Clare Wright

Professor Clare Wright OAM is an award-winning historian, author, broadcaster, podcaster and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media.

Clare is currently Professor of History and Professor of Public Engagement at La Trobe University.

She is the author of four works of history, including the best-selling The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka and You Daughters of Freedom, which comprise the first two instalments of her Democracy Trilogy. The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka won the 2014 Stella Prize and NIB Award and is currently being developed into a television drama series in an international coproduction.

The final instalment of Clare’s Democracy Trilogy, Ṉäku Dhäruk, a history of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions, will be published in October 2024.

Clare has written and presented history documentaries for ABC TV and hosts the ABC Radio National history series/podcast, Shooting the Past, and co-hosts the La Trobe University podcast Archive Fever.  Clare regularly appears in the print and broadcast media as a social and historical commentator, including a regular segment on ABC News Breakfast.

Clare is the co-founder and co-convenor of A Monument of One’s Own, a NFP advocacy group campaigning for statue equality and commemorative justice for women.

In 2020, Clare was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours list for “services to literature and to historical research”.

In 2022, Clare was on the National Cultural Policy Expert Advisory Panel and was commissioned to co-write (with Christos Tsiolkis) the Vision Statement for the policy document, Revive.  In 2023 she was Guest Curator at Bendigo Writers Festival. Clare is a Member of the National Museum of Australia Council.