When Shauna Bostock began researching a book on her family, she thought it would be limited to her Aboriginal ancestry. But then a late-night phone call led her down a surprising path.
Researching family history is a popular hobby. But hobbyists can find themselves unearthing details of ancestors behaving badly or treated cruelly – or family secrets and trauma.
Pore over family documents such as birth certificates and old passports, photographs and heirlooms, however trinket-like they might seem. Family history requires research in its broadest sense.
While tracing his own family’s journey from Ireland to Aotearoa New Zealand, Richard Shaw encountered how much ‘selective amnesia’ about the colonial past still shapes our lives today.
My family is Mauritian, but when I take a DNA test, Mauritian didn’t even rank as an ethnicity. It can’t. Everyone from Mauritius is from somewhere else, or from many places at the same time.
Regular controversies over breastfeeding might seem like a quirk of contemporary life. But 18th and 19th century clothing reveal that women have been handling the issue of visibility and practicality for centuries.
True stories that enrich our public sphere are often drawn from the intimate and shared lives of their authors. Where is the line between rattling social proprieties and respecting others’ privacy?
Over the last nine years, more money has been spent on Picasso than on any other artist. How much does Picasso’s granddaughter stand to earn? And why are some in the art world concerned?
From an early age, I was fascinated by any story about war. Being born in 1969, and being a child in the 1970s, a large number of my “play” options were linked to the war. I read comics such as Warlord…