Sydney’s Parramatta is developing fast, building over a rich archaeological history. Finding ways to retain it can help visitors and residents feel a sense of physical connection with those who came before.
Ivy Emms with the man she married, Jack Bent, on a music catalogue for the song Just a Ray of Sunlight. After performing patriotic songs as a child in popular pantomimes, Emms later worked as a choreographer at Melbourne’s Tivoli Theatre.
NLA
More than 100,000 records of live performance are on a database of our theatre history. They tell of corroborees, the first play staged by white settlers, and long-gone gracious theatres.
Male-dominated sex ratios in Australia’s history still affect attitudes today.
Wikimedia
Australia’s convict past and male-dominated sex ratios have long-lasting effects on attitudes, impacting women’s working lives.
Guy Pearce as the Chandleresque private investigator Jack Irish: in the early years of Australian crime fiction, convicts and bushrangers featured prominently.
Lachlan Moore
Australia’s rich tradition of crime fiction is little known – early tales told of bushrangers and convicts, one hero was a mining engineer turned amateur detective – but it reveals a range of national myths and fantasies.
Melbourne in 1846: a view from Collingwood. T. E. Prout.
State Library of Victoria
Ngár-go (Fitzroy), Quo-yung (Richmond), Yálla-birr-ang (Collingwood), and Bulleke-bek (Brunswick), are just some of the Woiwurrung names uncovered in the notebooks of a 19th century anthropologist.
Ring trees were made by binding young branches of young trees with reeds. As the tree grew, it formed a ring.
Tim Church/Timmy Church Films.
Thousands of Australian women took flight to the US in the early 20th century, escaping sexism at home for success overseas. They included architects, artists, dentists and an economist who advised JFK.
The statue of Captain Cook in St Kilda, Melbourne, was painted pink on January 25 2018.
DAVID CROSLING
The federal government will spend nearly $50 million over four years to commemorate Captain Cook’s first landing. But some have questioned the spend.
In the 1980s, Australian geographer Maurice Daly exposed the urban planning system as a policy toolkit developers could capitalise on to drive subdivision and speculation – an insight that remains true even today.
AAP Image/Lukas Coch
Essays On Air: Australia’s property boom and bust cycle stretches back to colonial days
The Conversation, CC BY58.7 MB(download)
Australia's property market is slowing and many are contemplating a possible bust. But today's episode of Essays On Air reminds us that since colonial days, Australia's property market has had its ups and downs.
Participants in A Tasmanian Requiem, a musical performance addressing Tasmania’s Black War.
Alastair Bett
A Tasmanian Requiem brings together Western and Aboriginal voices to confront the violence of the state’s Black War. It shows what a historical reckoning, and reconciliation, might look and sound like.
A depiction of Fook Shing in Melbourne Illustrated, November 13 1880.
State Library of Victoria
Fook Shing spent 20 years as a Melbourne gumshoe. He policed the thriving Chinese community – claiming opium as an expense – but was never promoted above his entry rank of detective third class.
The familiar images of high-rise development, looking north here from Surfers Paradise, tell only one part of the story of the Gold Coast.
Andrew Leach
Behind the built-up glitz of Surfers Paradise lies a deep history that has been written and overwritten in successive layers that have become thinner and thinner as time goes on.
Thylacine joey, from the collections of the Natural History Museum, London.
Penny Edmonds
Lisa Reihana’s video installation Emissaries combines Indigenous actors and performance techniques to reenact Captain Cook’s encounters across the Pacific.
Detail from William Barak, Figures in possum skin cloaks, 1898, pencil, wash, charcoal solution, gouache and earth pigments on paper, 57.0 x 88.8 cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1962
Irish influence on Australian English is much like the influence of the Irish on Australians themselves — less than you’d expect on the surface, but everywhere once you start looking.
Detail from a reconstruction of a Tasmanian picture board by Simon Barnard (2015).
Kristyn Harman and Nicholas Brodie
In the early days of colonial Tasmania, the British used threatening picture boards to communicate with Aboriginal people, giving them a choice between conciliation and death.
In July 2017, new research was published that pushed the opening chapters of Australian history back to 65,000 years ago.
Marcella Cheng/The Conversation
When did Australia’s human history begin?
The Conversation, CC BY16.6 MB(download)
Today's episode of Essays On Air, the audio version of our Friday essay series, seeks to move beyond the view of ancient Australia as a timeless and traditional foundation story.
This 1980s ad for Lindeman’s Ben Ean Moselle mirrored the shift in Australian wine culture from egalitarian to aspirational.
Lindeman’s (Holdings) Ltd, Z418 Box 335 27.103, Noel Butlin Archives Centre
Lindeman’s Ben Ean Moselle was the ultimate wine for everyone in the 1970s. But as Australia grew wealthier, its fortunes faded in competition with other, ‘finer’ wines.