Essay Archives

NATURE WRITING HAS never been more popular. In recent years it has become an international publishing phenomenon, with titles...

By Inga Simpson

IMMIGRATION HAS BECOME one of the great defining, dividing issues of our time. In Europe, it is helping to...

FOR A MOMENT, as my plane finally descended into Canberra at the end of the long trip from Germany, I thought...

By Antje Missbach

LIKE THE MEMBERS of every nation, Australians have fairly stable ideas about the kind of people we are, to...

MY PARENTS ARRIVED in Australia on a fine September Sunday in 1946, a light to moderate westerly blowing across...

I HAVE A confession to make. Some years ago, while enjoying solace in a café, a well-nourished white bloke accosted...

By Masako Fukui

DURING MY DOCTORAL fieldwork researching Islamophobia from the point of view of the ‘Islamophobes’, I spent many weekends in the...

Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they...

IN THE BEGINNING, I had to avert my eyes – not that he’d asked me to or anything. Sometimes I’d try...

By Adele Dumont

My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, ‘Good fences...

By Alex Reilly

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this essay contains references to deceased people. IN LATE OCTOBER 1959,...

By Annabel Stafford

Dedicated to the memory of Michael Gordon (1955–2018) THE PEOPLES OF the Indian subcontinent have a significant presence in contemporary...

By David Hansen