February 2010
POLITICS
The Whirling Dervish: Tony Abbott
Louis Nowra
The two days I spent in emergency, I whiled away my time trying to block my ears to the cries of angry injured drunks and moaning victims,...
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SOCIETY
Strutting & Fretting
Paul Kelly
In show business, you’re generally either the main act or the warm-up. Over 35 years, I’ve been both. A good show needs different and...
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Ebony: The Girl in the Room
Anne Manne
An ambulance officer looks around the room and breathes in the smell. It looks more like the bleakest of prison cells than a little girl’s...
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The Biggest Loser: Harry Kakavas and Problem Gamblers
Paul Barry
This occurred in November 2004, shortly after Kakavas was spotted at the tables in Las Vegas by Kerry Packer, who rang Crown’s chief...
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SOCIETY
Supermarket Sweep
Benjamin Law
It’s 4.20 am in Kingston, 30 minutes out of Brisbane, and already the place is a hive of human activity. In the darkness, people haul...
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SOCIETY
Saga
Cate Kennedy
It’s one minute past midnight and we are gathered, hushed, in our thousands across the country, trembling in anticipation like a coven of...
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SOCIETY
Impresario
Gay Bilson
At first glance, the 2010 Adelaide Festival program felt, well, small, in a sensible, tightly fused kind of way, with far fewer advertised...
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SOCIETY
Comforter
Anna Goldsworthy
“Are you OK, dear?” the nurse asks. Whether I am OK is hardly the issue, when we are surrounded by people screaming. They are trapped in...
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POLITICS
Comment: Keith Windschuttle
Robert Manne
Windschuttle’s argument can be summarised like this. While there were many separations of Aboriginal children from their mothers, families...
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'The Legacy' by Kirsten Tranter
Peter Craven
Kirsten Tranter, the daughter of famous poet John and formidable literary agent Lyn, has a literary background with bells on. Her first...
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'The Pregnant Widow' by Martin Amis
Linda Jaivin
“It sometimes seemed to Keith that the English novel … asked only one question. Will she fall? Will she fall, this woman?” But in Martin...
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SOCIETY
Percy Grainger & Edvard Grieg
As a small child growing up in Melbourne, Percy Grainger devoured the Icelandic sagas, signed his letters “Grettir the Strong” and bounded...
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Border Crossings: John Safran's 'Race Relations'
Alice Pung
The Torah says that we do not see things as they are. We see things as we are. In our everyday relationships, we take ourselves as the...
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Liberal Fundamentalist: AC Grayling's 'Liberty in the Age of Terror'
John Keane
In Liberty in the Age of Terror: A Defence of Civil Liberties and Enlightenment Values (Bloomsbury, 304pp; $35.00), English liberal...
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The Sins of the Son: Vladimir Nabokov's 'The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments'
Simon Leys
The bitterness of an interrupted life is nothing compared to the bitterness of an interrupted work: the probability of a continuation of...
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Easy Rider: Frederick Seidel's 'Ooga-Booga and Poems: 1959-2009'
Kate Jennings
For your consideration: “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare.” Now there’s a rip-snorting line of poetry if there ever was one....
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Lost Boys: Jacques Audiard's 'A Prophet' and John Hillcoat's 'The Road'
Luke Davies
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...
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Divine Intervention: John Waters
Peter Conrad
Australia’s girdling oceans used to serve as a prophylactic, our defence against the infectious depravity of the northern hemisphere. The...
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9 February 2012
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