How do you write a poem with someone else? John Kinsella has collaborated with musician Thurston Moore, Yamaji poet Charmaine Papertalk Green and Ghanaian-Jamaican Kwame Dawes. He offers some clues.
A close friend of John Curtin, Dame Mary Gilmore wrote poems on topics such as colonial violence and the plight of the koala. How has her great, great nephew, Scott Morrison, chosen to remember her?
Australia’s political economy was built on the primacy of (white) male labor, male power and male control, writes Julianne Schultz. Women have changed this culture - but still risk abuse when speaking out.
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel transformed women’s fashion across the world: how do we recognise her complex background, difficult choices and ongoing legacy?
Women were always important to the Beatles, yet Yoko Ono, in particular, faced extreme criticism for partnering with John Lennon. How does Peter Jackson’s Get Back present Ono and Linda Eastman?
My family is Mauritian, but when I take a DNA test, Mauritian didn’t even rank as an ethnicity. It can’t. Everyone from Mauritius is from somewhere else, or from many places at the same time.
More famous men are wearing dresses, harking back to ancient times, when androgynous clothing was the norm. But for male dresses to truly take off they might need a style separate to women’s.
The Rainbow Serpent features in murals across the nation and as an Indigenous fairytale in books. But such images are often far removed from this Ancestral Being’s traditional ambivalent meanings.
‘Wives’, volunteers, assistants: the vital contribution of women archaeologists has long been underplayed, if not erased. A new project uncovers trailblazers in the Pacific.
Birds have always been charged with carrying the burden of our feelings, writes Delia Falconer. Yet we’ve never treated these inscrutable, vivacious companions particularly well.
Confucius looked nothing like the great sage in his own time as he is widely known in ours. But his ideas continue to shape contemporary life for many.
From the Intercolonial Exhibition in 1866 to a landmark show, a century later, in which Aboriginal photographers displayed their works, photography has shaped the nation.
There’s something disturbing about a story tracking a character’s mental decline for thrills. Happily, Paula Hawkins’ new novel, A Slow Fire Burning, joins a genre of books bucking this trend.
From Fiji to France to Central Australia, stories abound of lands lost beneath the sea. Some are likely founded on millennia-old memories of coastal submergence, offering us clues today.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne