professor clare wright OAM

MAC.ROB student, 1983-1986
PORTRAIT GALLERY INDUCTEE, 2008
historian, author & commentator

Professor Clare Wright OAM is an award-winning historian, author, broadcaster and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media.

Clare is currently a Professor of History at La Trobe University. She is the author of four works of history, including the best-selling The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (winner of the 2014 Stella Prize) and You Daughters of Freedom, which comprise the first two instalments of her Democracy Trilogy (both short-listed in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards).

Clare’s essays, opeds and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Guardian Weekly, Meanjin, Griffith Review, Overland, The Conversation, The Age/SMH, The Australian and her academic articles have been published in leading international and national scholarly journals.

Clare created and co-wrote the award-winning four-part ABC TV history dramadoc series, The War That Changed Us, and created, wrote and presented the ABC TV history documentary, Utopia Girls. She hosts the ABC Radio National history series, Shooting the Past, and co-hosts the La Trobe University podcast Archive Fever.

Clare has appeared on Q&A, The Drum, The Project and Behind the News giving an historical perspective on current affairs. She is popular public speaker, panellist and interviewer and makes frequent appearances at literary festivals, in television documentaries, on radio talk shows, in other people’s podcasts and generally anywhere someone will pass her a microphone!

In 2020, Clare was awarded an Order of Australia Award for “services to literature and to historical research”.

The third instalment of Clare’s Democracy Trilogy, a history of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions based on a decade of documentary research and community consultation, will be published in 2023.

Clare lives on unceded Wurundjeri land in Melbourne/Naarm.