Speaking out for the traditional teaching of Shakespeare in schools drives campus ranters wild. Wonderful. Rightly, they see this as expressing contempt for Marxism, feminism, postmodernism and any other recently downloaded “ism”. As controllers of our culture they would have to do the teaching and they know (who better?) the problems of doing so in […]

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Barry Otto was kissing Marcus Graham. Which, I thought, was an odd way for adults to make a living. Behind me the kids went “Yuuuckk”. It was the most sensible thing they said all day. The play was advertised as Molière’s Tartuffe, at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre. The auditorium was cut in two by the stage: […]

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At Melbourne’s Arts Centre Playhouse there was a moment of awed silence at the beginning of Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll when Matthew Newton stepped onto the stage. And then chitter-chatter cartwheeled through the auditorium as the deaf explained to the deaf the delicate matter of his parentage. And then, as it were, with the […]

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Damien Cash: “the massacre claim was revealed as a case study in the misuse of historical evidence, beginning with a series of errors made by Robinson in 1841-42, and then perpetuated through a series of unreasonable conclusions and other errors made by historians and consultants.”

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It took less than thirty minutes in the Law Library at the University of Tasmania to suggest that the definitions of terra nullius given by historian Henry Reynolds, which I had been trying to understand, did not make sense and were not supported by the references he gave.

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This is us. In 1803, when George Howe began publishing the Sydney Gazette, most of our families had not arrived in the new homeland. But from the very beginning of our first newspaper its editor captured something familiar and typically Australian.

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