Australia’s original $1 note featured artwork taken without permission from Aboriginal artist, David Malangi. He was later given $1000, a medallion and a fishing kit, but archival evidence sheds new light on the affair.
Australia has a lesson to learn from Germany when it comes to reconciling with a shameful past. Artists are taking the lead in ‘When silence falls’, a formidable exhibition.
Alfred Deakin and his contemporaries invented the Australian prime ministership. But it was not settled as a platform for national leadership until John Curtin and Ben Chifley’s time.
Tom D.C. Roberts has crafted a book full of remarkable insights into a central figure in Australian corporate and political history, a figure hitherto enveloped in family mythology: Keith Murdoch.
Sir John Kerr probably made his own decision to dismiss the Whitlam government much earlier than he acknowledged publicly while alive – but he came to this conclusion in discussion with others.
Contemporary circus and circus-infused physical theatre are amongst Australia’s most innovative and in-demand cultural exports. It’s a performance craft with a proud history behind it.
In our era of 24-hour news, outrage and hyperbole seem to be par for the course. But as Sr John Madden’s 1909 “gravest peril” speech illustrates, overblown moral panic, to fit an agenda, is nothing new.
The problem with constitutional recognition lies in the way in which it changes the nature of the constitution away from a procedural document by introducing issues of identity into it.
Iconic murderers such as Martha Rendell electrify our imaginations and passions. The turn of the century case demonstrates why fiction can be such an effective vessel for history.
‘History and fiction journey together and separately into the past; they are a tag team, sometimes taking turns, sometimes working in tandem.’ Enjoy the second part of our series, Writing History.
Today, a convict ancestor is a matter of pride. But for past generations, including some convicts themselves, it was a shame that had to be hidden at all costs.
Federal parliament has passed legislation that removes Norfolk Island’s self-government but strong local views about the tiny island’s independence have deep historical roots.
Protests on Anzac Day, rather than being ‘utterly alien to Australians’, have a long tradition and embody the democratic right to dissent for which the troops fought.
Australia has continually faced a returned soldier crisis. This is something that marked men returning from all the wars of modern memory – from the Great War to Afghanistan and Iraq.