Aimed at those in Melbourne, this session brings together Kerry Wilson of Put Her Name On It and history researchers from the RHSV to focus on hands-on research into one or more historical women of your choosing. We'll cover research tools including archives, digitized newspapers, Trove, and other essential resources. Bring your laptop and your
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Join us to celebrate the publication of Old North Melbourne, the first comprehensive book on the nineteenth-century history of Hotham/North Melbourne, by Dr Fiona Gatt. 'Like Janet McCalman's Struggletown this book is destined to become a classic in the genre of Australian urban social history' – Associate Professor Seamus O'Hanlon. This is the story of the first fifty
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"After eight years and three Presidents, our legendary Executive Officer is retiring from the Royal Historical Society of Victoria. Please join us to celebrate all that she has done to help the Society become one of Australia's success stories at a time when the arts and humanities need robust history societies more than ever. Feel
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The RHSV is delighted to host an opportunity for leaders from the diverse historical society networks throughout Victoria to come together and connect. This event will not be Zoomed as a key aim is for leaders to meet with peers from across Victoria and then to share their findings with their member societies.

We are delighted that Professor Frank Bongiorno will be delivering the inaugural RHSV Hugh Anderson Lecture, a new addition to our Distinguished Lecturer series. "Hugh Anderson (1927-2017) was a scholar of formidable breadth, productivity and versatility. While it is as a folklorist that he is arguably best known both in Australia and abroad, Anderson’s prolific
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Kaleidoscope is the RHSV's major exhibition in 2022 and it celebrates the women who were crucial in building the organisation from its beginning in 1909. This is biography imagined through the lens of a Kaleidoscope. The viewer is offered fragments of the lives represented here. There is no linear narrative. Each time the kaleidoscope turns, a different story emerges. There are repeating patterns but different emphases and new ways of seeing, new reflections, new refractions. No one story dominates and one story does not fit all. 

Robyn Annear has devised 7 historic walks around Melbourne and, in this event, she will be taking us on one of those 7 walks, albeit whilst we are seated comfortably at the RHSV with a glass of wine in hand. The walks showcase the hidden histories we might scurry past every day, the buildings now gone and the extraordinary characters who inhabited them. Robyn, as always, will be charming, erudite and frankly gossipy.

Sex workers in nineteenth-century Melbourne were judged morally corrupt by the respectable world around them. But theirs was a thriving trade, with links to the police and political leaders of the day, and the leading brothels were usually managed by women. Who were they? What did their daily lives look like? What became of them? Drawing on the findings of recent archaeological excavations, rare archival material and family records, historian Barbara Minchinton brings the fascinating world of Little Lon to life.