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Terra nullius was long ago exposed as a myth – and this was enshrined in law with the Mabo case in 1992.If we acknowledge that Australia was colonised on a lie, then what should we do about it? How d…
Professor Ben Kiernan is the multi-award-winning author of Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, recipient of a 2008 Gold Medal for the Best Book in…
Climate change. Pandemics. Peak oil.These days, many of us have grimly accepted the fact that the human species is hurtling towards oblivion – if not in our lifetime, in that of our children or…
It’s been a tumultuous term in the federal government – and now it’s time for us voters to decide if we’re ready for change. And as we prepare to exercise our democratic duty to vote our government i…
Our fabulous double bills are back – bringing you three big nights of international writers, presented back-to-back.From genre-bending fiction bestsellers to young adult authors with cult…
Sylvia Nasar’s megabestseller A Beautiful Mind was ‘perhaps the best economics-related book of the past quarter-century’, according to the New York Times.This master storyteller has a knack for…
Studying a book or film can be a short-cut to consigning it to boredom. But our Texts in the City series – a gift to students, their teachers and lifelong learners – brings the VCE English and…
Sylvia Nasar is best known as the author of A Beautiful Mind, which the New York Times called ‘perhaps the best economics-related book of the past quarter-century’. In her latest book, Grand…
The plucky bravery of the Anzacs is one of our great national stories – it plays into our idea of who we are. But why is one of the touchstones of our identity based on a historic defeat?Some are…
The plucky bravery of the Anzacs is one of our great national stories – it plays into our idea of who we are. But why is one of the touchstones of our identity based on a historic defeat?Some are…
The passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948 was the last act of World War II – and the first act of the post-war human rights movement. In the first in a three-part…
Presented with the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash UniversityThe passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948 was the last act of World War II – and the f…
We’ve created an Australian Classics book club, just for you – with special writerly guests each month.Last year’s hugely popular Australian Literature 101 set the scene by introducing ten texts our …
by Yvonne Ward When Yvonne Ward began researching Queen Victoria’s Letters, she found that key aspects of her life were deemed unsuitable for public consumption: her experience of motherhood, her…
When Queen Victoria died in 1901, two literary gentlemen took on a monumental task: selecting and editing her vast correspondence. The book they produced would influence perceptions of Victoria for g…
When Queen Victoria died in 1901, two literary gentlemen took on a monumental task: selecting and editing her vast correspondence. The book they produced would influence perceptions of Victoria for g…
Studying a book or film can be a short-cut to consigning it to boredom. But our Texts in the City series – a gift to students, their teachers and lifelong learners – brings the VCE English and…
We’ve created an Australian Classics book club, just for you – with special writerly guests each month.Last year’s hugely popular Australian Literature 101 set the scene by introducing ten texts our …
Studying a book or film can be a short-cut to consigning it to boredom. But our Texts in the City series – a gift to students, their teachers and lifelong learners – brings the VCE English and…
In Midnight in Peking, renowned China commentator Paul French solved a grisly, long-forgotten true crime story which shocked the one-time inhabitants of pre-communist Beijing’s infamous nightlife…
Studying a book or film can be a short-cut to consigning it to boredom. But our Texts in the City series – a gift to students, their teachers and lifelong learners – brings the VCE English and…
The Wall Street Journal calls Jared Diamond ‘a star among public intellectuals’.The big-brained anthropologist built his own brand of intellectual blockbuster with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns…
Last year’s hugely popular Australian Literature 101 set the scene by introducing ten texts our experts deemed unmissable Australian reading. This year, we invite you on a brand new, leisurely…
We’ve created an Australian Classics book club, just for you – with special writerly guests each month.Last year’s hugely popular Australian Literature 101 set the scene by introducing ten texts our …
Geordie Williamson, one of our leading literary critics, approaches books and writing with the ardour of an enthusiast – though he’s also alarmed at the way classic Australian literature is falling o…
Geordie Williamson, one of our leading literary critics, approaches books and writing with the ardour of an enthusiast – though he’s also alarmed at the way classic Australian literature is falling o…
In the fight against the Japanese during World War II, the most disturbing events endured by the Australian soldiers occurred at Sandakan, in North Borneo.Join Sydney-based historian Paul Ham, as he …
In the fight against the Japanese during World War II, the most disturbing events endured by the Australian soldiers occurred at Sandakan, in North Borneo.Join Sydney-based historian Paul Ham, as he …
In this instalment of Sam Pang’s series – focussing on the odd obsessions and unlikely fascinations of familiar faces – broadcaster Jess McGuire spills the beans about her love for British reality…
David Marr’s Quarterly Essay on former PM Kevin Rudd marked the beginning of the end. Was it a well-timed coincidence, or a body blow he never recovered from? Now, Marr turns his pen to…
In Unexpected Passions, host Sam Pang invites familiar faces to share their less familiar obsessions. This time around, Dave Graney drops by to tell us about his passion for explorer Sir Richard…
An Incredible Race of People is a highly personal and at times challenging investigation of our politics and industry over many decades: heroes are applauded and pretenders dismissed, urgent issues a…
No matter how compelling a novel or a film might be, if you have to study it, there’s always the risk you’ll end up hating it. Not any more! A gift to VCE students, their teachers (and of course…
Dava Sobel is the author of Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter, The Planets, and A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos. In this appearance, she speaks with ABC Radio National’s R…
In our series of lectures and discussions on the classics of Australian literature, Ramona Koval and critic Kerryn Goldsworthy bring Helen Garner’s classic book (later a successful film), Monkey…
In this major new weekly series hosted by Ramona Koval, running in parallel with the university calendar, contemporary writers speak on seminal Australian texts, giving context, sharing their…
In this major new weekly series hosted by Ramona Koval, running in parallel with the university calendar, contemporary writers speak on seminal Australian texts, giving context, sharing their…
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all? In this major new…
Brilliant in a bust and selfish in a boom – that’s the assessment of ‘the Australian moment’ by one of our most authoritative and independent political commentators. George Megalogenis speaks on…
In this weekly series hosted by Ramona Koval, running in parallel with the university calendar, contemporary writers speak on seminal Australian texts, giving context, sharing their responses and…
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all? In the debut event of …
Join us for a unique opportunity to share the company of two of the most inventive – and critically acclaimed – writers working in Spanish today, both of them award-winning novelists, translators…
When the University of Melbourne’s undergraduate course in Australian literature was not offered last year, there was an uproar – not just from the literary community, but from the students…
Alan Hollinghurst is one of the British novel’s most admired stylists. In the course of his writing career, Hollinghurst has fashioned a unique literary voice at once considered, ruminative and…
Publisher Hilary McPhee, editor of celebrated film-maker Tim Burstall’s diaries, explores the impetus to diarise and the appeal of diaries as windows to the past. Burstall’s diaries in particular…
Working with Words is a new Wheeler Centre web series, where we’ll talk to writers and publishing folk about their work – and other bookish things. This time, we talk to Booker Prize-winning…
A new biography of Kurt Vonnegut has invoked a ill-tempered man consumed by bitterness and loneliness, a shadow of the avuncular persona well known to his adoring fans. The biography alleges that
A new exhibition at Paris' new-ish Quai Branly museum has become the most talked-about exhibition of the season, according to the Guardian. The exhibition, ‘Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage’, …
Must-Read Histories is marks the launch of a new website, History Speaks. Fully searchable and interactive, it features Australia’s leading historians discussing historical research, and the place…
