State of the Nation

In adopting the title The Lucky Country for his 1964 bestseller, which turns 60 this year, Donald Horne did not intend to deliver a compliment ...

I freelance because I am a freak and a failure. A lifetime with the vibe and energy of a character in the third act of a Safdie brothers movie has made me all but unemployable in the industry that I’ve ...

In Adelaide’s Museum of Economic Botany, the charming centre-piece of the city’s Botanic Garden, is a display case containing 210 papier-mâché models of fungi made in the nineteenth century by Heinrich Arnoldi and Co in Gotha, Germany ...

Some years ago, I met with the principal of an elite private school to pitch the benefits of a program of philosophical inquiry for students ...

Pain, suffering, hope, humanity, and revolution are universal and do not necessitate the safety of one peoples to the exclusion of others. We are not free until all of us are free ...

When Brittany Higgins came forward with her allegations, the nation split into two camps ...

Rain fell on my spirit and buried it somewhere in the dirt. It’s eight days post-referendum ...

The People of Gaza insist on living—and so we must not assign them to their death ...

Uluṟu stands still at the heart of the nation, an omnipresent red rock surrounded by an ocean of ochre. Immovable. The dark emu emerges each night, a silhouette among the stars. Unreachable. As sure as the sun will shine on ...

The thylacine is an easy symbol of Tasmania’s exceptional wildness and beauty. You also receive the benefit of nostalgia from its image because it’s dead. You see it in shop windows felted, painted, sculpted and printed. It is available in ...

At a recent event in Melbourne to launch the Human Rights Law Centre’s Whistleblower Project, a new legal service for those who speak up about wrongdoing, an interesting divergence of views emerged. It revealed much about the troubled state of ...

This apparent inability of most Australians to come to terms with their own history persists to this very day. As a university teacher and professor of history, I have for the past twenty years encountered and taught thousands of Australian students, ...

‘A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration?’ This is the question all enrolled Australians will be asked later this year. Yes ...

It’s not the end of the world at all. It’s only the end of us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan’t be in it. —Nevil Shute, On the Beach Political winds swirl wildly these days ...

You rock up to the emergency department of your local hospital with a jagged piece of bone protruding from your leg. Despite seeing the inside of your body on the outside, the medics who made an oath to do no ...