Historical fiction, from archive to launch room.
Imagining The Past is a literary history show centered on historical fiction, with Greg Johnston appearing in recurring introductions. Recent episodes move through ARA Historical Novel Prize context, author interviews, library conversations, and launch-room readings where research, character, place, and narrative structure matter.
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Imagining The Past is a literary conversation show about historical fiction and the work behind it. It comes through HNSA, with a recurring acknowledgement of Country and a commercial-free, volunteer-run frame. Greg Johnston appears in the repeated introductions, setting up seasons that include ARA Historical Novel Prize winners, other historical fiction authors, launches, readings, and occasional broader literary happenings. The show is interested in novels, but just as interested in how those novels are made. Recent episodes linger on structure, research, voice, setting, and the pressure of turning historical material into fiction. Mary-Lou Stephens discusses contrasting character voices, female friendship, found family, and the work of shaping different inner worlds. Debra Oswald talks through a century-spanning story with markers, charts, file cards, and the practical problem of keeping characters aligned across time. Sue Williams explains dual narrative construction, contemporary investigation, the Duke of Wellington, and the way hooks of time and place can make two storylines belong together. Shelley Dark’s conversation moves through ship musters, Greek prisoners, names in the archive, serendipity, and the long uncertainty of a book that took years to reach publication. Another recent launch follows Ali’s debut novel, Swallow, through William Swallow, Japan, Tokushima documents, convict escape stories, and the symbolic pull of return. Wendy J. Dunn-London’s Shades of Yellow episode carries the texture of a launch: invocation, praise, author response, and reading. Conrad Mueller’s My Heart at Evening brings colonial surveyor Henry Helya, Jorgensen, the Van Diemen’s Land Company, stock routes, Northwest Tasmania, and questions of land, conservation, prejudice, and discrimination into view. Nicole Alexander’s The Limestone Road connects wartime South Australia, Italian prisoners of war, farming cultures, Coonawarra, and the bond between language, land, and story. The show’s pace is unhurried and book-club-adjacent, but its best moments are practical rather than vague. It asks how writers find a voice, when they bend history, what archives reveal, and how place changes a story’s shape. It suits readers who like historical novels with their scaffolding visible. It also suits writers who want to hear how other authors manage research without letting detail smother the fiction. Imagining The Past stands apart by keeping the social life of historical fiction in the frame: libraries, launches, prizes, acknowledgements, gratitude, readings, and the communities around books all matter here.
Made for: Suits a listener who reads historical fiction closely and wants to hear how authors turn research, place, and character into narrative. It also fits writers interested in craft conversations grounded in specific books and historical problems.
What sets it apart: The show is less a generic author-interview feed than a record of Australasia’s historical fiction community in motion, from HNSA prize context to library talks and launch events. Its appeal comes from hearing research methods, narrative structure, and public literary moments share the same space.
A ship's muster can make you cheer when a novelist finds the Greek names she was hunting.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A warm novelist conversation about female friendship, found family, and the real women woven into The Hobart Hotel.
Mary Lou Stevens's The Hobart Hotel sits at the centre of a conversation about Hobart's Rest Point Hotel and Casino, the women who worked there, and the found family that can form when people are away from their usual supports.
Deborah Oswald discusses the charts, file cards, and historical markers behind Betty's century-spanning story.
Deborah Oswald's 100 Years of Betty frames the episode around a sturdy craft problem: how to follow one character across a century without letting the surrounding lives and eras flatten into background.
Sue Williams traces the craft of linking a contemporary journalist with Wellington's world.
Sue Williams' The Duke's Secret gives the episode a clear centre: how a historical novel can move between the Duke of Wellington, a maid, and Lucy, a contemporary Australian journalist and writer.
Shelley Dark follows Son of Hydra through ship's musters, missing names, and the research path around Winter in Hydra.
Shelley Dark's conversation at Noosa Library turns the backstory of Son of Hydra into a patient account of historical research and chance discovery.
A debut novel launch opens into William Swallow's reported voyage, Japanese records, and a tangled chain of convict escapes.
Ali's debut novel Swallow gives the summer Mesclun a strong literary entry point, then opens into William Swallow's reported voyage on the Cyprus to Japan.
Great books, taken chapter by chapter, with delight
Book talk with room to wander.
Imagining the Past’s 2026 launch conversation with Greg Johnston and Karen Brooks centres on Mary Lou Stephens’s fourth novel, The Hobart Hotel, set around Hobart’s Riviera Hotel in 1939 and Rest Point Casino in 1973.
["Debra Oswald talks with Greg Johnston about 100 Years of Betty, a novel long-listed for the ARA Historical Novel Prize 2025, after a career spanning theatre, television, radio, and fiction.", "Oswald says Betty grew from her mother\u2019s South London life, wartime evacuation, a hidden special-school letter, and migration to Australia.", "She explains how file cards, birth-year charts, and a planned Vietnam-conscription thread helped her carry Betty from childhood to 2028 without losing plausibility.", "The conversation also covers British migrant identity, first-person memoir structure, clarity in prose, and her next book about a controlling Australian painter and his testamentary trust."]
Imagining the Past's Summer Mesclun episode centers on Sue Williams's The Duke's Secret and a launch at the Hero of Waterloo in Sydney's Rocks District.
Shelley Dark traces Son of Hydra to a family discovery that her husband Jock may descend from a Greek pirate, after a son asked, Dad, are we Greek?
Greg Johnston's launch conversation for Ali's debut novel Swallow centers on William Swallow, a thrice transported convict whose repeated returns to England for his family kept undoing his chances of escape.
Greg Johnston opens Imagining the Past's Summer Mesclun with Wendy J.
Rodney Croon interviews Conrad Mueller at Devonport Library about My Heart at Evening, a novel that recasts Henry Hellyer's 1832 death at Circular Head as detective fiction.
Greg Johnston and Nicole Alexander use The Limestone Road to trace a grandfather raking the homestead perimeter every day until 1955.
Alison Booth's Death at Baroomba links a Walsh Bay rescue, a 1919 homecoming, and a murder in southern New South Wales.
["Greg Johnston opens Imagining the Past\u2019s 2025 season with Jane Harrison, whose novel The Visitors won the 2024 Indie Book Awards debut novel prize and was long-listed for the 2024 ARA Historical Novel Prize.", "Harrison says The Visitors began as a play shaped by the 2007 Northern Territory intervention and by her response to media stereotypes of Aboriginal men, then took the courtroom structure of Twelve Angry Men after permission to adapt it was refused.", "She describes moving the work from stage to novel during the COVID years, adding research on Sydney cicadas, First Fleet transcripts, and Country walks, while keeping seven Aboriginal men at the centre of the story.", "The conversation ends with her choice to shift the novel into a collective 'we' and to name colonisation\u2019s consequences, while she discusses current work on three plays, a YA sequel to Becoming Kiralee Lewis, and a Sydney Theatre Company project about Bennelong."]
Kim Kelly interviews Judy Nunn about her writing and historical fiction at the HNSA conference.
Three historical fiction authors discuss creating memorable characters, both virtuous and villainous, in a live conference recording.
A panel discussion at the HNSA conference where Claudia Chan Shaw interviews three authors about writing Asian historical fiction.
Stephen Romei interviews authors Fiona McFarlane and Jock Serong about their historical novels at the HNSA conference.
Kate Evans interviews Anna Funder about her genre-bending book 'Wifedom' which reveals the invisible life of George Orwell's wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy.