In This Issue
July 2008 in brief
THE MONTHLY ESSAYS"Despite the most fervent wishes of Bob Brown, coal isn't going anywhere. According to the Australian Coal...
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The Nation Reviewed
Comment
Guy Pearse
Kevin Rudd wasn't the only one licking his lips on election night last year. For millions of Australians, an end to John Howard's...
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The Nation Reviewed
Old House
Mungo MacCallum
Kevin Rudd personifies generational change in Australian politics, in part because he is the first prime minister not to have served an...
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The Nation Reviewed
Katharine’s Place
Alice Pung
I am in Greenmount, Western Australia. The sign outside the house says Katharine's Place, but I didn't realise that her husband was still...
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The Nation Reviewed
Trivial Pursuit
Craig Sherborne
You miss out on medicine by five points and so you dedicate your life to trivia. Don't get eccentric on us, with your pointy bald head and...
More ...The Monthly Essays
In the Dark?: The Same Dirty Old Energy
John Birmingham
The Mays own and run Solartec, a boutique renewable-energy company specialising in solar panels. Phil May, a country boy, didn't start out...
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Lovely Bones: Making Sense of the Flores Find
Ashley Hay
This something took three days to extricate. It was a skeleton, so tantalisingly conserved that some of its sections were still joined, and...
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An Oddity from the Start: Convicts and National Character
John Hirst
Reynolds had in his sights the classic work on the national character by Russel Ward: The Australian Legend, published in 1958. Long before...
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Travels in the Northern Realm: The Idea of the North
Nicolas Rothwell
Given such characteristics, it is no great wonder that Western incomers, over the past two centuries of concerted northern settlement,...
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More Than Picong: Patrick French’s ‘The World Is What It Is’
Louis Nowra
Whenever I read Proust's magnificent In Search of Lost Time I have to try hard to forget that the author liked to masturbate while watching...
More ...Music
Seeing the Light: Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s ‘Lie Down in the Light’
Robert Forster
There are cult stars and then there are cult stars. Will Oldham, born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1970, is one of the great enigmas of...
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Pipe Dreams: Maude Barlow’s ‘Blue Covenant’ & Åsa Wahlquist’s 'Thirsty Country'
Michael Cathcart
According to Maude Barlow, the human race is facing a threat more lethal than global warming. Barlow is a Canadian writer who crusades...
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Stand & Deliver: Matt Norman’s ‘Salute’
Luke Davies
Early in Matt Norman's documentary about the controversy surrounding the Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics - and in...
More ...Books, Noted
‘Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith’ by Mark E Smith (with Austin Collings)
Gideon Haigh
Mancunian Mark E Smith is the founder of The Fall, after 27 studio albums the most durable and protean of all bands to emerge from that...
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‘The Pages’ by Murray Bail
Chris Middendorp
The Pages, Murray Bail's latest novel and his first in a decade, is an intermittently engaging satire on the conceits of philosophy and...
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Encounters
The 7th Brigade & the Kaigun Rikusentai
The Kaigun Rikusentai were hard bastards, elite marines from the naval ports of Kure and Sasebo who had bloodied their bayonets in China...
More ...Letters to the Editor
Simon Nasht
Ashley Hay has done a fine job sorting through the myriad conflicting claims relating to the discovery of Homo floresiensis, AKA the Hobbit...
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Jim Connolly
Guy Pearse's July Comment and John Birmingham's essay, "In the Dark", are most informative, but fail to consider another...
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