In 1972, 5 women – Helen Garner, Claire Dobbin, Evelyn Krape, Yvonne Marini and Jude Kuring –spent 5 months workshopping a play. Frank, angry and explicit, it was a beacon of 1970s women’s liberation.
After Anita Lane died, former collaborator Nick Cave said she “despised the concept of the muse but was everybody’s”. Meera Atkinson highlights her achievements – with help from those who knew her.
Koalas are often regarded as cute but dumb: slow, sleepy and incapable of change. But they have been known to approach humans for help. And maybe they have been set free by their remarkable diet.
Reliance on the support of others after an accident showed philosopher David Newheiser the power of solidarity. We need a similar sense of communal connection in our approach to COVID, he writes.
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.
Musician and poet Patti Smith: ‘always evolving’.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP
Old women remain the butt of jokes; they are some of society’s most marginalised people. But age also invites us to become our most authentic selves, writes Carol Lefevre.
Josh Gorringe at the Debney Peace site in 2019.
Photo: Tom Griffiths
From talk of a ‘poisonous doctrine’ to mistaken beliefs that he hailed from Africa, Western thinkers got Buddhism wrong for a long time.
John Kinsella, top right, and (clockwise), Kwame Dawes, Thurston Moore and Charmaine Papertalk Green.
Courtesy Tamati Smith, The Thurston Moore Group, the University of Nebraska
How do you write a poem with someone else? John Kinsella has collaborated with musician Thurston Moore, Yamaji poet Charmaine Papertalk Green and Ghanaian-Jamaican Kwame Dawes. He offers some clues.
Akuch Kuol Anyieth pictured in Melbourne with her mother Mary.
Author provided
At the age of five, Akuch Kuol Anyieth climbed into a cattle truck to journey to the refugee camp known as Kakuma. This is her story.
Why don’t chimpanzees rule the world? Is storytelling - the mysterious glue that enables millions of humans to cooperate effectively - the answer?
Shutterstock
A close friend of John Curtin, Dame Mary Gilmore wrote poems on topics such as colonial violence and the plight of the koala. How has her great, great nephew, Scott Morrison, chosen to remember her?
Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame at the National Press Club last month.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
Australia’s political economy was built on the primacy of (white) male labor, male power and male control, writes Julianne Schultz. Women have changed this culture - but still risk abuse when speaking out.
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel transformed women’s fashion across the world: how do we recognise her complex background, difficult choices and ongoing legacy?
Breastplate, of metal, engraved ‘McIntyre King of Mannilla’, c.1860–1874. ‘King’ McIntyre (c.1814–74) . Donated by A.W. Wilkins to Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, 1930.
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery
Women were always important to the Beatles, yet Yoko Ono, in particular, faced extreme criticism for partnering with John Lennon. How does Peter Jackson’s Get Back present Ono and Linda Eastman?
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.
Anson Brothers Studio, Fern Tree Gully, Hobart Town, Tasmania, 1887. Albumen print.
Collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
More famous men are wearing dresses, harking back to ancient times, when androgynous clothing was the norm. But for male dresses to truly take off they might need a style separate to women’s.
A mural of the Rainbow Serpent in the NSW town of Bourke, pictured in 2015.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
The Rainbow Serpent features in murals across the nation and as an Indigenous fairytale in books. But such images are often far removed from this Ancestral Being’s traditional ambivalent meanings.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne