Throughout Australia’s history, overseas migration has featured prominently in public debate, sometimes seen as a positive, sometimes as a negative, but never far from the agenda. The trouble is that media headlines and political catchphrases all too often misrepresent the facts. In the extreme, political players exploit fears relying ...
With the spread of COVID-19 and the outbreak of a global health emergency, rights and freedoms that would never normally be curtailed are increasingly being subject to government-imposed restrictions.
In contemporary bilateral relations, great emphasis has been placed on India and Australia’s historical connection with the Commonwealth. The stress laid on a shared past is deeply misleading, however, for each colony was tied to Britain in the early twentieth century under very different conditions. Both, it is true ...
I can remember precisely when my passion for the past began. As a young child of five holidaying in Sydney from my home in Dubbo, my parents took me to the Australian Museum on College Street. I was transfixed by an exhibition of early human evolution. The panoramas displayed scenes ...
There is a brotherly bond between the men I am speaking to, forged through shared experiences of the most intense kind, that is palpably strong and unintentionally exclusive. It is like sitting with war veterans. As I listen to them I sense depths to the conversation that I will never ...
I wanted to start a conversation with educators, writers and performers. So, I asked Narcisa Nozica, a high school teacher who toured the US studying youth poetry slam movements, to join me in a written dialogue. This led to chats with writers in various spoken forms, poets turned novelists, event ...
One summer holiday, I got hold of a real page-turner. A John Grisham lay abandoned on the coffee table as I devoured Fermat’s Last Theoremby Simon Singh. This is a book about pure mathematics and on surface value would not seem to be the stuff of which ripping yarns ...
This is a book that I shouldn’t have had to write. It’s about taking the foods that are native to our land into our homes and cooking with them. The fact that it needed to be written, and that non-Indigenous readers need to be told how to source ...
History shows that Anzac commemoration has always filled an emotional rather than an intellectual function in the Australian psyche. In its original manifestation up until the 1960s, Anzac commemoration was primarily an outlet for mourning and remembrance. It endured a period of apathy and hostility from that decade, because it ...
