Discovering Humanities

A life in pots & vases The red figure pottery produced in the Greek settlements of southern Italy and Sicily during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE was far from uniformly exquisite but it provides a wealth of information about life in that period. Though he affectionately called some of the vases “little horrors”, A […]

A homegrown literary culture The first books arrived in Australia with the First Fleet in 1788, along with a small printing press and, from those early days, Australians read books and produced plays, poems, newspapers, and eventually all types of literature. Since the mid-twentieth century, scholars have been mapping the history of the book in

Introducing Homo floresiensis The chance discovery of ancient bones on an Indonesian island in 2003 had momentous implications, challenging the long-standing orthodoxy on human evolution. The partial remains of a woman of early human form were unearthed in a limestone cave on Flores by an Australian-Indonesian team of archaeologists led by Michael Morwood. Barely one

The blending of two cultures In the fourteenth century, traders from Arabia, Gujarat and China arrived in what is now Indonesia, seeking cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg. They brought with them Islam, and as some settled on Java and Sumatra, the new religion gradually blended with local culture. Jump forward seven centuries, and Indonesia is now

The problem of ‘yes’ In 2012, a Pintupi man from the Western Desert who spoke primarily two Aboriginal languages was charged with murder. Police informed him of his right to remain silent and asked him if he understood. The man, who had only conversational English, replied “Yes” and the interview proceeded. His conviction was later

Secrets & scribes The intense rivalry between Australian Football League clubs in Victoria has a long history. In the nineteenth century, Melbourne clubs used secret coaching manuals – handwritten, continually modified and passed down through the generations – to guide their strategy. This little-known fact is one example of how manuscripts, often penned by professional

An abundance of cultural riches When the National Library of Australia launched its Trove database in 2009, it heralded a remarkable moment for Australian humanities research. Suddenly, the books, newspapers and magazines, maps, paintings and photographs that documented Australia’s rich history and cultural life became available at the click of a button, from anywhere in

Forging a national identity When Indonesia gained its independence in 1950 following three centuries of Dutch rule, neither its national language nor literary canon were as developed as a modern nation required. There was an urgent need for both, in order to forge a national identity and culture and to unify this large, diverse country

A tale of two cities The discovery of ancient cities and monuments enriches our knowledge of human civilisation. What really captures our imagination, though, is learning about the everyday lives of those who inhabited them, their relations with their own world, and interactions between colonisers and colonised peoples. Two major projects by Australian archaeologists have

A discovery in the dunes Lake Mungo was emblazoned on the national consciousness during the early 1970s, following the scientific discovery of the oldest-known burials of the First Australians. The human remains had emerged onto the surface of an eroding sand dune on the lake’s edge.  At the time they were the oldest archaeological traces

I think therefore I am It’s a question that has tantalised philosophers since Plato and Aristotle: what, exactly, is the human mind, and how does it relate to the brain or body? The seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes claimed to have solved the puzzle. He was convinced that the mind and body were separate and

The Melbourne school Rhys Isaac called it “inclusive, ‘everybody-in’” history. For Donna Merwick, it was about making sense of “mysterious happenings in a culture that is not ours”. Isaac and Merwick were part of a collective of Melbourne-based social historians who, in the 1970s, adopted a new, ethnographic approach to studying and writing history. Rather