Women’s solo sex can be taboo even today. But in 17th century England it featured in many texts from poetry to medical books, suggesting knowledge or even acceptance of female self-pleasure.
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Arts + Culture – Articles, Analysis, Comment
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Rarely seen in the family album are photographs of funerals, burials and the suffering of those who are left to mourn.
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.
Wanji-wanji’s lyrics have remained unchanged over thousands of kilometres and the past 150 years.
Despite the diversity of art and performance on display at the tenth Ten Days on the Island festival, key themes emerge: life, death, and Tasmania’s colonial history.
Antoinette de Saint-Étienne was a Canadian First Nations woman of the 17th century whose beautiful singing voice attracted the attention of a queen.
Hofesh Shechter’s latest contemporary dance work is not the rousing narrative its title might suggest. Its dancers inhabit a global catastrophe and then a brutal new world order.
Describing non-consensual acts as pornography minimises the importance of consent.
A new play tells the story of George Johnston and Charmian Clift’s time on the Greek island of Hydra, which ultimately led to the novel My Brother Jack - but not without sacrifices.
Today’s screen satire frequently preaches to the converted. Fortunately, there are some notable exceptions that can skewer even the most progressive of viewers.
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.
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.
This verbatim drama presenting the stories of eight Iranian asylum seekers detained on their island prisons delivers uncomfortable home truths.
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?
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.
In this danced-through reimagining of the world’s most-popular opera, we are pulled into the characters’ inner turmoil.
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.
A new survey exhibition of contemporary artist Janet Laurence urges us to reconsider the relationship between art, nature and politics.
In A Man of Good Hope, an energetic cast of over 20 performers take the audience on a journey through the life of Somali refugee Asad Abdullahi.
It’s time for a more reasonable, hybrid definition of civilisation that incorporates our Indigenous heritage.
One of Australia’s most prominent playwrights has reimagined the infamous encounter between Hollywood icon Mae West and photographer Diane Arbus.
Sexual abuse in the music industry is a systemic, ongoing problem that won’t be resolved by just hacking away at the canon.
Establishing artists could benefit if New Zealand introduces a proposed capital gains tax that excludes any profit made on the sale of collectables and artworks.
In our competitive and underfunded arts sector, power relationships are ever present. To address power imbalances, major structural change is needed.
La Reprise is remarkable theatre about the murder of a gay man, Ihsane Jarfi, in Belgium in 2012.