Can you imagine Australia without Medicare, the age pension, or with 50% tariffs on imported goods such as cars, clothes and shoes?

Institutions we take for granted now took many decades of agitating, fighting vested interests and staring down passive resistance to be created. This is the realpolitik of economics.

Economic reforms have changed institutions and systems to significantly improve wellbeing for Australians. They are less glamorous than scientific and technological innovations, but our standard of living would be very much worse without them.

To some extent ideas are cheap. They are the fun part of reform. The heavy slog of realising ideas can consume lives and test the dedication of even extraordinary people.

These struggles show that reform has never been easy, but persistence pays off.

The 30-year battle for Medicare

Before 1975, health care was largely fee-for-service with some private insurance coverage. Most uninsured people were low-income and people with chronic or severe problems.

Between 1937 and 1953, there were four failed attempts to introduce a universal health plan. However, it was fiercely opposed at every turn by the medical and health insurance associations. They fought at both the emotional and political level and managed to forestall a national health insurance scheme by three decades.

The final successful push to introduce a universal scheme came from research work at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic Research at the University of Melbourne. An alliance with sympathetic media created enough heat that Gough Whitlam, then deputy leader of the opposition, supported it behind the scenes.

After the Coalition won the 1969 federal election, the reform plan was opposed by all other federal members of parliament, including Labor. However, Labor’s Bill Hayden and Whitlam continued to make it official Labor policy.

Labor won the 1972 election, but medical bodies still resisted the reform. One set up a A$2 million “fighting fund”. The General Practitioners Society asked GPs to distribute letters that included the line: “The control of our country has fallen into the hands of socialists.”

The argy-bargy between Hayden, the doctors, private insurers, hospitals, bureaucrats and state governments could fill volumes.

The sticking points were about money, profits and control – not what was in the best interests of the population. The legislation was eventually passed in 1974.

Successive generations of health department officials had simply believed that reforms to the health care system were not possible.

Garnishing wages to support children

Before the mid-1980s, financial support for children following divorce was either agreed privately or determined by court order. Although courts typically struck very low rates of payment, compliance was estimated to be only 30%. Custodial parents often lived in extreme poverty.

The problem at the time was easy to articulate: why should children suffer because their parents had decided to separate?

Labor’s Minister for Social Security Brian Howe intended to solve this problem. He appointed experts Bettina Cass and Meredith Edwards to build an evidence base and implement a solution.

Edwards proposed that employers deduct payments directly from workers’ wages, along with income tax. The child payment portion would be transferred to the custodial parent.

As strange as it sounds, it was opposed all along the social security chain of command. It was considered an “impossible reform”, according to Edwards.

The department of social security was openly hostile. At first, it did not take the review seriously, then it kept putting up different arguments for why it could not be done. Finally, it moved Edwards and her team out of the building as they posed a “safety risk”.

Undeterred, the team never took no for an answer and worked out solutions for each “unsurmountable” barrier.

The tax office was also antagonistic to assisting the child support unit, saying it wasn’t their job and it would cost too much to run.

The child support scheme officially began in 1988, meaning it’s now been in place for almost two generations.

Dismantling trade barriers

By the 1950s, Australia was the second most protectionist country among advanced economies, with an average tariff rate of about 30%.

By 2017, Australia had close to the lowest tariff rates in the world, with an average tariff of less than 1%. How did this come about?

The Australian journey to a low-tariff environment was driven by the intellectual force of academic economists. It was eventually taken up by successive Australian governments.

The arguments from economists such as Max Corden and Dick Snape were that Australia’s high level of import tariffs were lowering the average standard of living of the Australian people by forcing people to pay high prices for imported goods.

Economic evidence was used to considerable effect. Work done by politicians, backed by evidence from economists in academia and the public service, eventually disarmed manufacturers. Evidence made manufacturers focus on long-term issues rather than just immediate effects. Economic analysis was used to set out clearly the trade-offs of not making a change.

The business media was often brought in as an ally.

It took many reports by the Productivity Commission and its predecessors for the export and household sectors to appreciate how much tariffs were undermining their standard of living.

The main opponents to tariff reform were the NSW Labor right and the Business Council of Australia. However, the National Farmers Federation and the Australian Mining Industry Council eventually understood the (positive) implications for their exports and exerted their muscle.

By the 1980s, the broad arguments were largely accepted by both major parties and the labour movement. As a trade economist, Corden advocated for a gradual simplification of tariff rates and then reduction of import barriers. The Button Plan in the 1980s, and later plans from the Bracks and Green Reviews in the 2000s, had programs to help affected businesses refocus their markets or close in an orderly manner.

Interestingly, tariff reforms were not traditional Labor issues. But they were adopted by then Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Treasurer Paul Keating, who realised that some of the party’s mantras were undermining the party’s goals of social and economic justice.

What do we learn from these examples?

There are none so blind and belligerent as vested interests. We’ve seen this more recently in the vocal pushback to the federal government’s recent tax reforms.

Australia has entrenched economic and social problems, from unaffordable housing to wealth inequality.

No government, from any party, can fix those problems in one or two terms. History shows it takes persistent work over decades. At times, change can feel impossible. But that’s what health officials once said about setting up Medicare too.

Beth Webster, Director, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t yet causing widespread job losses in Australia. But with some high-profile business leaders still predicting a looming unemployment “crisis” it’s little wonder many people fear AI is coming for their job.

Anxiety about automation dates back to the early days of the industrial revolution. We know with the benefit of hindsight that the machinery of mass production ultimately did upend the lives of many workers and transform the world.

Yet today, centuries later, people haven’t stopped making things by hand; far from it. In much of the world, handicrafts are booming. From quilting and knitting to pottery and wood carving, many old skills are enjoying something of a resurgence among a new generation.

So, what’s behind the enduring appeal of making something by hand? And can looking to the past teach us anything about this present moment?

The backlash to industrial abundance

Edmund Cartwright, an English clergyman and inventor, first patented an early version of the power loom in 1785. It took a few decades of refinement to develop this invention into a reliable machine, but its adoption ultimately redefined the textiles industry.

As the industrial revolution rolled on, a group of labour activists we now know as the “Luddites” protested the working conditions and job losses that resulted.

Today, the term is used to describe people generally hostile to new technologies, but this contemporary usage misses the fact that they did have a point: industrialisation did have a devastating impact on many workers and their communities.

However, responses to the industrial revolution were not only political and economic. They were also cultural and aesthetic, and in some cases, a rejection of the cheapness of industrial abundance.

Across Europe and beyond, the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late 19th and early 20th century looked to craft practices, handmaking, and nature as stylistic inspiration for this most Victorian of radical politics.

As William Morris, designer, writer, activist and manufacturer famously stated at the time:

Have nothing in your house you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

An enduring appeal

Crafts are as popular as ever. According to recently released results from Creative Australia’s sixth National Arts Participation Survey, an estimated nine million Australians participate in creating some form of art or craft. Among these, visual arts and craft are the most common.

For many people, craft is more than a hobby. My previous research has shown that at the time of the last Australian census, 116,538 people were employed in jobs requiring craft skills, or 1.1% of the total workforce.

This included roles ranging from stonemasonry to industrial ceramics, scientific instrument making to textile production and fashion.

What about the cost?

Crafting today can be an expensive business. Hand spun, rare breed, naturally dyed wools can be knitted on handmade needles.

But you can also still pick up a pair of needles cheaply at your local op shop and some old wool from someone’s no-longer-needed stash.

However despite this growth in interest, Australia’s arts and craft retail sector is facing pressure from the shift to online sales.

In June, craft supplies and fabric supplier Lincraft announced it would be closing all physical Lincraft stores in Australia.

While some large retailers may be under pressure, more local, specialist and high-quality shops are opening to fill the demand for making materials driven by interest and recreation, not need or frugality.

Notably, across its 20 years of existence, craft supply stores have featured among Etsy’s most successful shops.

There is also growing demand for haberdashery, an over $A550 million sector, as new generations motivated by sustainability repair and alter existing garments rather than buy new ones.

Why analogue is so appealing

But more recently and often as part of wider trends driven by young people to make space to slow life down, avoid “doomscrolling” and perhaps get offline together, there is growing interest in the making side of craft.

Beside the sociality and sense of achievement this can offer, having the skills to repair items or re-use existing materials resonates with a commitment to living more sustainably.

In this way, craft can mark a re-calibration of our relationship to the material world grounded in care, doing things well, and at a human not industrial scale.

For some, too, crafting offers a way to connect with family across generations as they carry on a craft practice learned from parents or grandparents, linking with family memory and bringing this into the present (and hopefully, the future).

The time, labour and skill that goes into making rather than just buying a gift to give to another elevates that present to a whole new level of meaning.

A fulfilling sense of friction

Developing skills to turn materials into useful items has throughout history been a motivating human force. A key driver behind craft’s enduring appeal is precisely the friction of doing it “the old way”.

