Vitamin C is so often suggested as a treatment for the common cold that it’s almost considered common sense. This well-known vitamin is primarily found in fruits and vegetables, with small quantities in…
It’s been decades since electroshock therapy or other psychiatric interventions were routinely employed to “treat” homosexuality. These days, reparative therapy is more popular. It involves a combination…
Homophilia, a term once used to define “unnatural” relations between same-sex people in the early- to mid-20th century has been given a makeover. Urban gay communities around the world are using homophilia…
Many place the Anzac legend at the heart of the Australian national identity. But some have rightly challenged this idea, opening up debate about why the Anzac story is so central to our national mythology…
We all know the internet has enabled the creation of digital worlds of multi-layered, interconnected online information. But who’s going to protect this information for current and future generations…
AUSTRALIA IN THE ASIAN CENTURY – A series examining Australia’s role in the rapidly transforming Asian region. Delivered in partnership with the Australian government. Today, Professor David Walker looks…
The recent discovery of hundreds of human body parts in the University of Cologne’s cellars shocked Germany’s academic community and raised broader questions about the rights of people who donate their…
Australians have always loved their drugs – more so than any other nation in which those same drugs are proscribed and used under threat of native, criminal penalties. Drug taking is a national trait…
Local history is one of the most popular forms of history in Australia. Yet there is a yawning gap between the enthusiastic amateur and the academic historian. While some academic historians engage with…
The AFL season kicks off today and there’s a new team in town – Greater Western Sydney. Some don’t like it – the cynics claim Aussie Rules has no historical foothold in western Sydney. I disagree. While…
A long-awaited Senate Committee report will tomorrow reveal whether the Commonwealth’s policies and practices played a role in coercing young, unwed Australian women to give up their newborn babies for…
It’s hard to imagine that a whole race of people can be forgotten. But if no one chooses to remember them, genocide can mean just that, leaving a large hole in our history and dooming future minorities…
Early in the New Year, while most of us were thinking about going to the beach or when it would be okay to consign those unwanted Christmas presents to a charity bin, Commander Jim Unkles of the Royal…
Some 224 years ago on January 26, the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove. Just 1500 people disembarked with nearly 800 of them convicts. The date saw the beginning of the British penal colony, then known…
If you believe the doomsayers, the human race is not long for this earth. By the end of this year, our number will be up: the four horseman of the apocalypse will be upon us, fire will rain from the skies…
You may have read the British Government is being petitioned to grant a posthumous pardon to one of the world’s greatest mathematicians and most successful codebreakers, Alan Turing. You may also have…
Muslim conversion is growing in Indigenous communities. In the 2001 national census, 641 Indigenous people identified as Muslim. By the 2006 census the number had climbed by more than 60% to 1014 people…
The notebooks of Sir Isaac Newton, who was famously reported to have suffered a (scientifically) earth-shaking blow to the head from an apple, are being scanned and published online by the University of…
It’s December 15th, 1983. Around 13,000 people, a capacity crowd, are packed into the Sydney Entertainment Centre. This is the last of five Cold Chisel shows there. Fans had queued for blocks, some had…
Aboriginal people worked hard to make plants and animals abundant, convenient and predictable. By distributing plants and associating them in mosaics, then using these to lure and locate animals, Aborigines…