Clare Wright

Professor Clare Wright OAM is an award-winning historian, author, broadcaster, podcaster and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media. Clare is currently Professor of History and Professor of Public Engagement at La Trobe University. She is the author of five works of history, including the best-selling The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (winner of the 2014 Stella Prize) and You Daughters of Freedom. Her latest book, and the final instalment in her Democracy Trilogy, is the highly acclaimed Ṉäku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions which won the Queensland Literary Award for Non-Fiction and NT History Book Award and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, Victorian Premiers Literary Awards, Age Book of the Year Awards, Australian Political Book of the Year and ABIA Awards, and was longlisted for a Walkley Award and the NIB Literary Award. Clare has written and presented history documentaries for ABC TV and is Associate Producer of the feature film One Mind One Heart, written/directed by Larissa Behrendt, which won the NSW Digital History Award. She also hosts the ABC Radio National history podcast, Shooting the Past, co-hosts the La Trobe University podcast Archive Fever (with Yves Rees) and is Executive Producer of Hey History! the first Australian history podcast designed for use in the classroom. In 2020, Clare was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours list for ‘services to literature and to historical research’. Clare is Chair of the National Museum of Australia Council and past Board Director of the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas.

INTERVIEWS and ARTICLES

Conversation: Friday essay: 60 years old, the Yirrkala Bark Petitions are one of our founding documents – so why don’t we know more about them?
Conversation: Friday essay: masters of the future or heirs of the past? Mining, history and Indigenous ownership
Guardian: Lest we forget: a pandemic isn't a war but our healthcare workers are heroes