Archive Fever

In this special live episode of Season 8, recorded at the Footscray West Writers Fest, Clare and Yves are joined by writer and academic Dr Micaela Sahhar to unlock the vast ephemera and stolen inheritance of the Palestinian diaspora. How do archives and archiving operate as technologies of settler colonialism? Why have Palestinians been disappeared at both ends of the story - both from Nakba and assimilation? How does Micaela’s award-winning book Meet Me at the Jaffa Gate (NewSouth, 2025) provide a counter archive that allows Palestinians to assert authority over their own stories of exile and homecoming? And how can a single key embody a Palestinian past and present in the midst of an ongoing genocide?

Every family has its secrets—but what happens when a writer dives into the family archive to uncover and share those stories with the world? In this very special final episode of Season 7 (yes, already!) - recorded live on Gadigal land at the 2025 Sydney Writers Festival — Yves and Clare probe Australian-born Maori poet Anne-Marie Te Whiu (Mettle) and Queensland-born author and journalist Lech Blaine (Australian Gospel) about the promises and pitfalls of working with stories close to home. Why rattle the bones of family skeletons? How important it is to have one member of the family who is a hoarder of seemingly minor items or insignificant facts that can, to a writer, be like shards of gold? How to navigate the ethical and emotional minefield of finding uncomfortable truths about loved ones and forebears? And what does excavating the roots of the family tree do to the writer themselves?

As you tend your garden this summer, spare a thought for Alison Vaughan, responsible for no less than 1.5 million precious botanical specimens. As collections manager at the National Herbarium of Victoria, which dates back to 1853, Alison stewards a vast archive of past and present biodiversity that illuminates our social and ecological history and provides tools to build a better future. Why did a 500-year-old aquatic moss from Switzerland end up in drawer in Naarm/Melbourne? How is the Herbarium at once a colonial institution and a resource to remedy environmental ills of colonisation? What does repatriation mean in the context of botanical archives? And whose are the hidden hands that built this continent’s oldest settler scientific institution?

How did hearing Samuel Becket say ‘fuck it’ on a scratchy tape kickstart a multi-doctoral author’s archive addiction? In this episode, Yves and Clare talk to Dr (Dr) Matthew Lamb about his colossal biography of colossus intellect, activist, journalist, novelist, publisher and archivist, Frank Moorhouse. How does a biographer navigate a living subject, especially when that person is a self-proclaimed chameleon? Do the personal archives of such a protean figure help or hinder truth-telling about a man who urged: ‘when the facts conflict with the legend, print the legend’. And where does responsibility lie when your subject commands ‘make it salacious’—but also requires discretion about his sexuality and gender?

In this raw and intimate episode, historian Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson spills the tea on the psychological rollercoaster of archival research: it offered the ‘biggest high’ and also ‘fucked [her] up’. From her formative childhood experiences in Beijing, to stumbling upon a human tooth in a Queensland court file, to reckoning with the human face of anti-Chinese racism, Sophie walks us through the time capsules of human drama she uses to tell the stories of Chinese Australia. What does a former market garden reveal about Chinese and First Nations cooperation? How could language be a technology of resistance for racialised migrants? And why did her ex’s probate records provide a lightbulb moment about migration?

An archival decolonist walks into a colonial institution, and dreams up a whole new paradigm for cultural heritage. Today on Archive Fever, Wiradjuri librarian and museum educator Nathan Sentance illuminates the challenges and possibilities of bringing Indigenous epistemologies and voices into the GLAM sector. Why is it vital to close the gap between First Nations lived experience and the white-dominated written record? How can institutions move away from old models of colonial extraction, and instead build up First Nations collections via authentic collaboration and consent? And why are art and creativity key to making this thing we call ‘decolonisation’ actually happen?

What does it feel like to be a young, urban, Jewish post-war migrant woman who grabs a camera and walks into the Australian desert, only to emerge 50 years later with an intimate archive of a civil rights movement? In this very special episode, Yves and Clare are joined by legendary octogenarian photographer Juno Gemes to discuss her lifelong pursuit of creativity, community, independence and social justice. hy did Juno follow in the footsteps of Richard Avendon and not James Baldwin? What role does photography play in the political and artistic pursuit of truth-telling? Can landscape be a portrait? And why is living in an archive both a privilege and a responsibility?

Loot: to plunder or steal—an English word itself looted from the Hindi word lūṭ. To celebrate the launch of season 7, the inimitable Scottish-born historian William Dalrymple spills on the beans on the colonial loot that made modern Britain—and which today forms an archive of violence and extraction. Never one to shy away from the underside of history, William takes us into murky terrain: from the dust and sweat of archaeological digs, to his own family’s imperial villainy, to the deep antiquity and current genocide of the Palestinian people. Why did an underground tunnel turn teenage William into an archive addict? How did a tiny jade bead from India end up in a Viking charnel house in Scotland—and what does that tell us about histories of trade and colonisation? And why have we forgotten that ancient Gaza was once famous for sweet wine and erotic poetry?

