Friday essay
Today's screen satire frequently preaches to the converted. Fortunately, there are some notable exceptions that can skewer even the most progressive of viewers.
Hidden women
Decades before most white Australian women were granted the right to vote, a businesswoman and single mother of four took to the polls and signed a ballot paper.
Cultural heritage
New Zealand is the last major landmass to be settled. One of the sites of earliest occupation is under threat from development, despite its cultural significance for Māori.
Archiving the web
The National Library of Australia's web archive preserves online Australian content dating back to 1996. The next step is to archive platforms such as Facebook and Twitter - but it won't be easy.
Music
Sexual abuse in the music industry is a systemic, ongoing problem that won’t be resolved by just hacking away at the canon.
Religion
Interviews with survivors of sexual abuse by clergy show that recognising Jesus as an abuse victim might help the Catholic church to change its culture and response to the abuse crisis.
Cultural icons
Dorothy's slippers, worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, have long been celebrated as a 'queer object'. With one pair recently restored at a price of $300,000, do they deserve such adulation?
TV
The ABC's new soap opera The Heights is a nuanced representation of the diversity and community of life on a social housing estate.
Friday essay
It's time for a more reasonable, hybrid definition of civilisation that incorporates our Indigenous heritage.
The classics
Tacitus' Annals is a powerful and darkly humorous examination of imperial Rome. Though his work was little read in the Roman world, it has influenced great thinkers such as Hobbes and Montesquieu.
New research
Tattooing tools made and used 2,700 years ago include two blades made on human bone.
Fact or fiction
Margaret Atwood's classic novel imagined a society where women had almost no power. Hundreds of people gathered in Sydney yesterday to hear Atwood speak about dystopias – fictional and otherwise.
Performing arts
In our competitive and underfunded arts sector, power relationships are ever present. To address power imbalances, major structural change is needed.
Australian fiction
Kangaroos are a national icon, but Australian authors seem determined to kill them off.
Friday essay
Nora Heysen was the first woman to be awarded the Archibald Prize, but for most of her life she was defined not by her art, but by her relationship to her famous father, the artist Hans Heysen.
Royals reimagined
Was Mary Stuart a passionate and jealous failed queen, or a brave and complex woman? Opposing representations in a new film and play reflect modern anxieties about women's agency and leadership.
Hidden women
At her birth in 1901 she was registered with the name 'girlie', not really a name at all. But from this assigned anonymity, Hsieh Hsüeh-hung became a courageous and tenacious revolutionary.
Language
The term initially focussed on the intersection between race and gender, but more recent uses have extended to include
sexuality, gender diversity and disability.
Spectacles
Big Shows have a long history – the Romans used flying machines on stage and Medieval mystery plays took over whole towns.
Ancient history
The first mummy was wrapped up about 7,000 years ago, and it was from South America.
