Articles Archive

Science without a capital S

Selected for The Best Australian Essays 2011SCIENCE IS ONE of the few human constructs designed to test its own...

By Robyn Williams

The bone garden

AN OLD MAN is sitting by his fireside, candlelight illuminating a halo of wisps around his bald head. He...

By Margaret Merrilees

The play of days

I AM SITTING in the autumn shade at the edge of our long driveway. We always stop here on...

By Julienne van Loon

Doctrine of the top 500

IT IS OFTEN said that there are only 500 people in the country. Of course, this is untrue. There...

By Charles Firth

White me

IN THE COURSE of an average Australian lifetime, a white lifetime, face-to-face communication with Indigenous Australians might be fairly...

By Robert Hillman

Exploring the historical imagination

IT HAS BEEN said of George Macaulay Trevelyan that he was gifted with a 'vivid pictorial sense'. True enough,...

By Peter Cochrane

The minor fall, the major lift

ENGAGEMENT WITH THE fundamentals of music and sound deeply influence the formation of a composer's aesthetic. There is such...

By Andrew Schultz

What is seen and heard

‘What are these blinks of an eyelid, against whichthe only defence is an eternal an inhuman wakefulness?Might not they...

By Peter Ellingsen

Talking on the terrace

A FEW YEARS ago, I attended a wedding party in a guesthouse in a Bavarian village. The place was...

By Natasha Cica

Word for word

'Letters are signs of things, symbols of words, whose power is so great that without a voice they speak to us...

By Emma Hardman

We, the populists

IN OCTOBER 2010 Australia's Director of Military Prosecutions, Brigadier Lyn McDade, brought charges against three Australian soldiers, resulting from...

By Rodney Tiffen

Connection unbound by location

ONE DAY I met someone I didn't know I already knew. At the end of the first day of...

By Chris Chesher