history and culture Archives

History & Culture

Did a 19th-century sailor get swallowed by a sperm whale and survive?

It depends what you believe when you read the papers.

History & Culture

VIDEO: Meet the maker of monsters

Interview with Academy Award winning special effects artist, John Cox.

History & Culture

In pictures: 2016 Wings Over Illawarra airshow

Planes zoom overhead at the biggest annual airshow in the country, while punters crawl around the static displays with dreams of flight gleaming in their eyes. Read more about this event in the March-April issue of Australian Geographic (AG#137).

History & Culture

Celluloid dreaming

We look back at how the landscapes and legends of our continent have shaped Australia’s movie industry.

History & Culture

Parrot pie and possum curry – how colonial Australians embraced native food

The first European settlers in Australia used a dizzying array of flora and fauna in their kitchens – but they cooked them in a traditional British style.

Destinations

Art of gold: Hill End, NSW

Gold fever transformed a desolate patch of land into a thriving metropolis in the late 1800s. Once the fortunes ran dry, the town of Hill End was nearly abandoned but became a haven for some of Australia’s best-known artists.

History & Culture

LISTEN: Only known audio of indigenous Tasmanian words

Wax cylinders hold the only known recordings of any indigenous Tasmanian language.

History & Culture

The art of aeons

Emerging from the world’s oldest living culture, contemporary Aboriginal art has taken to the global stage to tell tales of ancient landscapes and storylines.