Dr Chris Sarra is one of the most outspoken and recognised educators in Australia today. He’s experienced many of the issues faced by indigenous students throughout their schooling first-hand –…
Bill Garner – historian, playwright and television writer – is just an ordinary camper with perhaps an unusually dogged curiosity. A casual conversation at Wilson’s Promontory several years ago…
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…
Once the Apple Isle, Tasmania’s size and isolation made it the butt of mainland jokes. But those qualities – and its stunning natural environment – are now seen as major advantages. And the buzz…
Some believe that multiculturalism is ‘a racism of anti-racists’ that ‘chains people to their roots’, as controversial French writer Pascal Bruckner has said.But curator Damian Smith believes that…
Australia has long been haunted by the spectre of ‘cultural cringe’ – nowhere more so, perhaps, than in our arts.But in the globalised new millennium, has all that changed? Have we finally stopped…
Step into a time capsule and go back 20 years … Paul Keating is prime minister of Australia. The Twin Towers dominate New York’s skyline and September 11 is the date of a Chilean coup. Pauline…
Charlotte Wood is an Australian novelist whose fourth novel, Animal People, set in inner-urban Sydney, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award this year. It featured a character who had…
Q: What’s as Australian as Vegemite and as American as apple pie? A: The new issue of McSweeney’s, the US literary journal so hip it should be wearing black-framed glasses and riding a bicycle.…
Q: What’s as Australian as Vegemite and as American as apple pie? A: The new issue of McSweeney’s, the US literary journal so hip it should be wearing black-framed glasses and riding a bicycle.…
Over four days, our 20 plus speakers – philosophers and theologians, historians and writers, believers and non-believers – will consider what it means to be religious, and what role the voice of…
Over four days, our 20 plus speakers – philosophers and theologians, historians and writers, believers and non-believers – will consider what it means to be religious, and what role the voice of…
Expanding on his recent essay for Griffith Review, historian and biographer Jim Davidson examines the complex history of Australia’s relationship with the British monarchy, and the various attempts t…
One of the leading Aboriginal Australians involved in the highly controversial Racial Discrimination case that dominated news agendas throughout 2011, writer and activist Anita Heiss charts her…
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…
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…
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…
Portable patriotism. (Source: Stephen Barnett/Flickr)
Today, ideas of national identity, patriotism, community and equity come to the fore in the…
Michael Kirby is one of Australia’s most admired public figures. When he retired from the High Court of Australia in February 2009, Kirby was Australia’s longest serving judge. In addition to his…
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…
For many decades Australia was the country that rode on the sheep’s back. No more – now we are a country of mining and services. In the new QE, one of Australia’s most original and respected…
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 …
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We love a sunburnt country – as long as it stays on the far side of a picket fence. We partition our wide brown land into lots of…
Did you know that the MCG has the highest lighting fixtures of a sporting venue on earth, Melbourne’s Symphony Orchestra is widely recognised as one of the best in the Southern Hemisphere, and many o…
Is there any myth more pervasive than that of egalitarian Australia? Mates look out for one another and good honest hard work is rewarded in the land of opportunity. Probably best not look too…
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 …
(Click to watch video.)
Earlier this week we reported on a new campaign by Clubs Australia opposing proposed reforms to pokies venues. As part of the…
We love a sunburnt country as long as it stays on the far side of a picket fence. Partitioning off our own little parts of the wide brown land, and replacing the sprawling menace of the Australian…
Part of our So Who the Bloody Hell Are We? series interrogating the Australian identity, The Quarter Acre Block is all about lifestyle and location, location, location.We love a sunburnt country as l…
Australian masculinity is most often presented as an uncomplicated beast: stoic, sports-loving, beer-drinking, emotion-hiding, hard-working, authority-bucking, laconic. We know what an Aussie man…
Paul Hogan and Shane Warne. Ned Kelly and Russell Crowe. Footballers, diggers, shearers and cobbers. Matter of fact I’ve got it now. Australian masculinity is most often presented as an…
Congratulations to Kim Scott, who has been named the winner of the southeast Asia and Pacific regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Nominated for his novel, That Deadman Dance, Scott thus becomes…
Will it be Christos Tsiolkas' Loaded or Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit? Or will it be something completely unrelated to GLBTI themes? Whatever it is, if you’re counting on…
