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The Monthly, September 2009, No. 49

In This Issue

September 2009 in brief

The Nation Reviewed

Comment • Mungo MacCallum
Harvest • Gay Bilson
Sleepers, Awake • Benjamin Law
Small-Time Big Top • Cate Kennedy
Ningaloo Sharks

• James Bradley

The Monthly Essays

David Marr

The Indian Ocean Solution

Christmas Island

Malcolm Knox

Only Itself to Blame

The Church of Scientology

Clare Press

This Year's Model

Fashion's Coming of Age

Drusilla Modjeska

The Death of the Good Father

Arts & Letters

The Cambodian Genocide • Simon Leys
Prepared • Anna Goldsworthy
Amoral Tale • Luke Davies
A Federer Game • Inga Clendinnen
Unbelievers • Ian Lowe
'The Bee Hut' by Dorothy Porter • Lisa Gorton
'Inherent Vice' by Thomas Pynchon • Justin Clemens

Encounters

Miles Franklin & Joseph Furphy • Shane Maloney

Recently forwarded | The Monthly

Mission Drift

A Report From Afghanistan

Chris Masters

Infomation Idol

How Google is Making Us Stupid

Gideon Haigh

Margaret Court and Martina Navratilova

Shane Maloney

Faith in Politics

Kevin Rudd

The Whirling Dervish

Tony Abbott

Louis Nowra

Recently forwarded | SlowTV

The origin of the universe and the arrow of time. Sean Carroll

University of Sydney

Historical Encounters

David Combe & Valery Ivanov

When Labor won the 1983 election, David Combe thought he had it made. As ALP national secretary he’d put the party apparatus on a professional footing, secured its finances and paved the way for Bob Hawke’s eventual victory. Now a commercial lobbyist, the lifetime Labor insider was to be the indispensable go-to man for corporations wanting to do business with the new government.

Quick to congratulate him was the first secretary at the Soviet embassy. At 31, Valery Ivanov was young for the job, his first diplomatic posting. The...

Monthly books

'The Legacy' by Kirsten Tranter

'The Pregnant Widow' by Martin Amis

Liberal Fundamentalist

AC Grayling's 'Liberty in the Age of Terror'

The Sins of the Son

Vladimir Nabokov's 'The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments'

Easy Rider

Frederick Seidel's 'Ooga-Booga and Poems: 1959-2009'

Monthly music

Obscured by Clouds

Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'

Waleed Aly

Curtain Call

Joan Sutherland

Peter Conrad

Prepared

The ANAM Piano Festival

Anna Goldsworthy

Setting Herself Apart

Sarah Blasko's 'As Day Follows Night'

Robert Forster

The Pretendies

The art of the spoken interlude

Paul Kelly

Monthly film

Lost Boys

Jacques Audiard's 'A Prophet' and John Hillcoat's 'The Road'

In A Prophet, a dazzling new film about innocence and power from Jacques Audiard (director of The Beat My Heart Skipped, 2005), 19-year-old Malik (Tahar Rahim) is about to embark on a six-year prison sentence for assaulting a cop. Polite and deferential, Malik is hard to read at first. The little we glean about his life is framed in terms of negatives: he has no contacts, no relatives; he didn’t grow up with his parents, but in juvenile centres. If he’s experiencing fear as he enters the chaos of the prison at Brécourt, he doesn’t show it. He’...

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