Clare and Matt speak to historian, author and fellow podcaster Yves Rees, author of the new book ‘Travelling to Tomorrow The modern women who sparked Australia’s romance with America’ (UNSW Press).

Don your rainbows (and beards) and get ready for the lavender haze of Australian history: Danielle Scrimshaw, author of She and Her Pretty Friend: The Hidden History of Australian Women Who Love Women (Ultimo, 2023), is in the studio to offer a queer eye for the straight historian. Why is queer history so important for the LGBTQIA+ community in the present? Can archive fever spark the fires of romance? And how can we uncover queer lives in heteronormative archives—is the answer ‘speculation as method’?

It’s complete carnage as Clare and Yves attempt to wrangle the phenomenon that is journalist, editor, historian, screenwriter, novelist and award-winning author Mark Dapin into the Archive Fever hot seat to discuss his latest venture in investigative crime writing, Carnage. We talk about growing up Jewish and working-class in a British army town, the stratified landscape of male violence, The Troubles, Chinese restaurants, what happens when your archives can shoot you in the knees and why researching true crime is the archival equivalent of crack cocaine. A wild and hilarious ride.

Today on Archive Fever the tables are turned, and interviewer turns interviewee. Co-host Clare Wright jumps in the hot seat to tell Yves and producer Matt Smith about the research journey behind her latest book Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions (Text, 2024)—the final work in her Democracy Trilogy, an award-winning series that uses the material heritage of Australian democracy to retell how the people acquired a voice. How to incorporate Yolngu ways of being and knowing into a linear historical narrative? What does it mean to practice truth telling a year on from the unsuccessful Voice referendum? Where did Clare uncover a long-lost fourth copy of the bark petition? And what does Joan Didion have to do with any of this?

A legend walks into the studio, as Yves and Clare are joined by queer royalty, Joan Nestle. In 1974, Joan founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in her home in New York. Fifty years later, Yves and Clare ask: how DO you start an archive from scratch, especially when so much of the history you are documenting has been lived underground? Why are archives the counter-narrative to a nation’s institutional history? Can an archival collection be both narrowly defined and broadly inclusive? How did a hundred women end up on Joan’s bed? And is it ever kosher to disguise your identity to steal photos of Eleanor Roosevelt and her lover?

Recorded in May 2024, seven months after the deadly 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel, Clare and Yves are joined by Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein, whose book The Palestine Laboratory was first published in May 2023. The dates matter, as numbers of Palestinian casualties grow and the genocide in Gaza continues to unfold. Where did Antony’s instinct to be an irritant germinate? How does researching against the grain of hegemonic power put him in the literal firing line? Why is WikiLeaks his go-to archival ground zero? And how do you document a genocide that is being livestreamed while the archives of a people are being reduced to rubble in an act of ‘politicide’?

Clare and Yves are joined by Jazz Money, a queer Wiradjuri filmmaker, poet and artist whose debut feature film WINHANGANHA (2023) uses archival footage by or about First Nations people from the National Film and Sound Archive to ‘make sense of the archival inheritances that shape our present realities’. What does it mean for First Nations creators to speak back to the colonial archive? How can we honour the archive of the body? And why is it essential to foreground love and joy and sexiness and strength, alongside violence and suffering?

Before British colonisation, there were more than 250 languages spoken on this continent. Less than half survive today, and most of them are under threat. In a live episode of their hit podcast, Archive Fever, historians Yves Rees and Clare Wright are joined by special guests Cheryl Leavy and Paul Girrawah House to discuss orality as archive: how language helps us know the past and why the work of language revitalisation – bringing languages back to life – is so vital to the future.

I have a dream. Dream large. Blue sky dreaming. A dream come true. You may say I’m a dreamer. We ask four extraordinary thinkers to dream on. Professor Megan Davis – constitutional lawyer, co-chair of the national campaign to recognise the Voice to Parliament, author of Everything You Need to Know About the Uluru Statement. Professor Frank Bongiorno – whose new political history of Australia, Dreamers and Schemers, is about to be released by La Trobe Uni Press, an imprint of Black Inc. Akuch Anyieth - Sudanese refugee, author of the memoir Unknown, award-winning domestic violence campaigner. Dr Joelle Gergis - ANU climate scientist and author of the new book Humanity’s Moment. With a special live performance by actor, Kate Atkinson, reading from the work of award-winning author and La Trobe graduate, Cate Kennedy. Recorded at the Bendigo Writers Festival on 5th May, 2023.

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 shares her journey from conventional academic historian to creative writer who connects with the past from the fullness of herself. How can we restore the past in ways that nourish the historian? Why does being more creative involve giving up authority? And what can settler historians learn from First Nations archival poetics?

