In this special summer series of the Afternoon Light podcast you can enjoy the presentations delivered at our November 2025 conference entitled ‘Menzies and the British Commonwealth of Nation’. This first episode features the keynote address delivered by Martin Farr, Josh Woodward's paper 'Enlarged horizons and excited imagination: Rereading Robert Menzies’s 1935 overseas diary', & David Lee's paper 'Menzies and Imperial Unity, 1934–1942'.

Martin Farr teaches contemporary history at Newcastle University (UK). His research interests centre on British politics and public life, foreign policy, and foreign relations. He has published on politics and strategy in the two world wars, political life-writing, US-UK relations, tourism, and popular culture. He is currently writing Margaret Thatcher’s World, an international history of Thatcherism. He heads Britain and the World, with its annual conference, book series, and peer-reviewed journal.

Joshua Woodward is an Australian environmental historian whose research explores representations of nature in tourist advertising. He has published several articles on the tourist promotion of Australian national parks and their emergence as important sites of the settler-nation. He completed his Masters at the University of Western Australia, where he was the 2019 recipient of the Frank Broeze scholarship. Josh will complete his PhD on twentieth century Australian tourist advertising at the Australian National University in 2025.

David Lee is an Associate Professor in history in the University of New South Wales, Canberra. He has published widely on Australian history in the twentieth century. His most recent books are Australia and the World: International Relations and Global Events since Federation (Circa, 2022) and John Curtin (Connor Court, 2022). He is also author of The Second Rush: Mining and the Transformation of Australia (Connor Court, 2016) and Stanley Melbourne Bruce: Australian Internationalist (Bloomsbury, 2010). He is Chair of the Commonwealth Working Party of the Australian Dictionary of Biography and Cabinet Historian of the National Archives of Australia. Current projects are a history of the Australian Department of Trade and its Antecedent Agencies, 1941–87; a history of Australian independence; Governance During the Howard Era, 1996–2007; a biography of JB Chifley; and an edited volume, Conduits of War: Dominion Governors and Governors-General during the Great War.

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Robert Menzies served 18 years as PM, but were they all as good as each other?

On this week’s Afternoon Light Georgina Downer speaks with Andrew Kemp, who has recently ranked Australian Prime Ministers by the best and worst terms of government we have experienced. A fun and enlightening exercise that highlights how good governance can be judged not merely on the policy programs for which governments are elected, but ultimately on rising to the unique & unforeseeable challenges of the day.

Andrew Kemp is a Melbourne-based writer and a former economist at the Commonwealth Treasury and the Department of Treasury and Finance in Victoria. He has written for the Australian Financial Review, The Australian, contributed a chapter to Unity in Autonomy: A Federal History of the Founding of the Liberal Party, and recently launched an Australian history themed Substack titled ‘Australia Past and Present’.

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How did the shopping centre become a ubiquitous part of Australian life & is its retail and cultural hegemony greater here than anywhere else on the planet?

On this week's Afternoon Light Georgina Downer speaks with retail historian Matthew Bailey to reveal the fascinating stories associated with the rise of the Australian Shopping Centre. An outgrowth of Menzies-era prosperity, automobility and suburban growth that we not only made our own, but which, through the likes of Westfield, we then began exporting to the world.

Dr Matthew Bailey is an Associate Professor at Macquarie University and one of Australia’s leading retail historians. His book, Managing the Marketplace: Reinventing Shopping Centres in Post-War Australia (Routledge, 2020) is the first book on the subject, and one of the few to comprehensively examine Australian retail history. Dr Bailey has published widely on retail and retail property history, including in leading international and Australian journals such as Urban History, Enterprise & Society, Australian Economic History Review, Journal of Australian Studies, History Australia, and the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing.

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