In This Issue
September 2010 in brief
THE NATION REVIEWED“Australia’s borders are more or less impenetrable. It would seem that no single asylum seeker boat has ever arrived...
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The Nation Reviewed
Comment: Asylum Seekers
Robert Manne
The first boatpeople were South Vietnamese fleeing from the communist victory of 1975. Between 1976 and 1982, 2000 reached our shores. In...
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The Nation Reviewed
Bread and Butter
Gay Bilson
For dessert we ate hot puff pastry with a filling of grated apple cooked with butter, eggs and lemon. It pleased the guests, although one...
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The Nation Reviewed
Taking Care
Gail Bell
My mother-in-law is bracing herself for loss. As moving day approaches, appetite and sleep have deserted her. She is shrinking in size. Her...
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The Nation Reviewed
Means of Production
Anna Funder
Speaking before going onstage at the Sixth Annual New York Burlesque Festival in 2008, Angie Pontani tried to encapsulate her genre of...
More ...The Monthly Essays
Land of the Long Black Cloud
Guy Pearse
Most of us think of Aussie coalmining as a local issue, and why not? Coal exports have doubled since 1992 and are set to do so again by...
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The Cult of Green
Paul Barry
In the four years BBL was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), Phil Green and his team of tyros harvested more than $2...
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The Monthly Essays
Body Politic
Emily Maguire
“Shame!” someone shouts. Jeffreys pauses and looks up towards the back of the auditorium as another voice calls out, “Absolutely!” It’s...
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The Monthly Essays
The Blast Zone
Nicolas Rothwell
Stalker, which was made under the Soviet Union’s studio system in 1979 with limited resources, tells a science fiction tale in stylised...
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Books
Sister Act: The Minogue Sisters
Peter Conrad
At the Royal Albert Hall in 1996, Kylie Minogue had an awe-inducing glimpse of the vacuum that she exists to fill. Nick Cave, after...
More ...Theatre
The Diary of a Maestro: Meeting Neil Armfield
Jana Wendt
We are approximately an hour into Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure – first performed in 1604 – when a phone rings on stage. The appliance...
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Barnsey's Blues: Jimmy Barnes's 'Rage and Ruin'
Robert Forster
What do Sarah Blasko, Silverchair, The Grates and Jimmy Barnes all have in common? Their latest albums were all made outside Australia...
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Film
Father Knows Worst: Taika Waititi's 'Boy' and Mia Hansen-Love's 'Father of My Children'
Luke Davies
A man perches awkwardly on the edge of a single bed talking to his two sons, Boy (James Rolleston) and Rocky (Te Aho Eketone-Whitu). He has...
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The Politics of Prose: David Grossman's 'To the End of the Land'
Inga Clendinnen
The Israeli novelist David Grossman leapt to international attention in the late ’80s with the release of his See Under: Love, translated...
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Noted
'Freedom' by Jonathan Franzen
Michelle de Kretser
Artists in fiction are coded confessions. Freedom gives us Richard Katz, rock musician and homme fatal, pitched suddenly, just like...
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Noted
'Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania's Forests' by Anna Krien
John Birmingham
Tasmania is another country, sometimes another world. To move beyond the edge of settlement, which largely peters out a short drive from...
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Encounters
Doctor Who & Gai Waterhouse
Sadly, only one of Australia’s 114 official National Living Treasures has ever appeared in an episode of Doctor Who. It happened in 1978...
More ...Letters to the Editor
Mungo MacCallum
In her Comment piece in the August edition of the Monthly Julia Baird correctly identifies Julia Gillard’s strengths: she is, first and...
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