She was the only daughter of one of the most famous and ruthless tyrants in history. She said she was doted upon, and only once did her father threaten to hit her, but when at 16 she fell in love…
In Must-Read Histories — an event marking the launch of the History Speaks website — contributors ‘go live’ to discuss the question: what are the indispensable works of Australian history? Hosted by …
It’s the 48th anniversary of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The New York Times has published a short film by noted documentarian Errol Morris called The Umbrella Man, in w…
A Jane Austen scholar believes it highly likely that Jane Austen died of arsenic poisoning. Although she won’t rule out the possibility that Austen was murdered, Lindsay Ashford believes Austen is…
Opium dens, illegal brothels, and men with names as colourful as their pasts: our panel uncovers Melbourne’s criminal record.Melbourne’s history is neck-deep with skullduggery, from our city origins …
Opium dens, illegal brothels, and men with names as colourful as their pasts: our panel uncovers Melbourne’s criminal record. Featuring Shane Maloney, LM Robinson, Andrew May and Jeff Sparrow.Melbour…
(Click to watch video.) Historian Bill Gammage’s recent Lunchbox/Soapbox event was subtitled ‘How Aborigines made Australia’. In the course of his address, …
All the wealth in the world adds up to just under $200 trillion dollars (the world economy is worth $60 trillion a year, as we mentioned in a recent story), most of which was created in the last two …
The Wheeler Centre is proud to announce the prime ministerial event we had to have. In this very special Sunday event, Paul Keating will be in conversation with Robert Manne to coincide with the…
Jane Gleeson-White talks about her third book, Double Entry: How the merchants of Venice shaped the modern world – and how their invention could make or break the planet. She describes the birth of t…
“This Halloween, give someone a scary book to read.” That’s the message Neil Gaiman is spreading this Halloween in a clip promoting All Hallow’s Read, an attempt to inaugurate a tradition in the UK o…
Bill Gammage AM is an Australian academic historian. In this Lunchbox/Soapbox presentation, he discusses the mistaken belief that Aboriginal Australians were passive occupiers of the land before…
Eight years after his last novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity, Melbourne author Elliot Perlman returns with his latest book, The Street Sweeper. In just his fourth book, the acclaimed author and…
In a post-conflict society, with a still fragile justice system, establishing respect for human rights is crucial to nation-building in East Timor. An estimated 10,000 civilians, including women and …
Poster of a Queensland production of the Casey Bennetto musical, Keating!, via Jiggs Images/Flickr In a recent Wheeler Centre event celebrating great speeches, a variety…
Iconic Australian literature doesn’t come much more iconic than For the Term of His Natural Life, the quintessential convict tale. We remember its author: journalist, poet and novelist Marcus…
Iconic Australian literature doesn’t come much more iconic than For the Term of His Natural Life, the quintessential convict tale. We remember its author: journalist, poet and novelist Marcus…
“Countries and nations are born out of geography, they are born out of history, out of politics, and out of demography.” So began Amos Oz, Israel’s most internationally-recognised novelist, when he d…
Image courtesy Robert Scarth/Flickr Click on the ‘What’s New’ page on the website of the Project for the New American Century and you’ll notice that the Washington…
(Click to watch video.) The Wheeler Centre recently hosted an event in our series, ‘The Late, Great…’, on Ruth Park. Today, as we publish the…
At the start of the Tour de France, we published the translation of a report by Albert Londres of the race’s beginning in 1924. Today, to coincide with the race’s end, we publish an extract of his…
‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen…’, ‘I have a dream‘, ‘Well may we say “God Save the Queen”…’, ‘Frankly my dear…’ Speechmaking isn’t all 21st birthday toasts and sporting triumphalism. From great…
In this Lunchbox/Soapbox, author and academic Sarah Maddison tackles the issue of mainstream Australia’s unacknowledged, unresolved guilt over the brutality of white settlement over two centuries…
De Tocqueville claimed that all places “bear some mark of their origin; and the circumstances which accompanied their birth… affect the whole term of their being.” On the day that his new book 1835…
