Michelle Arrow, you've chosen a book published in 1987, a breakthrough work written by Sally Morgan.

Yeah, so it's actually a memoir.

So this is Sally Morgan's book, My Place, which was published in 1987.

And I partly chose it because I thought it was one of those books that really helped ordinary Australians understand their past in new ways.

And it also sold a lot of copies.

It sold more than 500,000 copies.

It was set on school reading lists and it won a lot of awards.

combinations of what I chose.

And despite the rise in popularity of history podcasts in recent times, a very good thing indeed, Professor Arrow says books still have remarkable sway.

The role of a book can be to illuminate an aspect of the past that we don't necessarily know a lot about.

Books can also kind of affirm existing understandings of the past and I I think probably a lot of the books that sell a lot are kind of reflecting more accepted or widely understood notions of Australian history.

So military history, for example, is a genre that tends to sell very well.

If you go into the history section of a bookshop, it's usually got a lot of military history in it.

But books, I think, also form the basis of public discussion about history.

So often people might never buy all the books that they hear the authors interviewed about on radio, but the interview itself can be a stimulus to kind of think, oh, I didn't know that about the first woman to enter Parliament or the first person who did bushwalking or something like that.

They are just fundamentally asking more questions of the past and understanding this kind of discipline that we call history.

Michelle Arrow is an award-winning author, Professor of History at Macquarie University and was the President of the Australian Historical Association between 2024 and 2026.

I'm Michelle Arrow and this is The Library That Made Me.

It's 1993.

I'm sitting on the warm stone steps of the Mitchell Library with a group of students from my Australian Cultural History class.

Normally we would have our classes in our lecturer Richard White's office, which was in the main quad at Sydney University.

But today we have an excursion.

Richard begins the class, not by taking us into the library, but by pointing out the large statue incongruously placed between the lanes of the Eastern Distributor, the Shakespeare Memorial, where the man himself, pen in hand, is surrounded by Romeo and Juliet, Falstaff, Othello and Portia.