wireless World: Global Histories of International Radio Broadcasting (OUP, 2022). A former Menzies Australian Bicentennial Fellow and Rydon Fellow, and a former Harold White Fellow at the National Library of Australia, his work has encompassed the history of media connections between Britain and Australia, and he is currently engaged in a new research project on gold-rush migration between the UK and Victoria.

Keynote Speaker: Lorena Allam

Lorena Allam is a four-time Walkley Award–winning journalist descended from the Yuwaalaraay and Gamilaraay people of northwest NSW, with forty years’ experience working in the media. Until recently The Guardian Australia’s Indigenous Affairs editor, Allam is now Professor of Indigenous truth-telling research at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education at the University of Technology, Sydney. Lorena’s work at Jumbunna is to produce research and information that will help set the foundations for an ongoing process of truth telling in Australia, and continue to produce impactful journalism about Indigenous issues here and overseas. Lorena spent 30 years as journalist and broadcaster at the ABC, working in News, Triple J, Radio National, TV and online. Lorena worked on many RN programs including Awaye!, Background Briefing, Hindsight and Earshot, and was ABC Radio’s first Indigenous Editor, overseeing all programming, staffing and employment strategies across the division. In 2018, Lorena joined The Guardian Australia as its first Indigenous Affairs Editor, winning four Walkley awards, two Kennedy awards and the NSW Premier’s History award for her reporting on issues including Aboriginal deaths in custody, frontier colonisation, and the Juukan Gorge disaster. In forays outside journalism, Lorena worked on the landmark Bringing Them Home inquiry and helmed the Indigenous collection at the National Film and Sound Archive.

Presidential Address: Michelle Arrow

Michelle Arrow is Professor of Modern History, Macquarie University and President, the Australian Historical Association.  She is an historian with particular interest in cultural history, the history of popular culture, and the history of the women's movement. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a former National Library of Australia, State Library of New South Wales, Whitlam Institute Fellow.  Her first monograph, Upstaged: Australian Women Playwrights in the Limelight at Last was published in 2002. Upstaged was shortlisted for five national prizes in 2003. Her second book, Friday on Our Minds: Popular Culture in Australia Since 1945, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Australian History prize in 2010. In 2014, she was the winner (with Catherine Freyne and Timothy Nicastri) of the NSW Premiers' Multimedia History Prize for her radio documentary Public Intimacies: The 1974 Royal Commission on Human Relationships. Michelle's third book, The Seventies: The Personal, The Political and the Making of Modern Australia was published in 2019 by NewSouth and it won the 2020 Ernest Scott Prize for Australian History. Her most recent co-authored book was published in 2024, Personal Politics Sexuality, Gender and the Remaking of Citizenship in Australia. She is currently working on an ARC funded project that investigates the life and work of Anne Deveson.

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