Essay Archives

NEARLY FIFTY YEARS ago I walked into the Dickensian editorial offices of The Age in Collins Street, Melbourne, to start a...

By Geoffrey Barker

WHEN THE DEEPEST economic crisis of the past fifty years finally ends, a changed world will be left in...

I RECENTLY PARACHUTED into the crucible of the American policymaking debate when I was invited to present alongside Robert...

By Christopher Joye

Shortlisted, 2010 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Essay Advancing Public DebateAt particular times a great deal of stupid people have...

By Gideon Haigh

RECENTLY I HAD an eyelash transplant. Hairs were taken from the back of my neck and placed across the...

By Kevin Brophy

THE NEW GIRLS is a 1979 novel by Beth Gutcheon. It relates the lives of five teenage girls, students of an...

By Carmel Bird

A WHILE AGO I went to a lecture on geothermal power. Afterwards I got talking to the man sitting...

By Kate Grenville

IN THE 12 months since President George W. Bush made his Top Gun arrival on the deck of the...

By Stephen Sewell

PITY THE POOR spin doctors. Few occupations are more despised than theirs but then few occupations offer such power...

THE FIRST FOUR years of the 21st century have produced enough strange and unsettling developments to haunt a far...

By Brian Urquhart

SIMONE WEIL SAID in her book The Need for Roots (Routledge and Paul, 1952) that truth is "a need...

By Raimond Gaita

‘EATING IS NOT merely a biological activity, but a vibrantly cultural activity,' the food anthropologist Sidney Mintz reminds us....

By Donna Lee Brien