Friday essay: how to fix Parliament House - what about some neighbours?

Kim Dovey, University of Melbourne

Parliament House in Canberra celebrated its 30th birthday last week; the grass was freshly mowed and the fences to keep the citizens off the hill were under construction. While it is customary on such occasions to celebrate the virtues of what is surely a masterfully composed building, I want to explore here the relations of architecture to power. I will begin with some general points about these relations before returning to Parliament House with a little birthday gift...

Friday essay: the remarkable, prize-winning rise of our small publishers

Emmett Stinson, Deakin University

It has been a big 12 months for Australian small publishers, who have swept what are arguably the three most important national literary awards. Sydney press Giramondo published Alexis Wright’s biography Tracker, winner of the 2018 Stella Prize; Melbourne’s Black Inc. published Ryan O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers, which won the 2017 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction; and Josephine Wilson’s Extinctions (University of Western Australia Publishing) won the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award...

Religious backlash loosens clerics' grip on legacy of 1979 Iranian Revolution

Naser Ghobadzadeh, Australian Catholic University

With Iran’s ruling clergy already preparing to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it may be too late to question whether or not the revolution was in fact Islamic. What we can do, at least, is explore the revolution’s degree of Islamicness.

In Iran, like elsewhere in the world, often competing utopian political visions shaped the political landscape of the previous century. Marxism, nationalism and liberalism all played important roles in the 1979 revolution. Yet it was later branded “Islamic” with such insistence that this eventually became its sole adjective...

Friday essay: the complex, contradictory pleasures of pulp fiction

Peter Doyle, Macquarie University

That Sergeant Peppers album cover roll call of heroes seems a rather quaint exercise now. We’ve still got lists of heroes and anti-heroes but indie culture watchers and streetcorner critics have long since worked their way past the big figures like Elvis, Marilyn, Marlon and so on to people and places further out and further down...

Finkel: overcoming our mistrust of robots in our homes and workplaces

Alan Finkel, Office of the Chief Scientist

Here’s a question: do you consider yourself to be a trusting person? Or let me put it another way: would you put your life in the hands of a total stranger?

You do. Hundreds if not thousands of times, every day. Take me, for example.

This morning I woke up. I switched on the light – trusting that I wouldn’t be electrocuted by a faulty lamp, or cord, or socket. I prepared my breakfast – trusting that I wouldn’t be poisoned by salmonella in my factory-processed muesli...