Alex McKinnon After weeks of lobbying in Canberra, a leading paediatrician fears Australia’s toxic refugee politics will strand children on Nauru in a dire medical emergency.

Martin McKenzie-Murray A report released this week confirms conversion therapy is still practised in Australia, despite being deemed unethical and harmful by psychologists, as former Greens leader Bob Brown talks about his experience of similar procedures.

Andrea Booth The potentially dubious science of commercial DNA ancestry tests has serious implications for identifying Indigenous Australian heritage.

Sharon Bradley She’s played everyone from Velma Kelly in Chicago to Judy Garland in The Boy from Oz, flawlessly channelling the great Piaf and Merman along the way. Now Caroline O’Connor takes the stage in her one-woman show, From Broadway with Love. For one night only, she’s looking forward to airing a repertoire of songs she knows as intimately as old friends. “I’m in love with this material; that’s why I’m doing it,” she says. “I’m just going to relax and enjoy the occasion.”

Ruby Hamad Perhaps they are afraid that one day it will finally dawn on us that to be “white” does not denote an inherited ethnicity but an acquired power. That if we were to untangle being white from being English or Australian or Canadian or European, then we will see whiteness for what it is: not something you intrinsically are, but something to which you are granted access. That whiteness exists only because systemic institutionalised racism exists, and to dismantle racism by definition entails dismantling whiteness. White people are bound not by a shared culture or skin colour but by power.

Paul Bongiorno The previous time a byelection was held to replace a prime minister dumped by his own party, the government lost the seat. It was 26 years ago, when Bob Hawke’s seat of Wills fell to the independent Phil Cleary. The Morrison government is giving every impression it fears the same is about to happen in Saturday’s Wentworth byelection. This is in itself remarkable, although the Wills precedent is pertinent. Labor had never lost the seat before its 1992 byelection defeat. Wentworth has been a non-Labor stronghold for 70 years and has close to an 18 per cent margin – twice what Labor had in Wills. But the stakes are infinitely higher this time.

Richard Ackland By now on this Saturday morning citizens would be queueing at polling stations throughout William Charles Wentworth’s electorate. The question on many lips is what happened to Dave Sharma’s association with the accountancy firm Kelly+Partners? In January 2018 there was fanfare when he came on board to lead the firm’s lobbying and government relations team. Yet click on K+P’s online announcement and you’ll get a firm “Page not found”.

Psychiatrist Dr Beth O’Connor was Médecins Sans Frontières’ longest-serving mental health professional on Nauru until she left the island last month: “Held in indefinite detention and effectively in a perpetual state of limbo for the last five years, these people have been stripped of any hope for a meaningful future, resulting in shocking levels of severe depression and anxiety in the population – with many having lost the will to live.”

Mike Seccombe The mild response to the apparent murder of writer Jamal Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul is further evidence the West will turn a blind eye to the kingdom’s terrors to protect its oil and arms trade.

Hamish McDonald Morrison’s embassy misstep; aftermath of Khashoggi murder; PNG’s APEC spending.

Dave Faulkner The second albums of Empress Of and Oh Pep! see the acts moving from electronica and alt-folk respectively into poppier territory, and making good use of collaborators to assist the transition.

Lisa Radford

Open Window, presented by the collective of Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer and Simon McGlinn, is a puzzle of objects as empty vessels within spaces divided by open wall frames.

Claire G. Coleman An afternoon in the Tantanoola pub, on the trail of a tiger.

David Moyle

Sophia Auld While political debate rages over the funding of Great Barrier Reef projects, CSIRO and Australian Institute of Marine Science researchers are determining the best approaches for the reef’s restoration and survival

Cindy MacDonald Western Sydney Wanderers goalie Jada Whyman on family sacrifice, breaking into the Matildas and becoming a stronger, prouder Indigenous woman.

Cindy MacDonald Test your general knowledge with our weekly quiz.