History Lab

Narrator, writer, and producer: Sienna Brown

Sound recordist, writer, and producer: Ben Etherington

Supervising producer: Jane Curtis, UTS Impact Studios

Executive producer: Sarah Gilbert, UTS Impact Studios

Sound designer and engineer: John Jacobs

An earlier version of this episode was made for the ABC Radio National's History Listen programme, with Michelle Rayner as Executive Producer.

Support

The research for this series was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Creole Voices in the Caribbean and Australia: Poetics and Decolonisation (DP220101256).

We are also grateful to the Writing and Society Research Centre and School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University for their generous support in the production of this series.

Alana takes us through the joys of bringing Nellie Small, the subject of History Lab episode 33, back to the stage in her cabaret Send for Nellie! And we hear about Nellie’s solidarity with Indigenous performers. 

The panel also talks bloopers and highlights from their performing careers in this conversation recorded in a packed room at the Abercrombie Hotel in Sydney on October 23, 2025. 

Guests 

Zahra Newman was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, and moved to Australia at age 14. A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, Newman has an extensive list of credits in theatre, television, and film. Notable works include her performance as Nabalungi in the original Australian cast of The Book of Mormon, and her lead role in the adaptation of Maxine Beneba Clarke’s memoir The Hate Race. She has received a Green Room Award, a Sydney Theatre Award, and multiple Helpmann Award nominations. Newman played all 23 characters in the Sydney Theatre Company’s recent one-person production of Dracula.  

Alana Valentine is a librettist, playwright, and director who has had a long and celebrated career. One highlight is working with acclaimed First Nations performer, Ursula Yovich, on Barbara and The Camp Dogs, which toured nationally, was the recipient of four Helpmann Awards including Best Original Score and Best Musical and four Green Room Awards in Melbourne. She’s collaborated with the First nations choreographer and director Stephen Page on eight works including the multi-award winning Bennelong and the Opera ceremony Baleen Moondjan, which has just played the Brisbane Festival in 2025. Her cabaret Send For Nellie, which repositioned vaudeville legend Nellie Small in the Queer cultural firmament, debuted at the Sydney Festival in 2024. 

Jamaican-born Sienna Brown writes historical fiction that centres on the Caribbean Experience in Australia. Her novel Master of My Fate (2019), won the MUD Literary Prize at Adelaide Writers Week for the best debut novel and was shortlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize. In 2021, she was commissioned by ABC Radio National to create Caribbean Convicts in Australia. Since 2022, she's been a Research Associate at Western Sydney University as part of the ARC Discovery Project Creole Voices in the Caribbean and Australia.  

Ben Etherington is an associate professor at Western Sydney University. His teaching and critical work centres on literary decolonisation and he’s currently writing a history of poetry in West Indian Creole languages from the end of slavery to independence. Ben has produced a number audio features including a documentary for ABC Radio National on Gangallida activist Clarence Walden, which he co-produced with Waanyi author Alexis Wright. His book Literary Primitivism (2018) won the Australian University Heads of English prize for literary scholarship and, from 2026, he will be an Australian Research Council Future Fellow working on the project The Decolonisation of Literary Culture. 

Credits 

This series was produced on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and Burramatagal people of the Dharug nation. 

Writer and producer: Ben Etherington  

Producer: Sienna Brown 

Supervising producer: Jane Curtis 

Executive producer: Sarah Gilbert 

Sound designer and engineer: Simon Branthwaite 

The research for this series was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Creole Voices in the Caribbean and Australia: Poetics and Decolonisation (DP220101256). We are also grateful to the Writing and Society Research Centre and School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University for their generous support in the production of this series. 

Hear author and historian Katherine Biber tell the story of Jimmy and Joe Governor, Wiradjuri and Wonnarua brothers, who in 1900 went on a murder spree that killed nine people and terrified countless others.

The men were pursued for three months across 3000 kilometres, taunting their hunters with clues, letters and tricks. The last men in the state to be proclaimed outlaws, their pursuit and capture fascinated and terrified a nation on the eve of its Federation.

Back in 2021, History Lab published its award-winning Last Outlaws episodes (you can find them in eps 15-17) - a collaboration with Biber and the Governor family. Now, Biber has told the story in a book.

In this episode, she speaks with historian Alecia Simmonds about the connection between the fate of the Governor brothers and the birth of modern Australia.

The Last Outlaws: The crimes of Jimmy & Joe Governor and the birth of Modern Australia is published by Simon & Schuster. It is the product of decades of archival research, field work and interviews, and of a long collaboration with Jimmy Governor’s descendants.

This episode is brought to you in partnership with our friends at Gleebooks. Head to the Gleebooks events page to discover more great literary events featuring some of Australia’s best and best known authors. 

Guests

Katherine Biber is a writer, legal scholar, criminologist, historian and Professor of Law at UTS. Katherine undertook the research for The Last Outlaws in cooperation with descendants of Jimmy Governor. Her History Lab podcast trilogy, made as part of this collaboration, won multiple awards, including the NSW Premier’s History Award, the Australian Podcast Award (2022 podcast of the year) and the Australian Legal Research Award.

Katherine teaches and researches Evidence. Her scholarly interests lie in photographic evidence, documentary evidence, criminal evidence and histories of evidence.

Alecia Simmonds is a multi-award winning scholar and writer who works at the interface of law and history. Her most recent book Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law won the NSW Premier's Prize for best book in Australian history, the Australian Law Research Awards for best book, the biennial Hancock Prize for best book and the Australian and New Zealand Legal History award for best book 2023. It was also shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Award and the Ernest Scott Award. 

Credits

Fully Lit is made by Impact Studios, a media production house based on Gadigal land at UTS, Sydney.

