This week the McKinnon Institute had planned to publish its second annual index tracking the health of Australian democracy. Last year’s inaugural index served as a depressing baseline for anyone ...

Nations are built with pens and brushes not just hammers and nails. They exhibit their character in what they say about themselves as much as what is said about them. — Bruce Pascoe, Convincing Ground ...

The war had been over for a matter of days when Australia’s first female accredited war correspondent, Lorraine Stumm, filed her world scoop. She had tracked down and interviewed the first known ...

It’s been forty years since Mark Aarons, an ABC reporter, broke the news that Nazi war criminals were living in peaceful obscurity in Australian suburbia. What followed was astonishing for a country ...

Anna Haebich is a John Curtin distinguished professor at Curtin University, and an award-winning author and historian. Her latest publication is Dancing in Shadows: Histories of Nyungar Performance ...

Three hours into last Friday’s hearing of the parliamentary inquiry examining artificial intelligence, Nationals senator Ross Cadell asked a straightforward question about copyright. The answer he ...

Not far from Sydney’s Circular Quay, the old Chief Secretary’s Building — a sandstone relic of colonial New South Wales — is an incongruous setting for the picking apart of a controversial episode in ...

The 1980s should have been David Combe’s time. During an arduous career as a political operative — most recently as Labor Party federal secretary — this stocky, woolly-haired figure had shown ...

In Magnum Streetwise, Stephen McLaren distils and celebrates what many would regard as the most significant movement in postwar documentary photography. He brings together examples of the work of ...

Less than a year ago a little band of educators travelled to Canada to investigate why that country always seems to be ahead of Australia in the school achievement and equity stakes. The travellers ...

In 1925 the Commonwealth statistician Charles Wickens, himself the son of migrant parents, likened Australia’s approach to immigration to a boa constrictor and its food. “We are in the habit of ...

One in every eight visits to a general practitioner is seeking help with a mental health problem. Even so, fewer than half of the Australians who could benefit from mental health advice, treatment and ...