It’s May 2025 and Living Histories partners gather for a catch-up dinner at an East Brunswick restaurant. It’s a convivial occasion but includes a fierce (but friendly) debate between founding partners, Mary Sheehan and Jill Barnard, as to when we officially began business – was it 1998 or 1999? Karen Twigg and Sonia Jennings throw in their tuppence worth pointing out that they joined in 2001 so we should at least be celebrating 25 years in business. Yikes, where did that 25 years go? What a milestone! We almost missed it. We raise our glasses in celebration – woo hoo – and get on to ordering our food. But hang on, there’s another person at the table: it’s our new partner, Miranda Francis!
Living Histories partners: Sonia Jennings, Miranda Francis, JIll Barnard, Karen Twigg and Mary Sheehan
Things are definitely changing at Living Histories: in short, Mary Sheehan is stepping back and Dr Miranda Francis is stepping up (or in) and we are delighted to have her on our team.
We’re also happy to report that Mary is not disappearing over the horizon, she is still a part of our team but more in the role of adviser and general sounding-board rather than active consultant. Her current PhD studies (on how the Spanish flu impacted the lives of Melburnians and influenced the City’s public health response) have preoccupied her history world for a few years now and we look forward to seeing her completion of this epic venture.
With three other PhDs in our ranks – Karen, Jill and Miranda – Mary will be in good company and has already received great collegiate advice (and sympathy) from Karen and Jill. And a bit of interest from the under-educated Sonia Jennings.
Miranda comes to us with great experience and enthusiasm for public history. She has a passion for and expertise in the field of oral history. Her studies have centred around gender history and the history of the family in Australia, with a particular focus on the remembered emotions and experiences of motherhood, which she explored in her PhD thesis, ‘Mothers Remember: An Oral History’ completed in 2023. Miranda is also a Digital Curator/Historian at RMIT University, where she develops and facilitates programs, with a RMIT history focus. In 2025 she will be curating a comprehensive collection of RMIT history resources to engage and develop community connection with local stories and place.
And, of course, Miranda is a PHA member. She continues Living Histories’ practice of being fully committed to the PHA and (with only a small amount of arm-twisting) has recently become one of the alternate delegates for our national body, Professional Historians Australia.
In other news, Jill Barnard, who completed her PhD, ‘The Family Lives of Forgotten Australians’ as part of the ‘Fathering’ project at Monash University in 2023, is looking forward to the publication of a co-authored book, Fathering: An Australian History, by other Fathering team members, Al Thomson, John Murphy, Kate Murphy and Johnny Bell, in August 2025. Jill made a small contribution to the final manuscript, but relished being part of the team throughout the project.
Since finishing her PhD in 2020, Karen Twigg has continued to work in the environmental history field collaborating on national water resources projects through La Trobe University. Her two key projects are a Community Oral History project commissioned by the Murray Darling Basin Authority to investigate attitudes towards watery places and environmental change across the Basin and Parched: Cultures of Drought in Regional Victoria, where she is part of an inter-disciplinary team exploring historical, literary, scientific, media and visual responses to drought.
Sonia, Jill and Miranda are busy completing a social history of the Truganina community and all three historians have other projects in the offing, yet to be set in concrete. Sonia has been trying to retire for quite a few years but hasn’t quite come to terms with it yet or maybe it’s because she can’t resist the lure of an interesting project when it comes along.