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The Sydney Morning Herald

Breaking news from Sydney, Australia and the world. Features the latest business, sport, entertainment, travel, lifestyle, and technology news.

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Featured Writers

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Heidi Vogt

Writer Editor Journalist

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David Allegretti

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James Fry is an Australian writer.

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Isabella Podwinski

Journalist

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Jane Gardner

I am an award-winning journalist, with 15 years of experience in media relations, journalism, ambassador recruitment and management, communications strategy, social media strategy, and multimedia content production, as well as …

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Richard Hookham

Experienced newspaper and digital sports journalist and sub-editor. Have worked for Mail Online, Australian Associated Press, Associated Newspapers (Metro), BBC Sport Online and ITV Teletext. Have covered international rugby union, …

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Latest Articles

I demand my kids hug their grandparents. Am I a bad mother?

Though it’s an increasingly controversial stance among those who subscribe to the gentle parenting movement, I make my children hug their grandparents. To some, enforcing my two young kids these kinds of rules is considered to be on par with sending them to Neverland Ranch for a sleepover. Our “child-focused” …
By Cherie Gilmour
• The Sydney Morning Herald

Flights, cameras, action: Anthony Albanese travels to a restless China

Feminists, the LGBTQ community and liberal students have all been targeted by the Chinese Communist Party as it clamps down on groups that may threaten the increasingly hardline ideology of President Xi Jinping. “Once again, entertainment is not superficial, behind it are real-life scars,” wrote one user on Chinese social …
By Minyue Ding
• The Sydney Morning Herald

How AI forces us to look inwards at our own minds

“At the heart of artificial intelligence is a fundamental deceit,” claims AI doyen Toby Walsh, in Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World, his fourth book on the subject. The con starts at the name. AI is not true intelligence. It does not arrive at conclusions (or outputs) through …
By Kurt Johnson
• The Sydney Morning Herald

I’m stuck in recruitment hell. How do I keep my head above water?

Due to a serious illness in a colleague’s family, I’ve become responsible for recruitment at a small company that is growing rapidly. I’m trying my best, but this is a whole new world for me, and I’m barely keeping my head above water. We are getting good responses to the …
By Jonathan Rivett
• The Sydney Morning Herald

Sobriety is your choice. Stop preaching that it should be mine

Most of the time I’m simply cosplaying as a responsible adult. Like many Millennials, I’m increasingly startled by the suggestion that I’m now genuinely a grown-up, though seeing my childhood 90s fashion return to vogue renders it pretty hard to ignore. There are myriad ways in which I fall short. …
By Hannah Vanderheide
• The Sydney Morning Herald

After 14 years, I left the disability sector. Money alone can’t fix its problems

A few months ago, I left the disability support industry that I had worked in for 14 years behind. Despite finding the work hugely rewarding, supporting a young family on the industry’s wages was becoming harder, so I made the difficult decision to leave. Among the 222 recommendations the disability …
By Cherie Gilmour
• The Sydney Morning Herald

Forget a female David Brent – give women original characters

I am all for the matriarchy. In the words of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt theme song: “Females are strong as hell.” When done well, a female-led TV show or film can do justice to the complexities and diversities of women’s stories. But when it comes to gender-flipped reboots, like Australia’s …
By Cherie Gilmour
• The Sydney Morning Herald

Why couples should split the bill on the pill

There are all kinds of jobs involved in heterosexual sex. Some are more fun than others. But it’s women who have long been tasked with outlaying the time and money to facilitate a baby-free-bang. Yes, much like domestic chores, the mental load, child-growing and subsequent rearing, pregnancy prevention is typically …
By Hannah Vanderheide
• The Sydney Morning Herald

The ‘recovering teacher’ who’s written a portrait of small-town teacher life

“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth,” Doris Lessing famously said, and Gabbie Stroud’s move into fiction with Things That Matter Most is a testament to this. Stroud, who calls herself a “recovering teacher”, has written much on the ongoing teacher shortage, including her brilliant …
By Cherie Gilmour
• The Sydney Morning Herald

It’s great that your child loves Spider-Man and Elsa, but they have no place at Book Week

It’s that time of the year when two words strike fear into the hearts of parents who couldn’t papier-mache a boat to save their lives: Book Week. Last year, during a frenzied costume rush, I found myself embroiled in a debate with my three-year-old about why an Elsa (from Frozen) …
By Cherie Gilmour
• The Sydney Morning Herald

Life is dark and absurd. No wonder kids shows celebrating this are winning awards

My toddlers adore Teletubbies. As soon as the show’s baby-faced sun-God rises in the sky, they go off like a frog in a sock. The Teletubbies plod on-stage with their dead eyes, weird noises, and anthropomorphic vacuum cleaner, and I silently categorise the various controversies surrounding them over the years: …
By Cherie Gilmour
• The Sydney Morning Herald

Should grandparents be paid for childcare or should Nanna do it for nada?

The best part of being a grandparent is getting to hand them back, right? Well, it doesn’t always work that way. Picture it: you’ve finally managed to retire, you’re settling into a new pace of life and the next few decades are shining ahead of you, gloriously golden. Then your …
By Hannah Vanderheide
• The Sydney Morning Herald

How dog-sharing became a solution to ‘pandemic puppy’ problems

Natalie Hollenberg Stal’s dog lives around the corner from her, her husband and two children – but he’s still very much part of their family. “When we drive past his house – when he’s with his owner – my two-and-a-half-year-old will scream ‘Bear’,” says the hypnotherapist and coach. For the …
By Amy Fallon
• The Sydney Morning Herald

From silkworms to sculptures, the strange side hustles are keeping Australians afloat

A record number of Australians are now working a side hustle to make ends meet. While most pick up an extra bartending, food delivery or carer shift, others have turned to unique avenues to bring home a secondary income. Kate Reynolds’ voice-over acting side hustle has enabled her to take …
By Kate Reynolds
• The Sydney Morning Herald

My toddler is constantly misgendered. It may be the best thing for him

It’s curious how confidently strangers use “she” or “her” when referring to my son. They clock his wild curls, growing unopposed for a good two years, and they’re immediately certain – long hair must mean girl. My son is two. He has naturally taken to ball sports, outside play and, …
By Hannah Vanderheide
• The Sydney Morning Herald

Will a win for Donald Trump in 2024 threaten Australia?

Like me perhaps you are still coming to terms with the Trump presidency. After four years of ubiquitous coverage and surging cortisol, I began thinking he was Australia’s president. I’m not ready for four more years of fairy floss hair, barking recriminations and the impossible slipperiness of fact. Yet it …
By Kurt Johnson
• The Sydney Morning Herald

Let’s have some self-respect and not fall for celebrity group pictures

Among the many great questions of life (Is there a God? What is consciousness? Who is Kim Kardashian dating?) the ultimate one is: Why do group photos of celebrities break the internet? Last week, Kristen Bell posted a few “holiday snaps” to her Instagram account including a picture of a …
By Cherie Gilmour
• The Sydney Morning Herald

I used to love Black Mirror, but it’s completely lost the plot

I used to feel more intelligent just watching Black Mirror. The Netflix series was clever, twisty, and deeply prophetic. It was light on happy endings but had moments of intense emotion and epiphany. Take episodes Be Right Back and San Junipero, which delt with the possibilities of digital afterlife, or …
By Cherie Gilmour
• The Sydney Morning Herald

In an era of time-hacking, I just want to decorate fake bedrooms

Walking around Melbourne’s 2023 Oz Comic-Con, it feels like I’ve slipped through a crack into a confluence of dimensions: Anime and superhero characters mingle with Disney princesses chatting to Care Bears. Three Spider-Men line up for gyros while an eight-foot-tall Grim Reaper waves at a toddler, and a Stormtrooper wheezily …
By Cherie Gilmour
• The Sydney Morning Herald

Grieving my friend, I began crashing the funerals of strangers

New motherhood is a strange and disorienting time. Birth opens up that thin place where the eternal and temporal collide. I was grateful to meet someone from my mothers’ group with whom I could navigate it. Sarah and I clicked as we chatted openly about how overwhelming parenthood was. She …
By Cherie Gilmour
• The Sydney Morning Herald

Never mind the progress, what about the profit?

TECHNOLOGY Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity? Richard King Monash, $32.99 The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World is Costing the Earth Guillaume Pitron Scribe, $35 Faith in technology is a volatile stock. In under a decade we’ve sunk from the Arab Spring boomtimes, when legacy media credited …
By Kurt Johnson
• The Sydney Morning Herald

Inside the town the CIA dubbed ‘the most secret place on Earth’

Historical places are often anticlimactic to visit. Expecting they will maintain their resonance indefinitely, you arrive to find the concrete and flaking paint strangely mute. This is why most have museums – to do the talking. Yet some places wear their history indelibly. One such place is Long Tieng. Known …
By Kurt Johnson
• The Sydney Morning Herald

The Hillsong experiment is over. Christianity was never meant to be cool

There is a version of the Bible called The Message by Eugene Peterson. It translates ye olde King James verses like “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” into “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to …
By Cherie Gilmour
• The Sydney Morning Herald

Can we please find a vaccine for the mullet pandemic

We’ve copped a lot of crap post-pandemic. From rising interest rates and rents, a cost-of-living crisis, mass burnout and the promise of other crises to come. But we don’t seem to be talking about the most troubling thing to come out of our brush with total annihilation – the resurgence, …
By Hannah Vanderheide
• The Sydney Morning Herald

The secret underground city the US tried to bomb out of existence

How long you’ve been in Laos will decide how you react to Viengxay’s landscape. To new arrivals, bungalows nestled between towering misty limestone peaks will constitute an achingly beautiful sight but to the acclimatised, this is just more Northern Laos. And that’s the point. Viengxay was a secret underground city …
By Kurt Johnson
• The Sydney Morning Herald

‘Time is money’: How can you avoid burnout when we’re all on the clock?

During lockdown time lost its shape. While beards sprouted beneath masks and seasons changed with more swagger against the diminished traffic, the weeks ran together. In response, I engineered a schedule that in sheer cruelty would have made Mark Wahlberg’s 3am starts reasonable. A cacophony of pre-dawn alarms from devices …
By Kurt Johnson
• The Sydney Morning Herald

How Swede it is: The Allen key to happiness, or maybe not

I’m in IKEA, that Swedish flat-packed dream of domestic aspiration, breathing in the hygge. Everything is smooth, wooden, clean, and organised. Plant tendrils hang over the edges of cupboards, pictures hang perfectly on walls, and desks are free from clutter. I sit in one of the display living rooms thinking …
By Cherie Gilmour
• The Sydney Morning Herald

Misunderstood hero: This magical book will help you see mushrooms anew

If we ever get out of this environmental mess, it won’t be thanks to ego-driven men with projects and messiah complexes visible from space. It will be the quiet oddballs on their hands and knees rooting around in the underbrush that help us slow down and see the ancient wisdom …
By Kurt Johnson
• The Sydney Morning Herald

I’ve committed ‘adulting’ - and it exposed me as an impostor

Let me paint a scene: I’m at a music festival in a sea of bodies. The Rubens are playing, and giant screens broadcast every angst-filled expression. We’re sipping batch-made, handcrafted pale ales and watching all the beautiful people – glittered cheeks, Blundstones, Akubras, short skirts and square sunnies – looking …
By Cherie Gilmour
• The Sydney Morning Herald