When the pandemic plague hit, the first action taken by the government was to impose an emergency lockdown. It was known that the disease could pass from person to person, so movement and personal contact were strictly controlled. If you developed symptoms, if you had been in contact with someone who had symptoms, if you had been somewhere the disease was known to be present, you were isolated or forced to remain indoors. Australia 2020? No, this is Florence, 1630. But why were Florentines so frightened of bad smells? And why did the health office create a walking map of their city?

About Nick Eckstein - Nick Eckstein is Cassamarca Associate Professor of Renaissance History in the History Department at Sydney University. His research and publications emphasise the social and cultural history of renaissance and early-modern Italy. Recently he has published articles on the ways in which early modern Italians responded to plague. He is currently writing a book on the same subject, provisionally entitled Plague Time: Space, Fear and Emergency Statecraft in Early-Modern Italy. With Sophie Loy-Wilson, Nick is the regular co-host of How Was It Really. Reading for this episode Nicholas A. Eckstein, ‘Florence on Foot: An Eye-Level Mapping of the Early Modern City in Time of Plague’, Renaissance Studies 30, no. 2 (1 April 2016): 273–97, https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12144.

In geographical terms, the island of Papua New Guinea is one of Australia's closest neighbours. Yet most Australians know little about it, and we know even less about the island's western half, named West Papua. Why is West Papua not on our radar? Why do we - and for that matter, much of the world's population - not 'see' West Papua and its people?

In this HWIR, one of Sydney's most courageous young historians, Emma Kluge, lays bare the West Papuan people's heroic struggle to be seen, to be heard, and to speak for themselves. How did they become invisible in the first place? What does it mean to be "twice colonised"? And can a scholar who is not West Papuan write a West Papuan history?

About Emma Kluge - Dr Emma Kluge is a PhD graduate of the History Department at the University of Sydney, where she completed her doctoral thesis on West Papua's struggle for independence in the 1960s and 1970s. Learn more about the themes discussed in this episode by reading Emma's recent article: Emma Kluge, ‘West Papua and the International History of Decolonization, 1961-69’, The International History Review 42, no. 6 (1 November 2020): 1155–72, https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2019.1694052.

Sometimes progressive politics and good intentions create unexpected consequences for the marginal groups they are supposed to help. In this HWIR Sydney historian, Miranda Johnson, talks with Nick and Sophie about indigenous identity in Canada, land rights, and stories that resonate powerfully with the experience of aboriginal people in Australia. How did the concept of the "Treaty Indian" emerge? What is "Treaty Talk"? How does language erase some people's experience while giving licence and agency to others? And what happened when indigenous Dene man, Michael Sikyea, shot the Million Dollar Duck?

About Miranda Johnson - Dr Miranda Johnson is a leading historian of the modern Pacific world who focuses on issues of race, indigeneity citizenship and identity. She author of The Land is Our History: Indigeneity, Law and the Settler State (Oxford University Press, 2016), which won the 2018 Hancock Prize from the Australian Historical Association. Since this HWIR was recorded, Dr Miranda Johnson, a historian in the History Department at the University of Sydney, has returned to her original home in New Zealand. She is now at the University of Christchurch. The conversation in this episode draws on a major article by Miranda Johnson that was published in the American Historical Review. Find it here: Reading for this episode Miranda Johnson, ‘The Case of the Million-Dollar Duck: A Hunter, His Treaty, and the Bending of the Settler Contract’, The American Historical Review 124, no. 1 (1 February 2019): 56–86, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy576.