Our new G-G let slip an avalanche of heartfelt concern that recast our 236 years of indifference and guilt

The lust for power can be as great or greater driver of human effort as the good and humane

As Michael Easson notes in his new Chris Watson biography, Labor's first PM sought to civilise capitalism, not bring it down

Remarkably, the Voice went down despite big business, big tech, big sport, and big philanthropy

The Arabs lost in1948 and have since used a motley collection of Circassian, Turkish, Jordanian, Syrian and Lebanese Arabs, renamed Palestinians in 1967, to ceaselessly prosecute the original war of rejection

From a perspective of some eighty years it is possible to misunderstand or underestimate the intensity of the fears—but also the hopes and aspirations—of the British people as they faced up to another colossal existential challenge, less than a full generation after what, it was now suddenly clear, had only been the first world war

The proportions of Aboriginal children and young people placed in a relative or kin placement or with an Aboriginal foster carer have decreased, and the proportion of Aboriginal children who were reunified with their families has declined.

We are encouraged to rely more and more on government officials to do for us what we could equally well do for ourselves—and, maybe more importantly, not to do what might help us solve our own problems.

The cost of the Paris Olympics will never be known, but whatever it might be the French taxpayer will foot the bill

Fortunately, Opera Australia’s 'diversity and inclusion' statement 'celebrate[s] different perspectives' and will therefore accept my musings in the spirit intended

What offended him was not a lack of quality, but of purpose. He simply couldn’t tolerate—perhaps due to his profession, which was accounting—things that remained forever and intentionally ambiguous. He’d been trained to view unsolved problems as errors. To John, a balance sheet was poetry, and a bookkeeping ledger, a metaphor for human life.

Some have argued that Auden was a victim of his own naivety regarding the prospect of impending war. A few days before its declaration and while on a Greyhound bus at the end of that 1939 “honeymoon” with Kallman, he had written home to England: “There is a radio on this coach, so that every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on. By the time you get this, I suppose, we shall know one way or the other.”

Apparently, what respectable Australian researchers do is assume that there is a link between suspensions and incarceration because American researchers claim to have found one.

This is the paradox of the War Against the Past: those who are waging it are, inadvertently, denying themselves the capacity to win. For if your past is evil, if your centuries-old story is defined by bitterness and bad faith, how can you possibly hope to redeem yourself?

John Thewall is released from prison with his hands damaged from torture. Coleridge and Sara are conflicted as to whether it is safe to let him stay in the country with them and he is asked to leave.

Put shortly, a progressive, left-leaning Sydney-based artist visits her archaeologist brother in Bolivia. She is told that Che Guevara fought his last campaign in the wilds of Bolivia and that one of his lieutenants came from the utopian colony nearby founded by William Lane and other Australian radicals. Inspired by what she has heard, and well aware of Che Guevara’s popularity on university campuses in the United States and Australia, the progressive artist decides to enter a portrait prize for an image to be installed over the entrance to the New South Wales Gallery. Her image, linked to Che’s supposedly heroic campaign, will symbolise the victory of progressive thought down under.

Altogether, auteur theory sounds fascinating and, no doubt, develops excellent skills of analysis for students of film, as they dissect and discuss this or that auteur director’s body of work. But what is it doing in an English course, in high school, in Year 10?

Vance, like many former-Never Trumpers, belatedly acknowledged that Trump was simply ahead of the curve when it came to economic nationalism and protectionist initiatives to defend the United States against the predatory and antagonistic practices of foreign interests—not least Beijing which, according to some estimates, steals as much as half a trillion dollars a year in American intellectual property.

Pascoe invents Aboriginal farmers; Harney looked at Darwin and knew individuals who were trying to enter a white world: “Let them grow a garden and they soon felt the full weight of kinship ties when, at harvest time, their hosts of relations came to help them—not to gather, but to eat the crop.”

Clark’s account is dizzying, traversing what he sagely calls the only truly European revolution. He moves across France, Prussia, Hungary, Wallachia, Poland, Croatia, Spain, and beyond.

Magee began with the conviction that “to anyone thinking like this the only human activity that seems to have any importance at all is the search for meaning in life”.

Russia has long insisted that in return for peace, Ukraine must give up the 20 per cent of its territory that Russia currently occupies as well as any aspiration of joining NATO. These terms were unacceptable to Ukraine.

It is unlikely that the young Culshaw ever gave more than three minutes’ thought to antipodean residence. Yet lo and behold, the 1970s found him doing consultancy work for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and even giving lectures at the University of Western Australia.

The total failure of pre-contact Aboriginal society to advance in nearly all significant areas of the economy and technology is indicative of what Aboriginal society was actually like. To put the matter bluntly, pre-contact Aboriginal society consisted of 65,000 years of murderous, barbaric savagery.

Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.

On August 16, 1947, the Chifley government announced its proposed […]