Arts & Culture

Australia's arts sector needs more than words to survive

Australian artists are struggling. To support those who tell Australian stories, we need to go beyond the government’s Revive policy

Research

How Pasifika communities are reconnecting with their past in Australian museums

When a Samoan ethnomusicologist visited Melbourne's Grainger Museum as a music student, she found objects her community had no idea were there. Now she's changing that

Opinion

What The Devil Wears Prada 2 says about the state of print media

In 2006, Runway magazine was the place everyone wanted to be. Twenty years on, the fictional fashion media giant is at crossroads – but just how close to reality is Miranda Priestly’s situation?

Research

After 100 years, the song of a lost cricket returns to Venice Lagoon

As part of the Venice Biennale festival, the Adriatic Marbled Bush-Cricket has been reintroduced to lagoons via floating habitats, creating both an art installation and an ecological experiment

Research

Giant jars, ancient bells, buried bones and a mystery that endures

On a remote Laos plateau, thousands of stone jars hold clues to an ancient megalithic culture. An Australian-Lao team is piecing together what survives one artefact at a time

Opinion

The influencers with millions of followers who don't actually exist

They have lucrative brand deals and strong political opinions. They’re also not real. Behind the scenes, a handful of tech companies are rewriting the rules of global culture

Opinion

Have ballet and opera actually benefited from a Chalamet Effect?

Timothée Chalamet called opera and ballet irrelevant. The industries clapped back, tickets sold – but now comes the harder task of keeping those audiences

Research

Seeing the world through a cat’s eyes

An artist and scientist explore how cats see digital media – through lenses of colour, attention and imagination – in ‘Cat Island’, an artwork for Science Gallery Melbourne

Research

What history can teach us about pregnancy, sex and taboo

A new book recovers a forgotten history – one in which pregnant women were desirable and their sexuality celebrated. So how did we end up so squeamish?

Opinion

Women in Afghanistan aren’t waiting for the system. They're building their own

Despite severe restrictions, Afghan women continue to carve their own pathways to education and opportunity