The question that Conspiracy Nation implicitly raises isn’t why people believe in conspiracy theories but rather why people have stopped trusting official narratives. But what do we do with this knowledge? When we call something a conspiracy theory, what work are we doing? Who benefits from that designation?

Released in 2024 and screened for the first time at the Melbourne International Film Festival, Twilight Time charts Des Ball’s life and work. Yet it is also about one of the biggest elephants in Australia’s room: its close ties with the United States of America.

I have an intertextual relationship with the internet: my writing practice could not have existed without it, as much as I could not have grown as a person without it. Even if I’m not directly addressing online-ness in my work, I’m always in conversation with it.

Peter Drew’s latest project appears to be a response to the criticism aimed at his previous campaigns, which highlighted the erasure of Aboriginal folk, the traditional owners of this land called ‘Australia’. Indeed, as some of the new posters proclaim, this is Aboriginal land – but when juxtaposed with the slogan ‘Real Australians Seek Welcome’, the cognitive dissonance is unmissable. How does one ‘seek welcome’ in a land that is not theirs to begin with, while simultaneously grappling with questions of what it means to be ‘Australian’?

We can trace imperialist feminism to the Victorian era. In 1882 Lord Cromer, a British Consul General in Egypt, claimed to be liberating women through the British occupation of Egypt. While using women's rights to advance empire in Egypt, he was also championing the anti-suffragist cause at home.

By now, most of us should be fully aware of the arrival of refugees on European shores, and by extension, Australia. The descriptors used for these movements of large masses of people across land and sea are often described in fluid terms: a surge, a flood, a wave, a flow; a rising tide that is about to break open the dams and threaten the biodiversity of our precious ecosystems. This language isn't just tremendously invalidating and dehumanising: when scores of migrants are either locked up in detention centres or dying at sea, it helps to gloss over the fact of their mere existence.

When Robert Cornelius took a photo of himself – reportedly the first selfie in history – outside his father’s gas and lighting business in the North American autumn of 1839, what did he see? On the back of the photo of him looking sideways with hair tousled and arms crossed, he wrote, ‘the first light picture ever taken.’

Recently, 29-year-old Tamil asylum seeker Leo Seemanpillai set himself on fire and later died, with 90 per cent burns to his body. Leo was afraid of being sent back to Sri Lanka, where conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese is still rife, after a civil war that officially ended only five years ago.