Each year at Easter, Christians recreate the spectacularly violent end of Jesus’s life, raising some tough questions about the depiction of suffering on stage.
Yidaki, maker unknown. Collected from Milingimbi by Charles Mountford.
courtesy of South Australian Museum.
The yidaki, a musical instrument owned by the Yolngu people of North East Arnhem Land, is created by both termites and instrument makers, who tap trees to find hollow logs. A new exhibition tells its fascinating story.
Augustin Burdet (engraver) French active (19th century) Victor Marie Picot (after) Cupid and Psyche (c. 1817) engraving.
39.9 x 49.2 cm (image), 49.4 x 57.5 cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest, 1927 (3506-3)
In early modern times, wooing happened at balls and markets and in churches; while sex was obtained in bathhouses, inns, brothels and alleyways. Art tells the story.
Penny Gulliver wrote to Germaine Greer several times over two decades.
University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, 2014.0042.00350, Correspondence with Penny Gulliver
Fifty years of correspondence is stored at the Germaine Greer archive. It ranges across topics as diverse as US politics, grassroots feminism, gardening and Queen Victoria’s underpants.
Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (2012): the archtypal fictional spinster.
Grotesques, prattlers, hysterical women … historically, spinsters have had a raw deal in fiction. But astonishingly, the situation for older single ladies in contemporary novels has scarcely improved.
Jazmina Cininas, Christina sleeps on both sides of Grandma’s bed, 2010. Reduction linocut 52.8 x 71.8cm.
From witch-hunts to the suffragettes, belief in womanly werewolfs has flourished at times when the female gender was under threat. But in contemporary fiction, film and art, werewolf lore is evolving in surprising ways.
Marcoo was a 1.4 kilotonne ground-level nuclear test carried out at Maralinga in 1956. The contaminated debris was buried at this site in the 1967 clean-up known as Operation Brumby.
Author provided
History is writ large in the remote areas around Woomera and the Nullarbor: from the fossils of microscopic, cell-like creatures to ancient stone tools to the deitrus of rocket tests and the painful legacy of the Maralinga atomic blasts.
Poets are drawn to the time between seasons and to the time when both death and life, endings and beginnings, merge into each other and confuse us.
Annie Spratt/Unsplash
The beauty and delicacy of the Christmas story become in our consumerist hands a recipe for crassness and sentimentality. No surprise then, that poets are drawn to try to rescue it.
We need women to participate equally in science fiction’s conversations about humanity’s future.
MsSaraKelly
Science fiction is a popular and lucrative genre – but most authors are men and relatable female characters are sadly lacking. Given this entrenched sexism, it’s time for publishers to take affirmative action.
A doll lies in the ghost town of Pripyat, abandoned since the nearby Chernobyl power plant suffered a catastrophic meltdown in 1986.
Henrik Ismarker/Flickr
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse has documented heart-rending testimonies and elicited shattering revelations. But how does a society witness itself failing at its most fundamental duty?
Gurindji ranger Ursula Chubb pays her respects to ancestors killed in the early 1900s at Blackfella Creek, where children were tied with wire and dragged by horses, and adults were shot as they fled. They were buried under rocks where they fell.
Brenda L Croft, from Yijarni
The Gurindji people of the Northern Territory made history 50 years ago by standing up for their rights to land and better pay. But a new book reveals the deeper story behind the Wave Hill Walk-Off.
Aboriginal elder Max Eulo holds a baby in front of a sea of 70,000 multi-coloured paper hands at the Sydney Opera House in December 2000.
David Gray/Reuters
Racism is again on the rise in many parts of the world. So is the dehumanisation of our enemies. What hope is there, then, for notions of a common humanity?
Renaissance master Andrea Palladio designed Villa La Rotonda with rooms of various characters, which at night served as viewing boxes for fireworks displays in the surrounding landscape.
Bogna/Wikimedia Commons
Might we enjoy our homes more if their rooms were characterised by their sense of loftiness or intimacy or cheerfulness or melancholy rather than lifeless labels such as ‘media room’ or ‘home office’?
Photos of beaming young asylum-seekers with their families aboard HMAS Adelaide in October 2001 told a completely different story to the government’s spurious ‘children overboard’ claims.
Courtesy Project SafeCom, Jack H Smit.
Images move us to act – as last week’s episode of Four Corners has shown. Our government has gone to great lengths to suppress photos that humanise asylum seekers – but when they seep out, empathy is aroused.
A hundred years later, the magnitude of the Battle of Somme can still be felt.
Newzulu
A hundred years ago today, the Battle of the Somme began. This conflict, in which a million men died in order to move the front lines about six miles, spelled the end of courage as a cornerstone of masculine identity.
Degas and Manet’s stormy relationship is expressed in a portrait Degas painted of Manet and his wife, which has been slashed, presumably by Manet himself.
Detail of Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet and Mme. Manet (1868-69) Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons
Edgar Degas’ relationship with Impressionism was to be a stormy one, but his encounter with Edouard Manet in 1862 was a turning-point in his career. Degas went on to paint a portrait of Manet and his wife - later slashed in mysterious circumstances.
Peter Paul Rubens, Lot and his family escaping from the doomed city guided by an angel, circa 1615.
For Muslims generally, as for conservative Christians, homosexual acts are sinful. Christian gays and lesbians have had to work hard for a measure of recognition among fellow-believers; their Muslim counterparts are just beginning that struggle.
A young punk at Myanmar’s annual water festival in 2012.
Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters
Punk gave women a voice; changed the dynamic between audiences and performers and offered music fans a DIY smorgasbord. On its 40th anniversary, that’s worth celebrating.
A typescript for the Female Eunuch with photo of a young Greer on a book.
Germaine Greer archive: 2014.0038.0001. Picture Nathan Gallagher, copyright University of Melbourne
The Greer archives brim with notebooks and papers from her time as a student of the traditional humanities. And reading The Female Eunuch for evidence of the Bard reveals a new kind of book, one that is deeply informed by this scholarship.
Beyonce’s baseball bat wielding spree in Lemonade, left, bears more than a passing resemblance to the work of Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist.
Left, still from Lemonade (2016), right, still from Ever is Over All (1997)
From Beyoncé and Lady Gaga to Kanye and even Rihanna, pop royalty is crazy for high art. Is this a phenomenon worth celebrating or are pop stars mining the art world to gain credibility?
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne