Sun, sand and survival: a short history of the Australian beach

After months of lockdowns, travel bans and uncertainty, that first crunch of warm sand between the toes brings a sigh of relief that, all being well, lasts at least until the end of January. Walking by the waves finally feels like a bookend to what’s been a testing year.

The ‘great Australian silence’ 50 years on

It’s 50 years since the anthropologist WEH Stanner gave the 1968 Boyer Lectures — a watershed moment for Australian history. Stanner argued that Australia’s sense of its past, its very collective memory, had been built on a state of forgetting, which couldn’t “be explained by absent mindedness”.