The essay revists the 1994 eruption of the Rabaul volcano, which led to the destruction of the town of Rabaul and of numerous villages on the Gazelle Peninsula, East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. The 1994 catastrophe was significant on account of its sheer size. But it was also remarkable because it caused relatively few...

The kids call it “a shit school,” shorthand for their parents’ opinion of the local secondary school. These kids will go to a private, or a “good,” public school. Anywhere but their local secondary school, the one I call Pariah College. Pariah Colleges can crop up anywhere. They are the schools that miss out in...

Christopher Pyne says there is no alternative to his deregulatory reforms. The evidence suggests otherwise. In the late 1980s, Labor education minister John Dawkins oversaw radical reforms to Australian higher education, including institutional mergers to create a “unified national system,” the introduction of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, or HECS, and competitive research funding through...

With one-in-two people dying within days of becoming ill, it’s little wonder that Ebola causes panic. But the real threat can only be assessed if we understand the history of the virus and how it is transmitted In 1980, the year I started my clinical studies, the World Health Organization announced that smallpox, one of...

When “Howard’s battlers” defected from Labor in 1996, political commentators shifted their focus to Sydney’s western suburbs. But what if the whole idea was founded on a misreading of the data? The spectre of a major political party “losing its base” is popular in political commentary. It’s usually applied to the Labor Party, but in...