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.
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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.
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.
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.
The Debney Peace, negotiated over a 5-day ceremony on Mithaka Country, is nationally significant to 21st century Australia.
From talk of a ‘poisonous doctrine’ to mistaken beliefs that he hailed from Africa, Western thinkers got Buddhism wrong for a long time.
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.
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.
The unique power of story is like a sharp knife, writes Claire Corbett. It is neither good nor evil, but can cut both ways.
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?
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?
The Ancestral Remains of Aboriginal people still lie in British museums or in graves, marked and unmarked.
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.
A study of over 2000 early landscape photographs shows how nature was framed as a wilderness, empty of First Nations peoples.
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.
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.
Top contributors
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Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia
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Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies, Monash University
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Professor of Classics, University of Newcastle
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Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland
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Senior Lecturer in Writing and Publishing, Griffith University
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Emeritus Professor of Media and Culture, Griffith University, Griffith University
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Lecturer, Deakin University
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Associate Professor (adjunct) in Creative Writing, Flinders University
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Professor of English, Flinders 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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Professor of Geography, School of Law and Society, University of the Sunshine Coast
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Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University
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Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne
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Sessional academic, Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature, Macquarie University
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Fashion historian, Edith Cowan University
