You don’t have to be a full-on Freudian to see the truth in Freud’s proposal that jokes are the release of pent-up ...

Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada begins with the preparation of a room. There’s a practised efficiency as well as a ritual quality to the way three people unpack boxes, move furniture, shift a Christmas ...

Donald Trump has declared 2 April “a Liberation Day” for the United States because “we’re going to be getting back a lot of the wealth that we so foolishly gave up to other countries.” It’s the day ...

The Melanesian arc running from New Guinea to Fiji is also an arc across Australia, the geography loaded with history and strategic weight. Australia’s life in Melanesia is studded with dreams and ...

Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don’t do what I want them to. — “Crosseyed and Painless,” Talking Heads Every ...

The name Miles Franklin will be familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in Australian literary culture. When the writer died in 1954 she bequeathed funds to create a literary award to be made ...

China views marriages between Chinese and Taiwanese as the perfect metaphor for national unification. In Taiwan, their status is more ambiguous. An explosion in numbers during the 1990s led to fears ...

Books & arts The outsiders Antonia Finnane 11 February 2025 Has Guan Hu made a film about the feral dogs of Chixia — or about China itself?

National affairs It’s no time to lose our heads Paul Strangio 8 November 2024 What lessons should Labor take away from the Democratic Party’s defeat?

Books & arts Three “bloody difficult” subjects Tim Rowse 4 July 2023 Historian Ruth Ross, the Waitangi Treaty and historical mythmaking are the subjects of a provocative account of New Zealand’s ...

The Vatican has the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith. Australian schooling has AERO. New, not very important but very symptomatic, the Australian Education Research Organisation fits snugly into ...