If writing always made sense to the writer, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting,” says journalist Susan Orlean ...

Books & arts A day with Tom Stoppard and his biographer Glyn Davis 30 November 2025 On the death of the playwright this weekend, a brief memory ...

National affairs Growing bananas at the South Pole Stephen Wilks 2 October 2025 The great tariff clash shows how the Coalition manages to survive deep differences of ...

In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, 93 per cent of children attend public schools. In Alberta, the province that topped Canada for reading and science in the latest round of OECD tests, ...

For almost a decade the Coalition government insisted the states and territories had sole responsibility for ensuring that Australians on the lowest incomes had a place to call home. Even at the ...

When the BRW Rich List announced in 1987 that Australia now had it first two billionaires, their names — the cashed-up media magnate Kerry Packer and the lawyer and corporate raider Robert Holmes à ...

Seventy-four years ago an outfit called Australian Public Opinion Polls conducted a Gallup survey about Australians’ attitudes to immigration. The headline in Melbourne’s Herald emphasised the ...

With a few exceptions (including Andrew Leigh, Nicki Hutley and Angela Jackson) mainstream Australian economists — including me — haven’t thought, spoken or written as much about the causes and ...

Nations are built with pens and brushes not just hammers and nails. They exhibit their character in what they say about themselves as much as what is said about them. — Bruce Pascoe, Convincing Ground ...

Moree might be booming thanks to cotton and other crops, but many of the benefits haven’t yet reached the local Aboriginal people, the Kamilaroi, who comprise at least a fifth of its 9000 people.

The critics were right. Ten years after the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement, or AUSFTA, came into force, new analysis of the data shows that the agreement diverted Australia’s trade away ...

Across the southeast of the continent now known as Australia, the recent bushfire season provoked a surge in interest in Aboriginal peoples’ fire practices and knowledge. These practices are often ...