In the face of AI disruption, it is notable that creative manual work is seen as relatively safe from being replaced, requiring imagination and fine motor skills that AI can’t replicate.

Today, the sense of tangible achievement that comes from this offers many people, including growing numbers of younger people, a sense of control and agency in a world that often feels out of control, echoing again the words of William Morris:

A good way to rid one’s self of a sense of discomfort is to do something.

Susan Luckman, Professor of Culture and Creative Industries, Adelaide University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

From fistfights in the corridors to tractors driven up its front steps, New Zealand’s parliament has seen plenty of odd and unruly behaviour by sitting MPs.

But a few other controversies have involved something slightly less rowdy: knitting.

In the latest instance, Labour MP Deborah Russell was spotted stitching together a woollen vest during parliament’s question time last week. Around half of more than 43,000 respondents to a Stuff poll thought it unacceptable.

Russell’s defence? It helps her stay calm and focused. She also described it as a way of signalling displeasure with the debate happening in the chamber.

In suggesting a political element, Russell wasn’t pulling the wool. Knitting happens to have a long and storied place in political protest in New Zealand and around the world.

A history of needling

Knitting is often seen as a quiet hobby for the home and hearth. And for good reason: research suggests it can be calming, aid concentration and create social connections.

But its quiet nature has also made knitting an unlikely tool for protest.

During the French Revolution, women known as tricoteuses famously knitted while watching public executions. During World War I, Belgian women reportedly used knitting to record the movements of German troops and artillery.

New Zealand has its own history of knitting rubbing up against politics. An 1880 illustration depicts women knitting as they watched proceedings from parliament’s ladies’ gallery.

Heather Nicholson’s history of New Zealand knitting, The Loving Stitch, contains a colourful anecdote from the women’s suffrage debate of this period: “a ball of wool rolled right up the Speaker’s chair”, while “a half-finished camisole fluttered down to the feet of a scandalised legislator”.

Whether this was simply a knitting mishap or a political gesture is unclear.

There was less ambiguity about Marilyn Waring. The renowned feminist and former National MP, who was the first woman to knit on parliament’s floor, later described her own knitting as a political act.

More recently, former National leader Bill English accused Labour’s Judith Tizard of showing “contempt and arrogance” by knitting in 2002. And in 2021, then-Labour MP Stuart Nash objected when ACT’s Nicole McKee knitted during a tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh.

Away from the halls of power, New Zealand has plenty of other examples of disruptive stitching. In 1955, women staged a “knit-in” on railway tracks to protest the closure of the Nelson railway line, continuing for ten days before being arrested.

Overseas, the pink “Pussyhat” became a symbol of the 2017 Women’s March in Washington DC, where hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered following Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Knitting has also been a source of cultural innovation. Māori women unravelled wool from imported knitted garments and reworked it into korowai – an example of one culture’s materials being adapted for another.

A common thread

These examples show how something associated with quiet domesticity can carry a very public message. Knitting offers a form of protest that does not need to be loud or confrontational to make a point.

There’s also a clever term for this: craftivism. In 2009, British activist Sarah Corbett founded the Craftivist Collective to promote what she called “the art of gentle protest”.

To better understand this phenomenon, I interviewed 50 women in four countries involved in knitting for social change.

In Australia, Christian social justice organisation Common Grace invited people to knit “climate scarves” for politicians, using coloured stripes to depict changes in average global temperatures over the previous century.

For some of the women I interviewed, the project offered a way to participate in politics when they might otherwise have felt powerless. As one grandmother told me: “I’ve never spoken to a politician… I’m a little ordinary person. I’m sitting here watching the world get hotter. [Knitting] gave me some agency.”

Another described the scarves as a gentler way of communicating the urgency of climate change.

In England, knitting was used to show solidarity with survivors of church abuse.

Survivors in the Diocese of Newcastle had adopted the strawberry as a symbol of resilience and change, prompting church knitting groups to make more than 600 red and green knitted strawberries.

Many carried handwritten messages of support and were displayed inside the cathedral. One participant described the result as “exuberant defiance” – a particularly potent description given how abuse within religious settings can involve the silencing of survivors. Here, their voices were being made visible at the heart of the church.

Across these projects, I found knitting could give people a sense of agency, connect those who might otherwise feel isolated and make overlooked voices more visible.

As amusing or irksome as it may have seemed to many of us, Deborah Russell’s knitting was part of a rich and meaningful tradition.

