Commentary
As part of his budget speech to the House of Representatives in April, Josh Frydenberg, the federal treasurer, announced that his suite of policy changes would ‘deliver better outcomes for all Australians’. Such talk is par for the course in parliamentary democracies ...
... (read more)'Forced marriage: MAFS and reality television’s chamber of horrors' by Alecia Simmonds
Perched on the precipice of the Blue Mountains, Leura is both quiet and wild, a place of misty romance, sylvan charm, and middle-class entitlement. I am here because some friends have offered me their house as a writing retreat for ten days so that I can pen a chapter on the history of marriage (1788 to marriage equality) for ...
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The University of Melbourne’s announcement on 30 January 2019 that Melbourne University Publishing would henceforth ‘refocus on being a high-quality scholarly press in support of the University’s mission of excellence in teaching and research’, which led to the resignations of its chief executive, Louise Adler ...
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I heard the Egypt story countless times, but then Dorothy Porter believed that if a story was worth telling, it warranted multiple retellings. In the late 1980s, before Dot and I met, she visited Egypt to gather material for her verse novel Akhenaten (1992). In Cairo, she joined a tour group taking in the major historical sights ...
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In October, the Australian research and academic community was angered by the revelation that the former Minister for Education and Training, Senator Simon Birmingham, vetoed eleven Australian Research Council (ARC) grants that had been recommended for funding following a rigorous peer-review process ...
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ABR has asked thirteen academics to respond to revelations that Education Minister Simon Birmingham had vetoed eleven Australian Research Council grants despite the Australian Research Council’s rigorous peer-review process. 'The humanities are the heart of our culture and of our knowledge ...
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Inspirational Memoirs, Painful Lives, Real Lives – these were the polite terms, the labels you might find on bookshop shelves, but the term that stuck was Misery Literature. The books had plaintive titles like Tell Me Why, Mummy, and Please, Daddy, No, or single-word gut-punches like Wasted, Fractured, and Damaged ...
... (read more)In the Melbourne Museum is a collection of rainforest leaves. Wafer thin, they are not part of the forest gallery that gives visitors a taste of Victoria’s modern-day temperate rainforest. Rather, they are part of an exhibition about the tropical rainforest that Victoria was home to millions of years ago ...
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We live in strange days. Matters once unlikely to raise a flicker of public criticism can now quickly became raging bushfires of self-righteous anger. Such is the accelerant power of social media. Our public discourse is, however, rarely the better for it. Subtlety and nuance are all too frequently sacrificed on the altar of a supposed moral clarity that, among othe ...
