Meredith Lake
Dr Meredith Lake
- Post Nominals: FAHA
- Fellow Type: Honorary Fellow
- Elected to the Academy: 2025
- Section(s): History
Biography
Dr Meredith Lake is a broadcaster and historian, especially curious about how Australians reckon with the big questions of life in this place. She joined the ABC in 2019 as presenter of Radio National’s Soul Search, a specialist, weekly show about the lived experience of religion and spirituality. Her program exploring Arrernte Catholicism in the remote central Australian community of Ltyentye Apurte won the 2025 NT Media Award for Excellence in Radio Broadcasting.
Meredith studied history at the University of Sydney, receiving a PhD for the thesis “Such Spiritual Acres’: Protestantism, the land and the colonisation of Australia, 1788-1850’. Her most recent book is The Bible in Australia: a cultural history, all about the surprising ways people have engaged — and sometimes argued! — with a world-changing text. The Bible in Australia won multiple awards including the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History, the NSW Premier’s History Award, and the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences prize for Book of the Year.
Image credit: Xavier Martin (ABC)