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Evolution

The Portuguese Podengo

A Small Breed

By Sonya Hartnett
Among the canine entrants on the third day of competition at this year’s Royal Melbourne Show – the ethereal salukis and monolithic St Bernards, the dandyish whippets and the gentlemanly schnauzers – one small and comparatively unremarkable animal is attracting more than its fair share of attention. Competition name ‘Sleykh Cacao Chuao’, street name ‘Cino’, the little dog is a P
Alice Neel and Louise Bourgeois

Bodying Forth

By Drusilla Modjeska
The bodies of old women are rarely celebrated in art, and representations of them are few. The faces of older women who’ve achieved status and standing have long had their place in portraiture, which can indeed be a celebration. But the aged and unclothed female body – that’s rare indeed. If you see it at all, it’s likely to be as documentary or grotesque (think Diane Arbus, think Jen
'Rave On Buddy Holly'

Maybe Baby

By Robert Forster
Perhaps it could only happen to a white American boy writing songs and recording music during the first decade of rock ’n’ roll and at a time of American economic and cultural supremacy that, at his death on 3 February 1959, at the age of 22 years and 149 days, he could leave behind such a wealth of recorded material and a life of such tragic and tangled consequence. Buddy Holly was born in Lubbock, Texas, in 1936 and came to promin
The Case for a National Disability Insurance Scheme

Two Nations

By Anne Manne
Seven years ago, while bathing in a private backyard pool, she was terribly injured when a 90 kilogram man accidentally fell on her. The muscles were stripped from her spine, leaving nerve signals but no muscles to translate them. At age 31, Lillian was told she would have to spend the rest of her days in a nursing home. Through grit, hard work at rehabilita
Lice Infestations in Australia

Lousy Science

By Christine Kenneally
In a laboratory in the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Melbourne, Vern Bowles slides a Petri dish into a microscope and centres it on two coffee-brown lice eggs: one is full and opaque, the other empty and almost entirely translucent. Suspen
Yann Martel's 'Beatrice and Virgil'

End of History

By Inga Clendinnen
Not many people had heard of Yann Martel, the implausibly named Canadian novelist, before he won the 2002 Man Booker Prize for an implausible tale about an Indian boy marooned in a lifeboat with a Royal Bengal tiger travelling under the name of Richard Parker.

Water Gods

By Anna Funder
Not long ago I stood at the edge of my local pool in inner Sydney looking forward to getting a load off my feet – not that I had seen them for a while. I was in the last week of my third pregnancy, and my feet, along with quite a bit of the rest of me, had long since
Richard Dawkins' 'The Greatest Show on Earth'

Unbelievers

By Ian Lowe
You wouldn’t believe me if I claimed that almost half the people in a rich, modern country still thought the earth was flat, or that the Roman Empire never existed. It would be a ridiculous assertion. Yet almost half of all adults in the United States believ
Making Sense of the Flores Find

Lovely Bones

By Ashley Hay
This something took three days to extricate. It was a skeleton, so tantalisingly conserved that some of its sections were still joined, and so fragile that it had the consistency of wet blotting paper. The researchers thought it was a pre-modern child; they took it to t

Katharine’s Place

By Alice Pung
I am in Greenmount, Western Australia. The sign outside the house says Katharine's Place, but I didn't realise that her husband was still here, until Mardi told me. When she told me, I was staring at a bird in the gutter, at how the colours of death made it lo
How Do Creatures Think?

Toots's Kismet

By Robyn Davidson
As I do. And have always done.I have studied them in the wild, worked with them, shared my homes with them. Though ‘pets' seems too diminished a term to give to those aliens who have, throughout my life, kept me company, amused me, amazed me. Dogs, cats, par

Lazarus Taxa

By Ashley Hay
Extinction is one of the most popularly understood scientific ideas - that dangerous slide through the categories ‘threatened', ‘vulnerable', ‘endangered' and so on. There are celebrity cases like dodos and thylacines, and lesser-known cases like Colombian grebes
Recent books about religion

Letter to a Young Friend on God and the Question of a Good Lunch

By Amanda Lohrey
Dear Virginia,It's good to hear from you again, and I'm delighted to learn that you have decided to enrol in Cultural Studies 101. In light of this you might be interested in some books that have come my way recently on the subject of religion. There has, as you know, been a great deal of talk over the past decade about a religious revival, but religion is a
Who Holds the Past in Common Trust?

Corporatising Culture

By Malcolm Knox

Windows is Shutting Down

By Clive James