This episode was recorded at Sydney's Gleebooks, also on Gadigal land.

In 1919, Richmond footballer Vic Thorp won the league’s highest honour for the second time — the equivalent of today’s Brownlow Medal. But just a century earlier, his great-grandmother Susannah Andrews was enslaved in Jamaica, before gaining her freedom.

This episode uncovers Susannah’s remarkable journey: from enslavement, to freedom, to becoming matriarch of an Australian family that would include football legends and mining startups.

We hear from her descendant Garry Chapman, who discovered Susannah’s story while sifting through his father’s papers.

Jamaican historian Suzanne Francis-Brown — a regular on the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? — helps us reconstruct Susannah’s life as an enslaved, then free, woman living with a Jewish merchant in Kingston.

So how does one woman’s survival ripple through generations?

And why does remembering Susannah’s life matter for how we tell Australian history today?

Voices

Garry Chapman taught in both primary and secondary sectors and worked in both government and independent schools over a career of 42 years. He is the author of over 50 published books, written for children and teachers. Garry developed an interest in his own family’s history when he found a folder full of notes in his late father’s belongings. It contained a photo of his great great grandfather, George Brydon Brandon with ‘Jamaica?’ written on the back. This planted a seed, and Garry has spent the ensuing years trying to fill in the missing pieces of his ancestors’ stories, uncovering the fascinating tale of Susannah Andrews in the process.

Historian Dr Suzanne Francis-Brown has worked as a journalist, lecturer in media and communications and museum curator. Her research interests include heritage interpretation, enslaved families, and enslaved runaways in Jamaica, and she has published Mona, Past and Present: The History and Heritage of the Mona Campus, University of the West Indies (2004) and the co-authored The Old Iron Bridge, Spanish Town, Jamaica, (2005), as well as several works of youth fiction. She was curator at the University of the West Indies Museum from its founding in 2012 to 2019. Dr Francis-Brown has featured many times on the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? 

Credits 

This series was produced on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eeora Nation and Burramatagal people of the Dharug nation. 

Narrator, writer, and producer: Sienna Brown 

Sound recordist, writer, and producer: Ben Etherington 

Supervising producer: Jane Curtis, UTS Impact Studios

Executive producer: Sarah Gilbert, UTS Impact Studios

Sound designer and engineer: John Jacobs 

Support

The research for this series was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Creole Voices in the Caribbean and Australia: Poetics and Decolonisation (DP220101256).

We are also grateful to the Writing and Society Research Centre and School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University for their generous support in the production of this series. 

Alana Valentine is a librettist, playwright, and director who is an expert at working with real life subjects and stories, dramatizing them with respect. She has three plays on the NSW HSC Syllabus: Parramatta Girls, Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah, and Cyberbile. Her play, Letters to Lindy, has seen hundreds of amateur and school productions. Valentine is particularly distinguished in her skills as a co-collaborator, notably with Barbara and the Camp Dogs, which won the 2019 Helpmann Award for Best Musical and Best Original Score. She has chronicled her practice in Bowerbird and published the memoir Wed By The Wayside. 

Professor Cassandra Pybus FAHA specializes historical narratives about people who have been marginalized, forgotten or written out of history. An award-winning author she has published 13 books including Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia's First Black Settlers and the bestselling biography, Truganini. She has held research professorships at the University of Sydney, Georgetown University in Washington DC, the University of Texas and King's College London. She is descended from a colonist who received the largest free land grant on Truganini's traditional country of Bruny Island. 

Vanessa Cassin is Education Manager at Society of Australian Genealogists with extensive experience in providing training and assessment in the trustee industry, both as an in-house trainer for the NSW Trustee & Guardian and as an assessor for Western Sydney University the College’s Registered Training Organisation. Vanessa holds a Diploma in Family Historical Studies from the Society of Australian Genealogists and has been researching her own family history for over 20 years. 

Zahra Newman was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, and moved to Australia at age 14. A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, Newman has an extensive list of credits in theatre, television, and film. Her notable works include her performance as Nabalungi in the original Australian cast of The Book of Mormon, and her lead role in the play The Hate Race and in the film Long Story Short. She has received a Green Room Award, a Sydney Theatre Award, and multiple Helpmann Award nominations. Newman played all 23 characters in the Sydney Theatre Company’s recent one-person production of Dracula. 

Graeme Rhodes’ acting career spans over 30 years and includes numerous theatre, film, television and radio credits. Most recently he has been working as a writer and director for Forum theatre based Industrial safety programs. When he’s not acting he sings with a jazz trio and builds electronic noise making machines. 

Credits 

This series was produced on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eeora Nation and Burramatagal people of the Dharug nation. 

Narrator, writer, and producer: Sienna Brown 

Sound recordist, writer, and producer: Ben Etherington 

Supervising producer: Jane Curtis, UTS Impact Studios

Executive producer: Sarah Gilbert, UTS Impact Studios

Sound designer and engineer: John Jacobs 

Support

The research for this series was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Creole Voices in the Caribbean and Australia: Poetics and Decolonisation (DP220101256).

We are also grateful to the Writing and Society Research Centre and School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University for their generous support in the production of this series. 

More reading about Nellie Small

• Nellie Small on Wikipedia
• Nellie Small: the trailblazing, cross-dressing cabaret star who Australia forgot The Guardian Australia
• From the Archives: The great live music war of 1954 Sydney Morning Herald
• Zoe Coombs Marr on Queerstralia Sydney Morning Herald
• A letter to the editor about soup Sydney Morning Herald
• Send for Nellie in the 2024 Sydney Festival and article by Alana Valentine on the State Library of NSW website