Affirm Press have just launched A Break in the Chain, the first novel by academic and author Tangea Tansley. Tansley was born in Zimbabwe into a family that boasted of its ancestral family links to P…
The Tour de France, which this year is 98 years old, begins Saturday. To celebrate, we’re publishing, for what we believe is the first time in English, an extract of a report of the first stage of…
In this Lunchbox/Soapbox, author and academic Sarah Maddison tackles the issue of mainstream Australia’s unacknowledged, unresolved guilt over the brutality of white settlement over two centuries…
Professor Timothy Clark is one of the world’s most respected art historians. Professor Timothy Clark is also TJ Clark, poet. He talks to Antoni Jach about his dual intellectual lives, their points…
Professor Timothy Clark is one of the world’s most respected art historians. Currently the Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of York, he is also the author of a series of books on…
Manning Clark is a giant of Australia’s cultural landscape. His impact and influence on our history and our way of understanding our history constitute a lasting legacy – which is exactly what Clark …
While the Chilean volcano Puyehue continues to spew ash that has caused air traffic chaos halfway around the world, Chileans are grappling with another kind of combustion altogether. A Chilean judge …
This week has been a veritable hotbed of controversy. Here’s our wrap.Amina Arraf, a lesbian Syrian blogger, was abducted by Syrian authorities during the week, prompting howls of protest around the …
Manning Clark is a giant of Australia’s cultural landscape. His impact and influence on our history and our way of understanding our history make up a lasting legacy. Mark McKenna is one of…
Mark McKenna is one of Australia’s leading historians. Seven years in the making, his biography of Manning Clark is his most ambitious project to date. Here, he discusses his work – its burdens and r…
Born in France in 1955, Father Desbois is a Roman Catholic priest, consultant to the Vatican and the head of the Commission for Relations with Judaism of the French Bishops’ Conference. He has…
Born in France in 1955, Father Desbois is a Roman Catholic priest, consultant to the Vatican and the head of the Commission for Relations with Judaism of the French Bishops’ Conference. He has…
A volume of lavishly-illustrated drawings for children by a pioneering Australian woman will be auctioned next month. Charlotte Waring arrived in Australia in 1826 at the age of 29. She’d been hired …
Cover image of ‘Circus: The Australian Story’, by Mark St Leon Jugglers, lion-tamers, bearded ladies and freak shows – the world of the travelling circus is increasingly a …
When she was 14, Fatima Bhutto huddled in the corner of a closet shielding her baby brother while shots rang out in the streets outside her home. Those shots killed her father and continued the…
Its publication was a milestone in the making of modern England. For centuries, it was all the literature many English speakers around the world ever knew. It peppered our language with phrases like …
Lord Byron in Albanian dress, by Thomas Phillips, 1813, collection of the British Embassy, Athens, via Wikipedia The History channel’s website has a neat feature: a…
Image of this morning’s flashboards by Sarah Masters The death of Osama bin Laden is still sending shockwaves through the world (or is it?). It cost many lives and $1.3…
Joining us in this edition of Lunchbox/Soapbox is Dr David Tacey, Associate Professor and Reader in Arts at La Trobe University, where he teaches literature, spirituality and Jungian psychology.The a…
In this third instalment of our So Who the Bloody Hell Are We? series exploring Australian identity, Damien Carrick shepherds Melissa Lucashenko, Monica Dux, David Manne and Stuart Macintyre through …
Angus Trumble, Senior Curator of Paintings for the Yale Centre for British Art, provides some pointerson the finger, in a collision between art and science, history and pop culture. From Guernica…
Who protects our stories, our histories, our memories? In partnership with the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World program, we reflect on the importance and impermanence of memory.Chaired by
The Australian Book Review’s Calibre Prize is an annual celebration of an outstanding essay. Dr David Hansen, discusses his winning essay ‘Seeing Truganini’ and the stigmas surrounding indigenous…
Twenty years to the day since Nicolae Ceauşescu's communist regime was overthrown in Romania, a revolutionary figure of another type is celebrating an anniversary.It is 100 years since the birth of p…
