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Facing the inferno
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Tara James speaks to Cam Neville about his portrait series, Firefighters.
The Bath Butterfly
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The caricaturist and engraver James Gillray's biting satires about Sir Joseph Banks.
The consolations of religion
A bushranger meets his maker, 6 January 1826
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James McCabe provides proof that hanging wasn’t necessarily a fate reserved for the perpetrators of murder and other deeds of darkest hue.
Missing Persons
Thomas Woolner in Australia
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Desperately seeking Woolner medallions
Robert Oatley AO
1928–2016
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The National Portrait Gallery mourns the loss of one our most generous benefactors, Robert Oatley AO.
An Australian in Paris
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This week it is impossible not to contemplate the ways in which France has touched many Australian lives.
Audacity, audacity, audacity
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Angus delves into the biographies of two ambitious characters; Sir Stamford Raffles and Sir John Pope-Hennessy.
The medallion
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In recent years I have become fascinated by the so-called Sydney Cove Medallion (1789), a work of art that bridges the 10,000-mile gap between the newly established penal settlement at Port Jackson and the beating heart of Enlightenment England.
200 Years of Portraiture
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To celebrate his family bicentenary, Malcolm Robertson looks at the portraiture legacy left by his ancestors.
William Bligh
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The life of William Bligh offers up a handful of the most remarkable episodes in the history of Britain’s eighteenth and early nineteenth-century maritime empire.
Diseased curiosity
Captain Moonlite et al on trial for murder
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Just after 10.00 o'clock on 3 December 1879, four prisoners were brought from their cells at Darlinghurst Gaol and placed in the dock of a courtroom heaving with agitated spectators
Very fine and very like
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When did notions of very fine and very like become separate qualities of a portrait? And what happens to 'very like' in the age of photographic portraiture?
Queen Victoria
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Last Sunday I had the privilege of appearing at the Canberra Writers’ Festival in conversation with Julia Baird. The subject of our session was Julia’s recent biography, Victoria the Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman who Ruled an Empire.
Embrace your inner nerd
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The southern winter has arrived. For people in the northern hemisphere (the majority of humanity) the idea of snow and ice, freezing mist and fog in June, potentially continuing through to August and beyond, encapsulates the topsy-turvidom of our southern continent.
Seeing stars
Celebrating Science Week
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It has been suggested that Sir Thomas Brisbane’s interest in the New South Wales governorship was as attributable to his passion for astronomy as to the desirability of the position as a prestigious career move.
Indexing, the art of
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The first index I created was for my first book, and, to my astonishment, that was almost twenty-five years ago.