Articles by: Humphrey McQueen

Author Biography:

Humphrey McQueen contributed ‘The Australian Stamp: Image, Design and Ideology,’ to Arena, number 86 in 1988.

In the Pink

Dunstan had led the way with clothes reform in parliament, first with safari suits and then by appearing with neither coat nor tie.

I’m still Dreaming of a Black Xmas stamp

In over sixty-six years of Christmas stamps, Australia has never issued one featuring an Aboriginal artwork, let alone a Black Virgin and Christ child.

Informit: ‘When is our day?

A reply to Barry Morris on the Frontier Wars commemoration. To headline Barry Morris's comments (Arena Magazine, May 2019) on the Frontier Wars contingent at the Canberra Anzac Day parades with the police sergeant's 'This Is Not a Day for You' is to silence the Indigenous ex-serviceman who shot back: 'When is our day?'

Informit: A Sordid trade war: Australia’s place at the intersection of empires

Did Melbourne's Roman Catholic Arch - bishop Daniel Mannix allege, early in 1917, that the Great War was 'simply a sordid trade war', or did he but repeat as 'a truism that the war was a trade war'? His enemies seized on the 'sordid'. Well before the Cold War, his acolytes were uneasy with a 'truism' that sounded like a snippet from the godless Lenin's Imperialism (1916). Belief in the commercial motives behind war has…

Informit: Coca-Cola, human nature and the origins of our future

Informit: Men of flowers

Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker and Gregor Mendel: dramatising the life of plantsDespite Charles Darwin's confessing in 1843 to an 'entire ignorance of Botany', he had, before his death in 1882, inherited the laurel of Jupiter Botanicus. On the centenary of 'On the Origin of Species' in 1959, population geneticist J. B. S. Haldane valued Darwin's botanical researches more highly than his earlier work on evolution. In truth, those elements were inseparable, since he supported natural…

Informit: Whatever happened to alienation? [A re-assessment of the fulfilment of work and of its meaning in our lives is long overdue.]