Michelle Arrow

Michelle Arrow is an Australian historian, academic and author who is currently a Professor of History at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is best known for her work on Australia in the 1970s. Arrow won the Ernest Scott Prize in 2020 for The Seventies: The personal, the political and the making of modern Australia. Arrow is the vice-president of the Australian Historical Association.

Early life and education

Arrow graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts (hons) and received her PhD in history from the same university in 1999. Her thesis was a social and cultural history of Australian women playwrights between 1928 and 1968, including Gwen Meredith.

Academic career

Arrow's first academic work was an article in the Journal of Australian Studies in 1998. Her first book, Upstaged : Australian women dramatists in the limelight at last, was published in 2002. It expanded on the work undertaken for her doctoral thesis. Upstaged discusses Australia's largely forgotten women playwrights, demonstrating their popularity and political importance. In the early 2000s Arrow was an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio and television presenter, including the "failed ABC TV history experiment, Rewind."

From 2008 to 2012, Arrow was one of the five members of the advisory panel for the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History, serving alongside John Hirst, Joan Beaumont and Geoffrey Blainey.

In 2014, Arrow and her colleagues won the NSW Premier's Digital History Prize for their 2013 radio documentary Public Intimacies: The 1974 Royal Commission on Human Relationships, discussing the three commissioners (Anne Deveson, Elizabeth Evatt, and Felix Arnott), the commission and its findings. This documentary was funded by the 2012 Frederick Watson Fellowship.

In 2019, Arrow's third book was published, The Seventies: The personal, the political and the making of modern Australia. The book was awarded the Ernest Scott Prize in 2020.

Arrow was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 2023 and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2025.