Essay Archives

Retro-assimilation

NOSTALGIA FOR AN assimilated nation haunts public debate on national identity and nationhood, as well as related issues of...

By Anna Haebich

On being invisible

AS A WIRADJURI woman with an education, access to health, employment opportunities and a platform, I am incredibly privileged....

By Anita Heiss

Beyond pity

I FIRST MET Zarah Ghahramani on Tehran's Revolution Boulevard in June 2003, just down the road from the northern...

By Robert Hillman

Disturbing undertones

AUSTRALIAN FICTION WRITERS have, until the last few decades, avoided settling in Canberra and writing about the city in...

By Dorothy Johnston

Explorers, writers and other creative strangers

In homage to Lech Paszkowski and all creative strangersIN THE IMMIGRATION office in Paris, I had one chance to...

By Joanna Kujawa

Howard’s way: northerly neighbours and western friends

IT IS VERY hard to find good, objective writing about the philosophies, motivations and political skills of this country's...

By Michael Wesley

The antidote of multiculturalism

Winner, 2008 Australasian Association of Philosophers Media PrizeA CRUEL IRONY has marked recent Australian social policy. Reconciliation between indigenous...

By Geoffrey Brahm Levey

Blow-ins on the cold desert wind

EACH YEAR I drive from my home near Canberra to the Tanami Desert and spend several months in an...

By Kim Mahood

Of the bomb

HE WAS A small old man and he sat alone in the tram. It was late July and very...

By Matthew Condon

The gap between work and choices

ON THE GRASS outside an abattoir on the Western Plains of New South Wales, in the dark, cool air,...

By David Peetz

The words to say it

THE FUNERAL WAS held in a rural town in New South Wales on the hottest day that year. I...

By Charlie Stansfield

Threat made manifest

DARWIN AIRPORT WAS the very first bit of Australia that I stepped onto as a nine-year-old migrant on the...

By Peter Stanley