In This Issue
October 2007 in brief
THE MONTHLY ESSAYS"In late June 1956, towards midday, after a swift flight through dry-season skies, the Czech artist Karel Kupka...
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The Nation Reviewed
Comment: The Economic Myths of Peter Costello
Andrew Charlton
On 23 September 2004, three days before the launch of his re-election campaign, John Howard visited the marginal seat of Deakin in the...
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The Nation Reviewed
Written in the Body
Ashley Hay
On a table of its own, in the pulmonary section of the Museum of Human Disease at the University of New South Wales, sits a solid-looking...
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The Flatbed Scanner of Democracy
Charles Firth
It is vitally important to the health of Australian democracy and the economy that everyone buys a flatbed scanner.A few weeks ago I was...
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The Nation Reviewed
Caveat Emptor
Alice Pung
There are two important things your Chinese parents will teach you in life. First, don't owe any debts; and secondly, own your own property...
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The Nation Reviewed
Backing the Truck Up
Gideon Haigh
Australians go to the polls this month in elections with a huge bearing on their future prosperity, in which they will not only return...
More ...The Monthly Essays
Le Parti, C'est Moi: Liberal Leaders Since Menzies
Mungo MacCallum
The reasons for this preoccupation with control go back to the circumstances of the party's creation. It was, of course, the invention...
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The Collector: Karel Kupka in north Australia
Nicolas Rothwell
This arrival, which would have life-changing consequences for Kupka, and open a new chapter in Western appreciation of Aboriginal cultures...
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The Way of Horse: At the Track with Brian Mayfield-Smith
Craig Sherborne
Racing people are the nicest people in the world, say the richer racing folk. They say that because they are winning. Losing will lose them...
More ...Film
Low-Flying Aircraft: Werner Herzog’s ‘Rescue Dawn’
Luke Davies
In 1987, in Empire of the Sun, Steven Spielberg introduced a new actor, the young Christian Bale, as Jim - playing, to all intents and...
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A Desert Inside: Saul Friedländer’s ‘The Years of Extermination’
Robert Manne
The first volume of Saul Friedländer's history of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939, was...
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Politics, Writing, Love: Writing ‘The Unknown Terrorist’
Richard Flanagan
I met David Hicks not long before he was released from Guantanamo Bay. He was drinking Makers Mark bourbon in a bar in Greenwood, a fading...
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A Righteous Certainty: Paul Toohey’s ‘The Killer Within’
John Birmingham
Lawyers are a bit like junkies in some ways. If you let one into your life, you might as well throw open the door to a crack house full of...
More ...Books, Noted
‘The Door’ by Margaret Atwood
Greg McLaren
In predicting that "Time will curve like a wind," the speaker in ‘One Day You Will Reach ...' hints at the flow and architecture of this...
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‘The Book is Dead: Long Live the Book’ by Sherman Young
Chris Womersley
This is a tidy manifesto which argues that, in the same way news has become separated from newspapers, and radio programs (think podcasting...
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Encounters
Billy Hughes & Woodrow Wilson
The president of the United States did not have a high opinion of the prime minister of Australia. "A pestiferous varmint", he called him....
More ...Letters to the Editor
Lois Roberts
In "Pearson's Gamble, Stanner's Dream" (August 2007), Robert Manne covers the history of Aboriginal dispossession and...
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Roger Sandall
Raimond Gaita's ferocious disdain for my book The Culture Cult could mislead your readers. (August 2007) In fact it is meant to rescue...
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