In Too Soon Too Late: History in popular culture (1998), Meaghan Morris evokes Walter Benjamin’s ‘poor angel of history’, whose wings, ‘encrusted’ with scholarly citation, now beat ‘sluggishly in the service of a not very lively professionalism’. The critical discourse around W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) sometimes produces a similar feeling of fatigue, not least in its relationship to Benjamin, whose influence on Sebald’s melancholic oeuvre is well documented. 

When I think of Bach, I recall powdered wigs, a dim, gilded hall, limelight burning on a stage, rouged cheeks, finely turned men’s calves in stockings. I am in the audience, I am in a box seat, I am holding a fan, but really, I am nowhere at all.

For a long time, Antigone Kefala was thought of as a migrant writer. This lens confined discussion of her work to the territory of biography and witness and obscured the migratory poetics of the writing itself. In her spare, bristling poems and candid journals, and across her non-fictional prose and fiction, Kefala’s restive work hinges on precision and vision.

There’s a crisis happening in Australia – and each year it worsens,’ writes Tracy Westerman. Aboriginal children face devastating disparities: they die at four times the rate of non-Aboriginal children and forty per cent of these deaths are suicides, in some cases of children as young as ten years old. 

An unknown woman – traumatised, amnesiac, unable to speak – is found just north of Broken Hill in western New South Wales. Who she is and what happened to her is the question that drives Gail Jones’s twelfth novel, The Name of the Sister.

The first six months of the second Trump administration have left American allies worldwide, including Australia, in a state of shock and sullen resignation. Shock at the resumption of Trump’s global trade and tariff war, following threats to Canada, Greenland and Mexico, not to mention the harm being done to American institutions and soft power; resignation that US protectionism and the rising demands of Washington on allies to pay more for their own defence are here to stay.

Kirli Saunders (OAM) is a proud Gunai Woman and multi-award-winning writer, artist, singer-songwriter, and consultant. Kirli creates to connect, to make change. She was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for her contribution to the arts in 2022. Kirli is the author of eight books, including Bindi (2020), Returning (2023), Afloat (2024), and Eclipse (2025). Her theatre show Yandha Djanbay will tour in 2026.

Remember when the Russians ‘liberated’ Berlin in 1945, ending World War II? The iconic image of a Soviet soldier raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag became a staple of popular culture as well as historical memory. It was the culminating point of the wartime Alliance of the ‘Big Three’, with Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin hanging out together like old friends and deciding the fate of the world.

The global reaction to the recent death of Pope Francis and the ensuing election of Pope Leo XIV confirmed the centrality of the Vatican to its 1.3 billion followers and the international political landscape. The Vatican is the world’s smallest sovereign city-state with a tiny permanent population of 882, yet has immense influence. The intensely hierarchical Holy See is far from transparent. Secrecy, scheming, intrigue, and subterfuge have been the hallmarks of its modus operandi, to which the film Conclave (2024) so grippingly alludes.

Of all the revolutionary regimes of the modern era, few sought to remake society as radically as Communist  China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 to purge ‘class enemies’ and revitalise socialist ideals, the movement quickly spiralled into widespread upheaval that slipped beyond the Party’s control. Amid mass campaigns and brutal struggles, waves of political activism surged from below, jolting the very foundations of the Communist state and reshaping the country’s cultural and political landscape.