When Max Chandler-Mather rose to speak in question time, he was criticised for not wearing a tie. But Australian men have been going tie-less for decades.
Workers on a sugar cane plantation, Queensland c.1890.
Public domain
New research shows there is still a lot of love for rhyming slang – but mostly among older Australians.
‘Peace for our time’: British prime minister Neville Chamberlain displaying the Anglo-German declaration, known as the Munich Agreement, in September 1938.
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images
Oversimplified versions of the past lead to bad political decisions.
Tracker Nat, holding his hat on the far left, with Paul Hasluck standing next to him, holding Nat’s shield in this picture from 1958.
National Archives of Australia. NAA: A1200, L28199.
Soldier atrocities are shaped by our society, culture, and political fabric. Preventing them will require a comprehensive rethinking of policies, attitudes, and approaches to war.
Tim Rowse concludes that Paul Daley’s new novel, inspired by true events in Arnhem Land, is fluent and skilfully paced – but doesn’t risk complicating the critical narrative of our colonial history.
The cost of the Australian biometric passport and the rigour involved in obtaining one can be traced to our participation in an international passport system that evolved over the last century.
A Pacific island woman with a child planting sugar cane in a field, Bingara, Queensland, c 1897.
John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.
In 1881, a Pacific Islander woman brought here to work on a sugar cane plantation ran away. She was violently retrieved by her employer. Her story sheds moving light on a dark history of exploitation.
Gough Whitlam delivering the 1972 election policy speech at the Blacktown Civic Centre in Sydney, 1972.
National Archives of Australia via Wikimedia Commons
In 1895 the Wynne Prize was proposed as an award for a ‘landscape painting of Australian scenery’. Today it is more likely to be given to an Indigenous artist’s explanation of Country.
Schoolchildren queuing for free soup and a slice of bread during the Depression, Belmore North Public School, 2 August 1934.
State Library of New South Wales
The British atomic tests at Emu Field in South Australia pre-dated Maralinga by three years. Largely forgotten, they remind us the costs of harmful political decisions are borne by the most powerless.
View of the town of Parramatta from May’s Hill, ca. 1840. Painting attributed to G. E. Peacock.
State Library New South Wales
Kate Grenville suggests we read Elizabeth Macarthur’s letters as ‘a wonderful piece of fiction, sustained over sixty years’. They were exercises in doubleness, concealment, and delicious irony.
From the Easter Show to the ‘busy lady’ competition in the Australian Women’s Weekly, we’ve been competitive cookers for over 100 years.
Eugene von Guérard, Mount Kosciusko, seen from the Victorian border (Mount Hope Ranges) 1866.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1870 Photo: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne