To mark Independence Day, an Australian perspective on why - 180 years on - Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic political text is a must-read.
An historian reading the government White Paper on developing northern Australia will realise we’re actually heading all the way back to the 1890s.
andrew matthews/Flickr
The federal government’s recent White Paper on developing northern Australia has disturbing echoes of the 1890s, a time when unbridled capitalism and indentured labour developed the North.
People protest the Confederate battle flag.
EPA/Michael Nelson
President Obama’s recent condemnation of the Confederate battleflag mirrors the current and rapidly-changing public mood on this artefact. But attitudes to the flag have deeper roots.
Medications prescribed for disorders are being used by DIY brain-hackers.
Pranjal Mahna
Mad Max: Fury Road has generated heated coverage since its release last month. But focussing on the film’s terse script may be missing the point: it should be read as a poem, and a provocative one at that.
Loggerhead turtle populations are facing a brighter future, but many other species are still in decline, while for others there are no data at all.
AAP Image/Lauren Bath
The Great Barrier Reef is home to some 1,600 species of bony fish, 130 sharks and rays, and turtles, mammals and more. Most have had no population monitoring, meaning we don’t know how well they are faring.
George Brandis shocked the arts sector – and particularly the Australia Council – with his overhaul of the allocation of arts funding.
AAP Image/Dean Lewins
The more the 2015 arts budget is examined the less sense it makes. The changes contribute little strategically or politically – they just make an entire sector nervous. And culturally, they will improve nothing.
Hetti Perkins has curated an exhibition of bark paintings by John Mawurndjul and Gulumbu Yunupingu that is currently on display at Tarrawarra Museum of Art. Who are these artists – and how have their lives shaped their artworks?
Duncan Graham’s 2010 play Cut does not reveal itself as a traditional play does – but it’s a powerful demonstration of the evolution of theatrical storytelling.
Garry Cockburn
Drama involves an altered representation of reality – and the way we understand both the representations and the reality evolve. Duncan Graham’s recent play Cut shows how significantly those understandings change.
A second teaser for The Force Awakens has been released – a gift for the truly devoted.
What is the future of Australia’s wealthiest state? The Conversation, in conjunction with Griffith REVIEW and Curtin University, is publishing a series of articles exploring the unique issues facing Western…
Cities are always much more complex than their popular perceptions.
Daniel Lee
What is the future of Australia’s wealthiest state? The Conversation, in conjunction with Griffith REVIEW and Curtin University, is publishing a series of articles exploring the unique issues facing Western…
On the western edge of the continent there is a great deal to get the juices flowing.
Carnie Lewis
What is the future of Australia’s wealthiest state? The Conversation, in conjunction with Griffith REVIEW and Curtin University, is publishing a series of articles exploring the unique issues facing Western…
Women – and little girls even more so – are desperate to see images and stories that don’t actively oppress them onscreen.
Nadia Meli
Some time ago my then five-year-old goddaughter began insistently and, it must be said, somewhat repetitively humming a few bars that would quickly become one of the world’s most ubiquitous earworms. As…
Recent successes inspire hope the Kimberley (and places like it) will eventually be recognised for their deep intrinsic value.
Leah Kennedy/Shutterstock
What is the future of Australia’s wealthiest state? The Conversation, in conjunction with Griffith REVIEW and Curtin University, is publishing a series of articles exploring the unique issues facing Western…
Artist’s impression of New Horizons as it swings past the dwarf planet Pluto, in July 2015.
NASA
While the Mars Rovers and the Rosetta spacecraft will continue to make headlines in 2015, the stage is set for the solar system’s next great mission – the Pluto-bound New Horizons. Discovered in 1930…
Cinema has always been about spectacle – it’s not yet walking dead.
AAP/Marcus Walters, Gerrit Fokkema
At the opening night of the Victorian College of the Arts graduate film screening season this month, keynote speaker Clayton Jacobson (writer/director of Kenny, 2006) mentioned to the audience his belief…
By sharing their insights and knowledge, African leaders can improve health throughout the world.
The Aspen Institute/Flickr
Ebola has focused the world’s attention on the challenges of health care in Africa. The continent has 11% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s disease burden. It also has just 1.3% of the global…
Despite the huge and belated praise now surrounding John Williams’ novel Stoner (1965), much less attention has been cast to his earlier novel, Butcher’s Crossing (1960). Still, it’s been rightly hailed…
Australiana is back with a vengeance in popular culture.
AAP Image/Angie Raphael
There’s a trend you might have noticed emerging in an array of Australian popular cultural forms at the moment. It announces the return of locally-grown pride: albeit one taken through the route of irony…