For generations, women have taken an activity often regarded as quaint and homely and carried it into public life – sometimes for comfort, sometimes for community and sometimes to make a political point.

Perhaps that’s why, after all these years, a harmless pair of knitting needles can still get parliament in a tangle.

Stephen John Taylor, Research Affiliate, Centre for Theology and Public Issues, University of Otago

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Some 550 million years ago, the Earth looked very different to what it does today. The Southern Hemisphere was dominated by an enormous, single continent known as Gondwana.

This continent was first recognised by Austrian geologist Eduard Seuss in 1885 based on the presence of a unique plant fossil that was first discovered in the Gondwana Province of India. The fossils were then found in Australia, Africa, Antarctica and South America, demonstrating these land masses were once connected.

But whether Gondwana was an actual “supercontinent” has been a subject of intense scientific debate in recent years.

A new paper I coauthored, published today in Science Advances, helps settle the debate. Our team found a previously hidden part of the Gondwanan landmass that’s now buried under mountains, which shows it was much bigger than previously thought.

What exactly is a supercontinent?

The concept of supercontinents and supercontinental cycles came about in the mid-1980s when geologists first recognised cyclic, global-scale sea level changes in the geological record. These cycles dated back at least 2 billion years.

Since the 1980s, at least four supercontinents have been recognised. The youngest is Pangea which formed 300–250 million years ago. Gondwana is the second youngest at 550–500 million years. Rodinia formed about 1 billion years ago and the oldest verified is called Columbia or Nuna, which formed between 2–1.6 billion years ago.

However, the supercontinent status of Gondwana has been questioned in the 21st century. This was because an arbitrary value of 75% of continental landmass was considered necessary to attain supercontinent status and Gondwana was initially measured at 64%.

The initial measurement of Gondwana was based on five core continental fragments: India, South America, Africa, Australia and Antarctica. Subsequent measurements included landmasses extending from the Appalachian mountains in the United States, through southern Europe, to Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, then connecting to India.

Even so, the additional landmass was insufficient to increase the status of Gondwana.

Gondwana’s true scale

As is often the case in science, our team’s discovery of Gondwana’s buried bits was serendipitous.

We were compiling a global dataset of granite samples from around the world to understand how deep crustal processes relate to mineral formation. Part of that deep Earth understanding was to determine the age of the rocks from which the exposed granites – now at surface – came from.

Most granites are formed by melting older continental rocks. We used a special technique which measures the amount of radioactive isotopes in rocks. This technique has existed for several decades, but the individual datapoints from rock samples is rarely plotted at a continental scale. We did this at global-scale to generate an age-map of the deep Earth.

To give an example, even though some granites formed in the Himalayas only 20 million years ago, others formed at 50 million years. Still others formed at 120 million years ago. But our analysis showed that all the Himalayan granites were derived from a common continental block.

That block formed approximately 700–550 million years ago and was part of Gondwana.

We have traced the original Gondwanan fragments from India and southeast Asia, through most of China into Kazakhstan. Previously, much of this region was thought to be ancient ocean floor containing volcanic island chains like in the Pacific Ocean today.

It turns out that most of this region, which is now mountainous and covered by younger rocks, was originally part of Gondwana.

This finding expands Gondwana’s continental landmass to roughly 80%. In other words, it really was a supercontinent.

So what if Gondwana was a supercontinent?

It matters that greater Gondwana was a true supercontinent because the world changed immediately after it formed.

The formation of supercontinents can impact global dynamics, such as global climate and biological change, including the explosion of life on Earth between 550 and 500 million years ago.

Many models have invoked specific environmental effects for the Cambrian explosion, as this event is known. But the profound changes required a global cause-and-effect relation.

Even then, linking global climate, biology and geology is daunting. However, other isotopes found in carbon, oxygen and seawater were recording the same change. So here was a paradox to evaluate with our new information.

When greater Gondwana was forming between 750 and 550 million years ago, Himalayan-sized mountain ranges criss-crossed the supercontinent. Gondwana was an entirely frozen, arid landmass.

However, once the continental fragments amalgamated, Earth had to reconfigure its plate tectonics. A volcanic arc chain formed that encircled the supercontinent, extending from Russia, via China, Australia, Antarctica, South Africa to the Andes of South America.

This volcanic arc around Gondwana was the precursor of today’s Ring of Fire around the Pacific Ocean. It was also similar in length, almost 35,000km.

Like the present day, this ancient ring of fire was associated with constant volcanic eruptions. It released huge amounts of volcanic gases, especially water vapour and carbon dioxide. Present-day gas emissions from volcanoes are estimated at 1–4 million metric tonnes of water vapour and 150–370,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide daily – most coming from the Ring of Fire.

Once the Cambrian ring of fire formed, the huge amount of gas emitted each day over 50 million years helped change Earth’s climate from icehouse to greenhouse. And in doing so, it was the catalyst for life to proliferate for the first time on planet Earth.

Bill Collins, Adjunct Professor, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tasmanian devils are among Australia’s most distinctive mammals. Stocky, powerful and famously noisy, wild populations are now restricted to Tasmania.

But this was not always the case. In fact, thousands of years ago devils could be found across mainland Australia.

Skeletal remains of Tasmanian devils have been found in deposits from southern Australia to the tropical north, across the Nullarbor, central Australia, Queensland, the Northern Territory and parts of southern Western Australia. Yet one major region was missing from this record: Western Australia’s Pilbara region.

Our new study, published in Archaeology in Oceania, reports the first unequivocal evidence of Tasmanian devils from the Pilbara, recovered from the Juukan 2 rockshelter on Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura Country.

Why the Juukan rockshelter matters

Juukan 2 was a large rockshelter in the western Hamersley Plateau. Archaeological research has shown people used the shelter from at least 47,000 years ago, including through the dry Last Glacial Maximum (roughly 29,000 to 19,000 years ago).

The shelter is the only known mainland northern Australian Pleistocene-aged archaeological site where faunal remains occur in unequivocal association with stone tools. Its deposits preserve an unusually detailed record of people, animals and environmental change.

That record became internationally significant after Juukan 2 was extensively damaged by mining blasting in 2020. Research and rehabilitation have since continued under the direction of Traditional Owners.

A jaw, a tooth and thousands of scavenged bones

The strongest evidence for devils at Juukan comes from two fossils.

The younger fossil is part of a lower jaw preserving the first two molars. Dating of the sediment around the bone shows it is between 6,900 and 7,300 years old.

The older specimen is a fragment of a lower first or second premolar. This tooth was excavated from sediment dated to between 42,500 and 47,100 years old.

Our findings are reinforced by a much larger body of evidence – the context archaeologists and palaeontologists use to interpret the past.

We have examined more than 8,000 catalogued animal bones from Juukan so far. More than 1,000 show chewing or gnawing marks from mainly rodents, but also quolls, devils and perhaps monitor lizards.

Upon analysing 55 of the bone specimens, we found at least ten with tooth-pit dimensions (or gnaw marks) closest to those produced by Tasmanian devils.

These devil-like marks occur in deposits from pre-Last Glacial Maximum (roughly 47,000 to 26,000 years ago), post-glacial (roughly 19,000 to 11,600 years ago) and Holocene (roughly 11,600 years ago to present day). This shows that devils repeatedly scavenged at Juukan across a substantial part of the sequence.

We also examined 263 digested bone fragments found in the rockshelter. These fragments are too big to be from the prey of Pilbara’s smaller extant carnivores like quolls and mulgaras. They are most compatible with digestion by a large bone-eating dasyurid such as the Tasmanian devil.

Taken together, the fossils, tooth marks and digested bone show that devils were a recurrent part of the Juukan scavenger community over tens of thousands of years. They persisted through dramatic environmental change, demonstrating they were not restricted to the cooler or more temperate environments where they live today.

Devils, people and a changing scavenger community

Juukan also gives us a rare glimpse into the ecological relationship between people and devils.

Much of the medium- and large-animal bones at Juukan were brought into the shelter and butchered by people, while smaller animals were often gathered by owls and deposited as pellets. The devil-like chewing occurs on the larger material associated with humans.

This raises the possibility that human camps provided predictable scavenging opportunities for devils for tens of thousands of years.

The finds also complement devil-like rock art at Nganjarli in Murujuga, within the Dampier Archipelago National Heritage Place.

No comparable images are currently known from around Juukan itself. However, marine shell beads from the rockshelter indicate that people or objects moved between inland and coastal areas during the Holocene. Cultural knowledge of animals such as devils may likewise have circulated through these connections.

Importantly, there is no evidence that the two Juukan devil fossils themselves were butchered, cooked or eaten. Their presence may instead reflect animals entering and scavenging and eventually dying at the shelter.

The disappearing devil

Devils disappeared from mainland Australia about 3,200 years ago, after dingoes had arrived and spread across the continent.

Dingoes have long been implicated in devil extinction because they competed for prey and carcass scavenging. Our findings suggest another possibility: dingoes may also have displaced devils from scavenging around human camps.

If devils had exploited animal remains discarded by people for tens of thousands of years, the arrival of a new carnivore increasingly associated with humans could have reduced access to that reliable food source.

We can’t yet demonstrate that dingoes caused devil extinction. But it identifies a previously underappreciated form of competition that may have contributed to their decline.

Juukan preserves far more than a list of vanished species. It records changing relationships between people, predators and prey over almost 47,000 years.

That is precisely why places such as Juukan are irreplaceable archives of Australia’s cultural and environmental past.

Timothy Churchill, Adjunct Associate Lecturer, School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences, UNSW and Gavin Ashburton, Puutu Kunti Kurrama Traditional Owner, Indigenous Knowledge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the 1950s and 60s, artists, writers and musicians were drawn to the islands in the Aegean, including Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift, who took up residence on the Greek island of Hydra, as did the young Leonard Cohen.

In 1962, Melbourne-born Australian artist Leonard French spent six months on Samos, with his wife Helen, his son Marc, and me, then just a baby. While there, a fortune teller told him he would “decorate the heavens”.

It proved to be an apt prediction, and became a much-retold family story. In 1968, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) opened on St Kilda Road with my father’s monumental stained-glass ceiling illuminating its Great Hall. He had created what is still believed to be “the world’s largest cut-glass ceiling”.

The heavens had, indeed, been decorated.

One of my childhood memories is of my father laying out the thick pieces of glass on vast glowing light boxes, then adding sawdust in between the glass to see the effect. I also recall visiting the Great Hall while the ceiling was being constructed, and later lying on the floor beside him, gazing up at his work: the giant turtles at either end, surrounded by birds and partly obscured serpents, all facing a massive sun at its centre.

The NGV has just installed another work by my late father at the Ian Potter Centre, its Australian art museum at Federation Square. I had not seen it before, and coming face to face with it for the first time was thrilling; it is spectacular!

To view it, visitors ride the escalator to the right of the gallery entrance and slowly approach the work. It looks so perfect there, one could imagine it was commissioned for that space.

A key to deciphering a masterpiece

It proves to be a fabulous companion to the original NGV commission. Able to be seen close up, this window provides visitors with something unexpected: a key to deciphering the imagery of French’s Great Hall ceiling, one of Australia’s most familiar, yet surprisingly little-interrogated, artworks.

At the top of the new window is a figure with outstretched hands reaching to a blue sky. Beneath each arm, three birds fly upwards, signifying renewal.

The water, which is teeming with life, has a giant brightly coloured fish swimming in a turquoise sea, and a massive royal blue serpent with a vivid red eye, sliding upwards towards the figure.

At the bottom, three turtles surge forward. The exhilarating upward movement of the composition is beautiful and joyous.

Each of the motifs in the new window recur throughout French’s work. Here, the progression from turtles (land), through the fish (water), to birds (sky), give the work a powerful sense of regeneration and ascent, a spiritual and natural completeness.

From private home to public gallery

By the 1960s, Leonard French had achieved a degree of celebrity unusual for an Australian visual artist of the period. He appeared on the cover of The Bulletin in June 1967 and Life (Australia) in August 1968, and received a number of high profile public commissions, including the Alpha and Omega window at Monash University.

Growing up, I was aware of his fame.

NGV Australia’s window was originally commissioned by the late businessman and entrepreneur Gordon Barton for his private home. It was the largest of several windows my father created for the house, which he referred to collectively as “Gordon Barton’s windows” (here I will refer to NGV Australia’s work as the Barton window).

According to my father, Barton had admired his stained-glass windows at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, and commissioned him through architect Michael Dysart to create windows for his new home in Vaucluse, Sydney. The NGV’s window was originally commissioned for the stairwell, where it was installed around 1972.

In 2020, the Barton window, which had been removed from the house by subsequent owners, was offered for private sale by Leonard Joel auction house, where it was purchased by a philanthropist, who later donated it to the NGV.

Conservation has included removing white paint that had covered areas around the glass, allowing French’s original composition and the extraordinary luminosity of the glass to be seen again.

I am delighted that the window, more than half a century after it was created, has been placed on public view.

The Barton window has found a particularly fitting home at NGV Australia. The Great Hall ceiling is one of the museum’s most recognisable works, yet its distance from the viewer can make the imagery of turtles, serpents, fish and birds difficult to discern.

