An Italian-born-woman-turned-Sydney-dwelling-man, Eugenia Falleni was convicted of murder in 1920. Researching a novel about Falleni left this author literally, and figuratively, at sea.
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
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Hokusai’s Great Wave is the enduring image of Japanese art. Less well known is the story of its primary pigment - Prussian blue - which was created in a lab accident in Berlin and sparked ‘blue fever’ in Europe.
Anthropologist Percy Leason thought he was painting the extinction of Victoria’s Indigenous people in the 1930s. He was wrong, but his portraits, part of a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, are surprisingly sympathetic.
Why is Cher, 71, celebrated when she wears a near-nude costume while Madonna, 58, receives revulsion? 19th century women’s magazines reveal how the double standards of beauty for older women came about.
The Men’s Painting Room - a Nissen hut in the government settlement of Papunya - is Australian art’s most important atelier. A new form of creative expression happened here.
Love, it is said, is a battlefield, and it was no more so than for the first goddess of love and war, Ishtar. Her legend has influenced cultural archetypes from Aphrodite to Wonder Woman.
Around the world today, fans of James Joyce’s Ulysses will celebrate Bloomsday. This experimental novel can be bewildering to read, but for those who persist, it is a ‘feast’ of a book.
The 1990s was once the forgotten decade of the 20th century but no longer.
For thousands of years, tattoos have been indicative of the passage from girlhood to womanhood, of female power and female beauty.
The lack of strong female characters in children’s picture books is oft-lamented. But a new crop of books invites girls to write themselves into history.
Being an air hostess in the 1960s was a sought after job. But bodies were carefully policed: at Qantas, if a hostess put on too much weight she could be rostered off until she’d lost it.
The introduction of a new Muppet on Sesame Street represents an encouraging cultural shift in the portrayal of characters with autism. But there is still a way to go.
As Australians once found spiritual communion through allegiance to the British monarch, they find similar virtues in Anzac today. Can the republican movement connect with a large enough number of people in a similar way?
Each year at Easter, Christians recreate the spectacularly violent end of Jesus’s life, raising some tough questions about the depiction of suffering on stage.
The yidaki, a musical instrument owned by the Yolngu people of North East Arnhem Land, is created by both termites and instrument makers, who tap trees to find hollow logs. A new exhibition tells its fascinating story.
In early modern times, wooing happened at balls and markets and in churches; while sex was obtained in bathhouses, inns, brothels and alleyways. Art tells the story.
Fifty years of correspondence is stored at the Germaine Greer archive. It ranges across topics as diverse as US politics, grassroots feminism, gardening and Queen Victoria’s underpants.
Grotesques, prattlers, hysterical women … historically, spinsters have had a raw deal in fiction. But astonishingly, the situation for older single ladies in contemporary novels has scarcely improved.
From witch-hunts to the suffragettes, belief in womanly werewolfs has flourished at times when the female gender was under threat. But in contemporary fiction, film and art, werewolf lore is evolving in surprising ways.
History is writ large in the remote areas around Woomera and the Nullarbor: from the fossils of microscopic, cell-like creatures to ancient stone tools to the deitrus of rocket tests and the painful legacy of the Maralinga atomic blasts.
Top contributors
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Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia
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Honorary Professor, The University of Queensland
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Associate Professor, Griffith University
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Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Monash University
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Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland
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Lecturer, Deakin University
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Professor Emeritus of Media and Culture, Griffith University, Griffith University
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Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne
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Associate Professor (adjunct) in Creative Writing, Flinders University
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Fashion historian, Edith Cowan University
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Professor of English, Flinders University
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Associate Professor Visual Communication, University of Technology Sydney
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Sessional academic, Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature, Macquarie University
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Joanna Mendelssohn is a Friend of The Conversation.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne
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Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University