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 traditional music – like oral history – serve as an endless archive? When songwriters do research, what comes first: the story or the music? How much historical licence can you take in songwriting that has truth-telling (and activism) at its heart? Why don’t some tales heal unless they are told? And why does listening to music make even the most hardened of grown men cry? Spoiler alert: this episode comes with bonus musical tracks. Get out your tissues.

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’s past? Why should we disrupt the monolingualism of Australia’s settler history? What do non-English archives bring to the table? And can foreign-language sources help us challenge nationalist mythologies?

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 voice from the dead to rise up out of the grave, speaking in the urban colloquial vernacular of a bygone era? At what is all this nostalgia for a pre-digital age where it was possible to driftnet fish in the stacks? Fiona takes us on a tour through tattoos, night clubs and streets that might just be familiar to you … sort of.

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 pollution threaten this celestial library? And why must any recognition of Indigenous sovereignty extend to the sky? Once you learn about Indigenous sky rights, you’ll never think about Country the same way again.

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? Why, when you ‘enter a justice space’, is writing an explainer simply not an option? What happens to judicial impartiality when you want to flay your historical protagonist alive? And how does it feel, down there in the gutter fight of history?

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 from Zelda the cavoodle, and Zoe reveals all about her street vomit archive.

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? The group discusses the psychoanalytic journey from an obscure Viense poet to Robert Menzies, reading for patterns, and writing history as an act of reparation.

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 absence, digitising the archive, and accessibility of institutional and archival research.

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.

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 the historian’s professional anxiety, patrolling the disciplinary boundaries of archival work, and a hidden code in paperclips.

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 light and shade in the world today.

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 antipodean stars? What gets overlooked when knowledge is discredited as myth and legend? The group discusses outsiders, variable stars changing the history of science, and researching with ears open, mouth shut.

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 chronology-obsessed history with a capital H.

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.

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.

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 reconnection with Indigenous knowledges.

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 buried treasure, the methodology of visual storytelling, and the nitty-gritty of using archival footage in Australia.

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 peoples colonised by European empires. Are the archives themselves the problem, or the questions we ask of them? The group discusses an extraordinary discovery in the middle of the Australian outback, the historian’s power of time travel, and the potential of the dream archive.

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 archival submarine, misgivings with a digital archive of data, and documenting the pandemic in real time (#covidstreetarchive).

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 group discusses the recipe for unforgettable information, the “third archive”, and the mind-altering power of bringing humanity into… everything.

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 personal archives, the significance of a storyteller’s own identity, and the gendered nature of a colonial history that seeks to penetrate the center of a nation.

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, going “down the hole,” and assuming the role of detective amongst the documents. Is all archival research, after all, an act of snooping?

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 discusses the archival turn in contemporary Indigenous art, the learnt voyeurism of culture, and art as a release from the archive.

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 he do it?” The group discusses overcoming rage and confronting internalized misogyny, the emotional complexities of the human archive, and eating stolen academic journal articles for breakfast. If you, or someone you know, need assistance and support through domestic and family violence in Australia you can call the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service: 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).

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 diagnosis: terminal.

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? Michelle explores the rich archival basis of her work on the 1974 Royal Commission on Human Relationships, the transcripts and sensitive submissions locked away in “a bunker in the bush”. The group discusses the Commission taking stock of the impact of second-wave feminism and the ethical implications of working on the history of the not-so-long-ago seventies. Michelle also uncovers the perceived national security threat posed by a spoon.

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 space in Archival Poetics. The group considers the paradox of Natalie’s archive fever, rebuilding the archival container, the dual voices of oppression and resilience, entering the archive with rupturing intent, and weaving your way back out.

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 his journey from his local parish records in year nine, to working in the ice that comprises the Antarctic. Sandro explores the relationship between humanity and science and reveals how he was caught up in a climate-denying Fox News storm. Most importantly, he reminds us never to “leave our own archive” behind in Antarctica.

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 heritage management to satellites and spacecraft, and reflects on the pitfalls of understanding the story of humankind as “from the stone age to the space age”. The group also discusses code-breaking, armor against mortality, colonialism and the unexpected delights of cable-ties.

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 group discusses their shared motto and letters that elicit a sweat of fury, before reflecting on what it means to bear the blows in life and hand them out.

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 between Sir John Kerr and the Palace is "far worse than she'd imagined". Plus she shares her dirty little archive secret - a family skeleton in the closet that shocked Gough Whitlam. Recorded live online with an audience via zoom, 20 August 2020.

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 historical data. Where else might we go to locate a trans or non-binary lineage? What records may LGBTIQA+ elders and predecessors have kept, and how we can recover and integrate queer figures and stories into our broader understanding of Australian history? Join us as we discuss how to set the record queer. Recorded live at the Wheeler Centre, Melbourne on 28 November 2019.