Abra Pressler

I was sorting and organising my papers recently, when I came across a sheet of lined paper containing the handwritten texts of three songs, transcribed for me in 1982 by Ferruccio Poiana (1923-2023), the father of my long-time friend, Lou. Ferruccio’s family had come to Adelaide in 1951 from their home near Udine in the […]

In 2017, researchers discovered ceramics, dating between 1,800 and 3,000 years old, in an archaeological excavation on Jiigurru conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) in partnership with the Dingaal and Ngurrumungu communities. The pottery sherds indicate ancestors of the Dingaal and Ngurrumungu communities traded goods, culture,

Only three weeks after its introduction, Google decided to suspend the image generation features of its newest generative AI model Gemini over accusations it contained an ‘anti-white bias’. The move follows a series of viral posts by X (formerly Twitter) users who were outraged that prompts used to generate images of America’s founding fathers, Vikings,

In 2016, Professor David McInnes FAHA FRHist received the Max Crawford Medal for his work researching lost plays in early modern Britian.   ‘I remember being the only Shakespeare scholar at my university, working on and studying lost plays,’ David reflects eight years after receiving the prize. ‘When I was told I was the recipient, I was overjoyed.’

This article is based on Dr Emma Cole’s 2024 Trendall Lecture, Experiencing immersion from antiquity to modernity, presented at the Australasian Society for Classical Studies Conference (ASCS) in February 2024. The full video of her lecture can be viewed at the end of this article. Immersive experiences are big business within today’s creative economy. Forms

The blockbuster films Dune: Part one (2021) and Dune: Part two (2024) started life as an epic serial novel by American science-fiction author Frank Herbert. Originally published as the novels Dune World and Prophet of Dune in 1963-64 and 1965, Herbert’s work was firmly grounded in the nuclear and environmental politics of the Cold War. The

The discrepancy between poetry and everyday language, and the difficulty that many of us have reading and understanding poetry, was once brought home to me by a very able student who confessed that she couldn’t see why people wrote poetry at all. ‘Surely’, she said, ‘the whole point of a poem is to tell a

I am currently sitting on the terrace of a Melbournian café, sipping a lemonade, and wondering how to explain to my students of French that a language is a living, dynamic entity that constantly evolves over time. Indeed, the proliferation of borrowings from English (or anglicisms) in the French vocabulary, particularly in the cutting-edge sectors

Content warning: homophobia, hate crimes against LGBTQI+ communities. Over the last half century, antagonism between NSW Police and Sydney’s queer communities has been extensive and, at times, intense. The recent, tragic deaths of Luke Davies and Jesse Baird — allegedly killed by Beau Lamarre-Condon, a NSW senior police constable — have rekindled and reactivated far-reaching