Discovering Humanities

Poets, archives & secret police Sascha Anderson was a prominent avant-garde poet in East Berlin’s underground literary scene in the early 1980s. He was also, it emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a high-ranking informer for the Stasi, East Germany’s infamous secret police agency. Revelations that communist East Germany’s literary and artistic circles […]

Reframing our national identity Once notorious for its “White Australia” policy, Australia is now one of the world’s most multicultural nations, with 28 per cent of people born overseas – a bigger proportion than in the UK, the US, New Zealand or Canada – and another 21 per cent having at least one parent born

Shifting perceptions Artistic expression has played an important role in First Nations people’s lives and cultures for tens of thousands of years: from paintings and engravings on rock walls, through to ceremonial sand and body art, bark paintings, decorated spears and boomerangs, and canvases that reflect stories of Country and culture. Until the mid-twentieth century,

Confronting a long-held myth It was the foundational myth, used to justify “terra nullius” and dispossession: before European settlement, Australia was an unoccupied and untouched wilderness; and the shadowy figures who were seen on the landscape were cast as uncivilised – even lacking agriculture.  It is thanks to archaeological and historical research by scholars such as John Mulvaney, Sylvia Hallam, Rhys Jones, Harry Lourandos and others, and recent popularisation of such ideas by Bill Gammage and

A dialect of its own The health, education and employment inequalities experienced by Indigenous Australians sometimes appear intractable, as does their over-representation in the prison system. One way to address these problems, linguists have discovered, is to tackle communication issues. For many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, standard Australian English is their second language. Their

A different kind of storytelling In the early 1980s, two Australian researchers independently filmed a Guugu Yimidhirr man, Jack Bambi, recounting how his boat capsized in shark-infested waters off the northern Queensland coast. The first time he told the story at his Hope Vale community, Bambi was facing in one direction. The second time, he

A call for change In the 1980s, Gunditjmara woman Connie Hart, an accomplished basket weaver, was keen to make an eel trap. However, the skill appeared to have been lost. In a display cabinet at the Museum of Victoria, she came across an eel trap woven by her mother, Frances Alberts, and collected by the

History from below India became an independent nation more than seventy years ago, but from that time its colonial history was largely told from the standpoint of its former imperial masters, or of nationalist elites. Almost absent from the narratives was the perspective of the peasantry and working classes, whose resistance to British rule played

Ben Jonson was, by any measure, a colourful and volatile character. He was also one of the most celebrated poets and dramatists of his age, surpassed in talent only by Shakespeare, his contemporary. His eventful life was charted in unprecedented detail, and with piercing insight, in a biography by Australia’s Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Life

Cognition for the classics The dramatic tales of war, heroics, adventure and adversity during the siege of Troy and its aftermath, recounted in the Iliad and the Odyssey, continue to captivate readers and audiences, inspiring plays, films, novels and poems, as well as new English translations. Australian classicist Elizabeth Minchin has uncovered new layers of

The historian & the magnate It’s the story of humanity, but also of other life forms, and of Earth, the stars and the universe itself. It’s “Big History” – and it so enthralled Bill Gates, who watched a lecture series about it while running on a treadmill, that he put up US$10 million to create

A sandwich on a bench As a young historian at James Cook University in Townsville in the 1970s, Henry Reynolds struck up a friendship with a gardener named Eddie Mabo. Mabo was astonished to learn, during one of their conversations, that his family’s ownership of ancestral land on his beloved Mer Island, in the Torres