Winning Histories

Join the History Council of NSW and three leading historians as they present their professional perspectives on the alchemy of writing award-winning histories and creating captivating narratives.

The panel will feature Margaret Cook, an environmental historian who writes about climate-related disasters with a particular focus on rivers and floods, Nicole Cama, an historian with the City of Sydney Council with experience in museums, heritage and public history and Shannyn Palmer, a community-engaged practitioner, cultural consultant and writer. All three are award-winning historians. Q&A will follow. Chaired by Jan Láníček.

As an historian, Margaret Cook is fascinated by water and its interaction with humans, animals and the environment over time. She writes about climate-related disasters with a particular focus on rivers and floods and is the author of A River with a City Problem: A History of Brisbane Floods. Margaret is a Research Fellow at the Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University and La Trobe University.


Shannyn Palmer is a community-engaged practitioner, cultural consultant and award-winning writer. She works with cultural institutions and communities to facilitate ethical community engaged practice and enable meaningful intercultural collaborations. She is particularly interested in community engaged practice as a methodology for disrupting settler colonial systems and knowledge. She has a PhD in History from the Australian National University and her first book, Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station, won the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History and the 2023 Northern Territory Chief Minister’s History Book Award.

Nicole Cama is a historian with the City of Sydney Council with experience in museums, heritage and public history. Her work has been published across a range of platforms including radio, websites, print publications, social media, mobile applications and exhibition displays. In 2023, she was awarded the History Council of NSW’s Macquarie University-PHA Applied History Award for her work, ‘Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst’, a digital history project mapping the people and places of the street from the 1840s to the 1940s using the City of Sydney Archives, produced for the Australian Centre for Public History, University of Technology Sydney.

Jan Láníček is Associate Professor in Modern European and Jewish History at UNSW Sydney. He received a PhD from the University of Southampton in Britain in 2011 and has published widely on the history of the Holocaust and Central Europe. He is currently completing a study of post-Holocaust judicial retribution in Czechoslovakia and also researches Jewish migration to Australia before World War II. Jan is also a member of the General Council of the History Council of New South Wales.


This event is presented in partnership with the History Council of NSW and Sydney Writers’ Festival.