Essay Archives

THE BEGUILING PROMISE of sport is that everyone is treated equally: that it transcends politics through meritocracy. Fair play...

MUCH OF MY life is spent writing about race politics, suicide and genocide. For relief, I write about sport –...

THERE IS NO doubt that soccer began to be associated with European ethnic groups in Australia after the Chifley...

By Josh Chiat

THERE’S A SPECIAL moment in mid-February when the grass at our local park is so smooth, tended so carefully,...

IN THE WESTERN tradition, faith and reason stand at opposing poles. My social-scientific training was deeply framed by this...

By Brendan Gleeson

MANY IN THE social sciences have given up on trying to imagine the future. Between the options of conceiving...

By Tim Flannery

TWO POWERFUL AND contradictory images come to mind when I’m asked to reflect on my experience of attending the...

By John Wiseman

IN JANUARY 1961, nobody on earth symbolised the future like John F Kennedy. At his inauguration the youthful president...

By Antony Funnell

IN THE SOUL of Man under Socialism (1891), Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘A map of the world that does not...

By Richard King

BIOMEDICAL RESEARCHERS LIKE me probe the mechanistic basis of health and disease. In a long career working at the...

By Peter Doherty

SINCE MY LATE teens, I’ve had a penchant for Russian literature. It started with Dostoevsky. It may have been...

By Andy Merrifield

White man got no dreaming Him go ’nother way White man him go different. Him got road belong himself.THESE...

By Graeme Davison