I have lived with my father’s images all my life, but for many viewers these creatures are hidden in what can appear to be geometric abstraction. The Barton window offers a new way into his visual world.

Lisa French, Professor & Dean, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On Friday morning in Melbourne, 100,021 people crammed into the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) for the first National Football League (NFL) game ever to be played in Australia.

Tickets for the clash between the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers – which the 49ers won 27-7 – sold out in about half an hour. So, there is definitely interest in Australia.

But even though the NFL has played games around the world for decades, why has it now chosen to go to Australia, a country with a population of only about 28 million people with its own unique version of football?

The expansion of the US’ biggest sport

Culturally and financially, the NFL is the United States’ most dominant sport.

For decades, the league has hoped international games can bring new fans to the sport and help identify NFL-ready talent around the world.

Its first international game was an exhibition contest in Tokyo, Japan, in 1976.

In the mid-1980s, preseason games were played in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Mexico.

It wasn’t until 2005 when a regular-season match was hosted outside the US, in Mexico City.

After a one-year break, the NFL started hosting annual international games during the season. Since then, regular-season games have been played in countries such as the UK, Germany, Spain, Brazil and Mexico.

This year, Australia and France were added to the slate.

So, why Melbourne?

For the NFL, Commissioner Roger Goodell said expanding to Australia “underlines our ambitions to become a global sport and accelerate international growth.”

He later added:

We’re coming here for the long term. We don’t come as a one-off.

Los Angeles Rams owner Stanley Kroenke also emphasised the value of the Australian market:

When we first identified Australia as one of our global markets, it was not only because of our passionate fans who reside there, but also because of the important role Los Angeles plays in serving as a gateway to Australia and many countries across the Pacific.

But Australia has a small population. Mexico reportedly boasts the biggest fanbase outside the US, with some 40 million NFL fans. Wouldn’t doubling down on the NFL’s investments there be a better use of energy and money?

Or Germany, the world’s third-largest economy? Every NFL game there has sold out almost instantly since 2022.

The time zones of these countries are also much safer bets for US television audiences and media contracts. Additionally, the travel time is much shorter, requiring far less consideration of sleep and recovery for the athletes.

Of course, money is crucial.

International games are a lucrative business: the Jacksonville Jaguars reportedly generate US$35-50 million (A$49-70 million) each time they play in London. The league has made similar gains through broadcasting. Teams are allocated international marketing rights across 22 global regions.

In Australia, the state of Victoria beat out two other states (New South Wales and Western Australia) – in addition to South Korea and Japan – for the NFL deal, reportedly paying $15 million per game as part of a multi-year agreement.

NSW Premier Chris Minns said the asking price was “a king’s ransom”.

The venue choice for Melbourne was controversial, too. Critics argued a rectangular stadium would better suit the sport compared to the oval-shaped MCG.

But Australia – and Melbourne, in particular – makes sense for the NFL due to people’s passion for sport. Research suggests Australia has the second-highest attendance at professional sporting events in the world per capita, behind the UK.

This fandom is not limited to one sport, either, with healthy fan bases for Australian rules football, rugby league and rugby union.

The local NFL fanbase is growing quickly, too. It is approaching similar fan numbers to the NBA, despite basketball having a long head start in the country.

Athletes are part of the picture, too

Developing international talent is one of three stated pillars of the NFL’s global strategy.

The league’s International Player Pathway was launched in 2017 to funnel elite overseas athletes into the sport. It helped the Philadelphia Eagles’ Jordan Mailata, from Sydney, earn an NFL contract. The Super Bowl winner was a former rugby league junior player before swapping sports.

In 2024, the NFL’s first Southern Hemisphere academy was also opened on the Gold Coast, with Mailata as its ambassador.

In recent years, there has also been a pipeline of Australian punters (kickers) heading to the US to play in college, with many later making it onto NFL rosters.

Prokick Australia is the major player here, having spent almost two decades converting Australian-rules football players into punters. It has produced many NFL players, including the Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl champion Michael Dickson (a former Sydney Swans academy prospect).

So, Australia now has three distinct pathways for local athletes into the NFL – more than most international markets.

Flag football – a modified version of the sport – is another element the NFL has invested in to try to attract more athletes and fans to American football. It will make its Olympic debut in 2028.

Recently, the NFL partnered with American Football Australia to expand in flag football in schools across Australia, with the hope of gaining enough momentum to remain part of the Olympics in 2032 in Brisbane.

What will the impact be?

