Audio on demand

Celebrate activist Rick Farley’s contribution to Australian environmental and political thought in this forum with friends, colleagues and the authors of his biography, A Way Through: The Life of Rick Farley.

Peter Singer is Australia’s best-known philosopher. Once labelled the most dangerous man on the planet, in this lecture facilitated by Jenny Brockie, he examines how well Australia is performing as a global citizen.

The inaugural Platform Conversations event was a provocative panel discussion facilitated by David Speers debating whether recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the Australian Constitution will make a meaningful difference to Indigenous peoples’ lives.

Curator Jennifer Wilson tells us how Australia’s first purpose-built home for the Commonwealth Parliament was opened with suitable pomp and ceremony in Canberra on 9 May 1927.

Don Watson looks at the triumph of modern management-speak and how those who favour the deliberately obscure and the falsely scientific are driving us all nuts.

Julian Burnside reflects on the importance of words in his life as a barrister, an activist, and a writer.

Ian McIntosh examines how Yolngu people negotiated disclosure and concealment in relation to Bayini bark paintings. What did they tell Charles Mountford about it and why? What did they tell other anthropologists and how is that issue significant?

Murray Garde considers the Wubarr ceremony performed in 1948 and examines the tangled cross-cultural politics of non-Aboriginal involvement in secret Aboriginal religious ceremonies in Western Arnhem Land.

Tony MacGregor examines the 1948 ABC radio feature about the Expedition both as a remarkable contemporary account and as a media object of an emerging form – the radio documentary feature.

Craddock Morton, Director of the National Museum of Australia, introduces, contextualises and launches the book by Sally K May: Collecting Cultures: Myth, Politics and Collaboration in the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition