May 2018

Manufacture. Sell. Deploy. Commemorate: is this how we should memorialise war? | Paul Daley

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Our cultural institutions have a stark choice: start doing less or find money elsewhere – anywhere

Our national cultural institutions stand on the sculpted face of the capital, Canberra, with a symbolism that reflects a practical purpose to serve as the memory and conscience of the country.

They have become accustomed to doing more with less as so-called “efficiency dividends” have compounded regular budgetary cuts forcing staff freezes and losses, halts in digitisation and compromises in the storage of collection items.

Nurse, journalist, mother: Helena Cass is a figure for our time | Paul Daley

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The State Library of Victoria has launched a public appeal to curate a collection about the life of Helena Cass

Helena Cass, a Canadian-born Australian wartime nurse and Melbourne socialite who turned to journalism after her career soldier husband died, was a woman ahead of her time.

Cass died in Melbourne more than half a century ago at the end of a long life that, while remarkable for its cultivated eclecticism, inquisitiveness and daunting energy, has slipped largely from public memory.

My daughter is right: our generation is wrecking the world for hers | Paul Daley

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I inherited a better world than my parents did. Our kids can’t say the same in an era of Trump, terrorism and climate deniers

The car is where I’ve discovered most about my parenting.

There was that time when I, a very young father, oh-so-briefly and absentmindedly left Number One Daughter in her baby capsule on the roof of the clapped-out Morris. It all turned out fine. So much so that she is now about to have her own child.

The National Picture: overwhelming reminder of wilful gaps in Australia's history

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Symbolically named for a Duterrau painting that has long been missing, exhibition in Canberra interrogates the stories we haven’t told

Interrogating Australia’s missing history – all of those events around the colonial frontier that so many of us never heard about at school or read of in the history texts that supposedly guided us – is a fraught but critical responsibility of our leading cultural institutions.