Mary Elizabeth Shutler in Vanuatu, in the1960s. Permitted to join the first archaeological expedition to New Caledonia in 1952 as a ‘voluntary assistant’, she was the only French speaker and chief interlocuter with the Kanak people.
Family archives, reproduced with the kind authorisation of John Shutler & Susan Arter.
‘Wives’, volunteers, assistants: the vital contribution of women archaeologists has long been underplayed, if not erased. A new project uncovers trailblazers in the Pacific.
Birds have always been charged with carrying the burden of our feelings, writes Delia Falconer. Yet we’ve never treated these inscrutable, vivacious companions particularly well.
Kurt Cobain in April 1993, during a benefit concert in California.
AP Photo/Sam Morris
Confucius looked nothing like the great sage in his own time as he is widely known in ours. But his ideas continue to shape contemporary life for many.
Hoda Afshar’s exhibition Remain, The Substation, Melbourne, 2019.
Photograph by Leela Schauble. Courtesy the artist and The Substation, Melbourne
From the Intercolonial Exhibition in 1866 to a landmark show, a century later, in which Aboriginal photographers displayed their works, photography has shaped the nation.
Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train has sold 23 million copies, and the film adaptation was a box office smash.
DreamWorks Pictures/Universal Pictures via AP
There’s something disturbing about a story tracking a character’s mental decline for thrills. Happily, Paula Hawkins’ new novel, A Slow Fire Burning, joins a genre of books bucking this trend.
A submerged coconut palm on Kadavu Island, Fiji.
Ethan Daniels/shutterstock
From Fiji to France to Central Australia, stories abound of lands lost beneath the sea. Some are likely founded on millennia-old memories of coastal submergence, offering us clues today.
A slide by Gordon H. Woodhouse to accompany a 1901 lecture by his father Clarence entitled ‘exploration and development of Australia’.
State Library of Victoria
Exclusion has been central to utopian ideas of Australia since before Federation. It still lingers. To progress in this climate-challenged century, Australia’s foundational wrongs must be righted.
Lieutenant John Bowen and party arriving at Risdon, by Thomas Gregson (c.1860).
Courtesy of the WL Crowther Library
Outnumbered 200 to one and using traditional weapons, Tongerlongeter and his warriors drove the colony to desperate measures. In other wars his self-sacrifice would have earned him a medal.
Making Afghan coats for sale in Herat, 1974.
Shutterstock
By the end of the 19th century, the Devil had become a figure of myth. Ironically, that helped his image proliferate in popular culture.
St Kitts-born Archibald Burt pictured beside sugar cane growing in his Perth garden in 1862. Burt, a former slave owner, became chief justice of Western Australia.
State Library of Western Australia 6923B/182
When Britain legislated to abolish slavery in 1833, some former slave owners moved to the Australasian colonies. New research traces this movement of people, money and ideologies.
It’s no coincidence that more books about trees are popping up. There is an air of desperation in new books by Peter Wohllben, Janine Burke and others.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, made between 1622 and 1625.
Stefano Chiacchiarini/Shutterstock
This ancient myth, in which a nymph transforms herself into a tree to escape the lustful attention of the god Apollo, has inspired countless retellings in art. Its themes resonate today.
Not only is the black swan important for many Aboriginal people, it was also a potent symbol within the European imagination — 1500 years before Europeans knew it existed.
A crocodile known locally as ‘Barrat’ emerges from the water of the lower Daintree River, Far North Queensland.
Kevin Crook
For an ecologist working in a tangle of creeks in North Queensland, crocodiles are a tangible threat. We are food to them, yet we must learn to co-exist with these creatures.
Could music provide an unlikely source of inspiration for improving human relationships with forests?
Paul Jones / UOW Media
Following scandals over illegal logging, and with an appetite for rare, old-growth wood, the guitar industry is rethinking its environmental footprint. Australian companies are leading the way.
How does the spirit of Byron Byron endure wave after wave of seekers and lately, Instagram influencers? Sally Breen took a road trip and found a something deeper in the beachy township.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne