In our 50th episode, ‘The Hidden Women of the Public Stage: Women in New Zealand orchestras at the turn of the twentieth century’, Inge van Rij, Associate Professor of Musicology at Victoria University of Wellington, explores the paradoxical position of women in New Zealand’s early orchestral history. Focusing on two New Zealand exhibition orchestras (from 1889 and 1906), and contextualising them in relation to the women’s suffrage movement and representations of Maori culture, her talk aims to render visible the experiences of women whose presence on the public stage has long been overlooked. These monthly Public History Talks are a collaboration between the National Library of New Zealand https://natlib.govt.nz/ and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage https://mch.govt.nz/. Recorded live at the National Library of New Zealand, 1 May 2019.