Considering Melbourne’s insatiable appetite for major sporting events, perhaps selling out the first regular-season NFL game in Australia was the easy part.

Time will tell if Australia’s fandom and passion for a wide variety of sports translates into a viable return for the US league.

Adam Cohen, Senior Lecturer, Sport Management, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The National Gallery of Victoria’s Margaret Preston is a breathtaking exhibition. It is Preston as we have never seen her before, and challenges many earlier preconceptions.

We see her work in the context of her students/lovers, Bessie Gibson and Gladys Reynell, and her obsession with First Nations art – her adaptations, her collections, and, now, commentaries on her adaptations by Trevor Nickolls and Gordon Bennett, among others.

A much more complex and nuanced image of Preston emerges than in previous exhibitions.

The show is a mixture of a chronological survey with her early still life paintings from the opening decade of the 20th century, then her decorative flower pieces moving to the magnificence of her hand-coloured woodcuts.

There is a desire to bring her art to life: we see her iconic Wheelflower print of 1929, next to the actual woodblock from which it was printed. Her First Nations pieces are shown together with their actual sources of inspiration.

The exhibition is full of these little detective pieces that save the exhibition from being just another Margaret Preston show to make it into the Margaret Preston show for our generation.

A spectacular makeover

Born Margaret Rose McPherson in Adelaide in 1875, she initially trained in Sydney, then at the National Gallery School in Melbourne. She spent many years travelling in Europe, mainly in Germany, France and England.

She first travelled with Betty Davidson and then Gladys Reynell, with both of whom, the NGV catalogue asserts, she had a romantic bond.

She exhibited to limited acclaim, first under the name of Rose McPherson and by 1912 as Margaret McPherson.

Her personal and artistic makeover was as spectacular as it was sudden.

On the last day of 1919, the 44-year-old McPherson falsified her age by eight years and married Lieutenant William George Preston, subsequently a successful businessman. This made her, at least on the marriage certificate, a socially respectable two years younger than her husband, rather than the embarrassing six years older.

She changed her exhibiting name to Margaret Preston and, armed with her husband’s wealth, launched her new career with a massive publicity blitz that was to last until her death in 1963.

Following her marriage, she settled with her husband in the bayside Sydney suburb of Mosman and moved rapidly up the social ladder to become a friend of the publisher Sydney Ure Smith.

Preston was the most articulate and outspoken female artist of her generation, writing frequent articles and giving lectures and interviews.

While always a committed traveller, after her marriage Preston embarked on numerous journeys throughout Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East and Europe.

At the height of the Depression, the Prestons moved from Mosman to a 14-acre block in rural Berowra, before returning to the Mosman neighbourhood in 1939, where they remained until her death.

A revelation

For me, a revelation of this exhibition is her late stencil pieces, including Christ turning the water into wine (1951) and White gum (1953) where Preston in her mature years is grappling with a host of conceptual problems and exhibits a brilliant technical inventiveness.

While many of the pieces have been seen before, here they gain a new poignancy through their new context.

With over 200 works on display, there is enough to present a comprehensive overview to gain a good understanding of her work and her contribution to Australian art and not an overkill requiring a packed lunch for viewing every print she ever made.

On ‘primative’ art

Although a strong advocate for First Nations art, I feel that Preston’s attitude still sat within the framework of cultural imperialism.

That is, it came from one who had not the slightest doubt in the superiority of her own culture that could absorb “primitive” elements from Indigenous cultures.

She illustrated how a sacred Kimberley dancing board could give you a suggestion for a curtain. In 1924 she boasted,

I have barely altered the design […] The Australian aboriginal has followed the usual abstract designs that are characteristic of the savage […] I have suggested a cushion cover that could be adapted from the design.

In 1925 Preston wrote,

In wishing to rid myself of the mannerisms of a country other than my own, I have gone to the art of a people who have never seen or known anything different from themselves, and were accustomed to always use the same symbols to express themselves.

[…]

It is on the primitive natural forms that we must depend. In returning to primitive art it should be remembered that it is to be used as a starting point only for a renewal of growth, and a gradual selection must take place to arrive at the culmination.

Over the decades, Preston’s attitude to First Nations art matured as she travelled thousands of kilometres to view rock art and art in various communities. But the art remained a quarry from which a “civilized” artist could plunder elements from which to create an “authentic” Australian national art.

Preston’s ideas on a national art were naïve, but, as shown by this exhibition, she did create a powerful and memorable oeuvre.

Margaret Preston is at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia until January 31 2027.

Sasha Grishin, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.