essays

Literary historians have long known that nineteenth-century Australian newspapers published fiction. But the size of the newspaper archive and the difficulty of exploring it meant we had only partial knowledge of the stories and the importance of newspapers to the history of reading and writing fiction. The National Library of Australia’s (NLA) digitisation of historical […]

The broad appeal of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s mega-hit musical about one of the founders of the United States of America, may initially seem unlikely given its hip-hop soundtrack and rap lyrics. Hamilton premiered in 2015 off-Broadway in New York before transferring to Broadway, then touring the US and subsequently overseas including Sydney and Melbourne, with

For Mr Justice Higgins it was a straightforward metric: a man’s wage needed to be sufficient to support husband and wife and three children, calculated on the cost of rent and food and clothing. The Harvester Decision of 1907 was remarkable for its time, but as a preventative against poverty, it left out a lot

When disabled people enter a school, hospital, or workplace, whether as a service user, a job seeker, or, still too rarely, a worker, they often bring memories based on a long history of unsafe, difficult, and discriminatory encounters with professionals at all levels of the institution or industry. Running since 2019, the Royal Commission on

The Anglican Church in Australia has made great strides in its approach to women and women’s leadership over the past thirty years. In 1992, women were first ordained as priests in Perth, with Adelaide and Melbourne quickly following. Soon, many other dioceses (geographical regions) joined them. In 2008, the first women were consecrated as bishops,

Readers are advised that this article includes discussions of suicide. This article was published in 2022.  The language is very careful. The choice of words, the clarity, the respect. Reading the Interim Report of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide reveals the acute sensibility of the Commissioners. We are here to listen, they

This year Sydney Theatre Company has an exciting new production of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, equipped with all that modern technology can offer but also relying on good old-fashioned acting and directing skills. This seems like a good opportunity to reflect on how the original text by Robert Louis Stevenson came into being and

When Prime Minister Julia Gillard rose to deliver what became known as the ‘misogyny speech’ in October 2012, she had occupied the office for two and a half years. The novelty of the first (and to date only) female Prime Minister had ignited hateful and misogynistic pornographic images and abusive language on social media. In

Child removal has a long and troubled history in Australia. All the colonies quickly found that they had to make some arrangements for the care of orphaned or abandoned children. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, legislation, influenced by the Evangelical child rescue movement, introduced a more interventionist approach. New laws empowered

The Federal Government recently announced that the Royal Commission’s investigation into Centrelink’s automated debt recovery system (aka ‘robodebt’) will focus, among other things, on how to avoid similar debacles in the future. This is a crucially important point of inquiry, given the ongoing automation of bureaucratic and administrative operations. We live in an era of

Suddenly the crisis in care work is at the top of the political agenda. Whether it be nurses’ and early educators’ strikes or the shortage of childcare and kindergarten workers or the exploitation and exhaustion of the aged care and NDIS workforce, care work is all at once attracting public attention. Political leaders and media

In the first week of August 2022, China conducted live-fire drills and launched ballistic missiles across the East China Sea in response to the visit to Taiwan of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Some landed in the ocean near the islands of Okinawa in Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone. The prefecture of Okinawa carried a particularly