Discovering Humanities

The Academy Editions They are Australian classics we think we know well – works such as Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (for too long known as For the Term of His Natural Life) and Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl. Yet the stories behind them are far more complex than we might realise, as a landmark […]

A new kind of ethics Richard Sylvan and Val Plumwood – formerly the married couple Richard and Val Routley – were leading proponents of a new environmental ethics which emphasised the intrinsic value of the natural world. Plumwood and Peter Singer both featured in Routledge’s 2001 Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment, alongside Darwin, Buddha,

A language all of our own Is there such a thing as Australian English? Or do Australians speak a bastardised form of British English, incorporating some choice local words and phrases? (Such as – a simile no foreigner would understand – “flat out like a lizard drinking”.) The answer to the first question is an

Mutiny on the Batavia It was one of the most gruesome sagas of Australia’s early European history: the massacre of more than a hundred men, women and children by mutineers on a remote, inhospitable island following the shipwreck in 1629 of the Dutch East India vessel Batavia. The bloody events, which unfolded off the coast

Tracking the Brontës in a Greyhound bus Nearly two centuries after their deaths, Charlotte Brontë and her sisters remain among the best-loved writers in English literature, their novels read and re-read – and the minutiae of their lives pored over – by millions of people around the world. It’s well known that these extraordinary women

A billion dollar industry Australia’s cultural and creative industries generated nearly $112 billion for the economy in 2016 to 2017 and employed 600,000 people, more than mining and agriculture combined. And while many other industries have been shedding jobs because of automation and other factors, creative employment – which includes people working in screen production,

Two databases, both alike in dignity In 1789, the year after Britain colonised Australia, settlers staged their first theatre production in a mud-wall hut in Sydney: a performance of Irish playwright George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, with Governor Arthur Phillip in the audience. The production is among more than 100,000 theatrical events recorded in AusStage,

Do emotions have a history? Throughout human history, emotions have inspired and shaped individuals and societies. The driving force behind wars, relationships, culture and creativity, they continue to play a central role in every realm of life today.  The broad-ranging impacts of human emotions have, in recent years, been exhaustively explored and illuminated by Australian historians, psychologists, musicologists, archaeologists, and

A world of grammatical wonders The rainforests of north-east Queensland, the ancestral country of the Dyirbal people, are replete with wild fruit and vegetables. They were an important food source – so important that the Dyirbal language has a special gender just for edible plants. This is just one of the “grammatical wonders” of the

Illuminating challenges, creating solutions What have art, literature, philosophy and history got to do with rising sea levels, mass species extinctions and over-consumption of natural resources? Plenty, according to researchers in the environmental humanities, who demonstrate that science and technology alone cannot solve the global challenges threatening the planet’s future. By exploring the human dimensions

Puzzle in the Pacific The islands of the Pacific were among the last spots on Earth to be colonised by humans – and just how that happened has puzzled outsiders since European explorers arrived in the sixteenth century. A prehistoric people referred to as Lapita piloted their canoes across vast stretches of ocean, settling on

Placing women at the centre As the winds of women’s liberation swirled across Australia during the 1970s, women historians began re-examining the national story. And what they found was largely a tale of men’s deeds, feats and adventures. As historian Marilyn Lake wrote: “Though women gave birth to the population, only men it seemed could