April 2012

Gough Whitlam & Enoch Powell

By Shane Maloney

At the 1938 ceremony for the conferring of degrees in the Faculties of Arts and Law at the University of Sydney, the address was given by the newly appointed professor of Greek, Enoch Powell. Although only 25, Powell came very well credentialled. The only son of ambitious schoolteacher parents, he was reading Ancient Greek by the age of five. An absolute swot, he’d gone on to master Platoni

'Life in Movement' by Bryan Mason and Sophie Hyde

By Anna Goldsworthy

Tanja Liedtke’s name was suddenly everywhere in May 2007, when she was appointed artistic director of Sydney Dance Company. The 29-year-old dancer and choreographer claimed to be “absolutely ecstatic” about her new role, and there was a great deal of ecstasy in the arts industry too: a notable lack of pre-emptive poppy-lopping, the genuine hope of generational change. Three months later

'The Hanging Garden' by Patrick White

By Michelle de Kretser

The publication of an unfinished draft is the writer’s version of that nightmare in which you find yourself naked in the street. Writers donate manuscripts to libraries, of course, but there is usually a finished work to offset those drafts. Also, the toilers in archives are generally steel-nerved academics accustomed to stripping finery from the great. But commercial publication is addressed to the common reader, and I, for one, am a

Aki Kaurismäki’s 'Le Havre'

A Port for the Soul

By Helen Garner

A watchman strolling late one night on the wharves of the French port of Le Havre raps his stick on the side of a container, and hears the faint cry of a baby. An official arrives with a clipboard: the container is in transit from Gabon to London, but due to a computer error in Paris, it’s been on this wharf for days. If they have oxygen, if they have wate

Aztec Music’s Archaelogical Dig

That Blockhead Thing

By Richard Guilliatt

The ’60s, so the saying goes, didn’t start in Australia until the ’70s. Richard Nixon was well into his first term in the White House by the time any Aquarian gathering happened here, and it was 1972 when the Sunbury Pop Festival tried to replicate Woods

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Sydney Gets a Laneway

By Drusilla Modjeska

Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art on Circular Quay West re-opened on 29 March with a new wing, as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Abutting the old building with its whiff of Art Deco, and glancing across to the Opera House, its stepped facade of

EL James’ 'Fifty Shades of Grey'

Randy House

By Malcolm Knox

When a new book series emerges from the swill of online fan fiction to sell 250,000 copies, dominate the New York Times e-book bestseller list, and earn lucrative ratification from a mainstream publisher, the humble reviewer’s task is inverted. Instead of asking wheth

John Strehlow’s 'The Tale of Frieda Keysser'

On a Mission

By Peter Sutton

Among a right-thinking crowd you can still get a laugh with a missionary joke. At the 2008 conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth in Keele, the doyenne of British anthropology, Professor Marilyn Strathern, brought th

The Story of Billy Blue

A Ferry into the Past

By Cassandra Pybus

When I was 17 my friend Chloe lived in Lavender Bay, just down the road from the Old Commodore Hotel. I lived nearby in Kirribilli, immediately across the water from the soaring sails of the Opera House that shimmered in my bedroom window at night. Chloe and I had been

Public versus Private Schools

Across the Great Divide

By Catherine Ford

In the mid 1970s, my conservative, town-dwelling parents uprooted us on a whim. From our comfortable home in a fantastically uneventful suburb of Geelong, we decamped to a farm five hours away, in the north-east of Victoria. Our new house, wedged between large

Four Days with José Ramos-Horta

Autumn of the Patriarch

By Peter Robb

I got to Dili at seven in the morning and the president of the República Democrática de Timor-Leste arrived from New York via Singapore a few hours later. Seven is a great time to land in Dili. You leave Darwin in the black night, fly over the Timor Sea in i

Turnbull Speaks on Life in Politics

One Morning with Malcolm

By Robert Manne

Paul Keating was the prime minister deemed most responsible by Liberals for imposing the yoke of political correctness on the shoulders of the Australian people. In our conversation, it becomes clear that on questions connected to race and ethnicity – and indeed not o

Grace Kelly’s Gowns in Bendigo

All Frocked Up

By Catherine Ford

On a recent March morning, the air over Bendigo Art Gallery turned suddenly noisy with lorikeets. Wearing ’70s day-glo capes and clocking delinquent speeds, the birds screeched past the gallery’s giant publicity billboard: a winsome come-hither headshot of Grace Kelly. Had she ever made it to Australia in person, Kelly would have loved the chutzpah of th

The Bourbon & Beefsteak in Kings Cross

A Romantic B&B

By Paul Ham

Outside a dead bar in Sydney’s Kings Cross, a homeless prostitute sags against a wall. A yellow neon light announcing ‘The Bourbon’ is turned off. The smudged window reveals only a damp cave – all that remains of this once glorious Sydney institution. The sounds have died with it: the howling laughter of soldiers on leave from the Vietnam War; the cackle of old prostitutes in the faces of

The Docklands and the Broken Wheel

The Big Tumbleweed

By Robyn Annear

In the closing scene of Planet of the Apes, there’s that moment of awful realisation for Charlton Heston’s shipwrecked astronaut: “Oh my God … I’m back. I’m home!” Rounding a lonely headland he has come upon the Statue of Liberty, sunk to her arm

Murdoch’s Tweets of Doom

Rockin’ Rupert

By Peter Conrad

Tweeting, as the Beat poets might have said, is for the birds – though what kind of bird exactly? Most users of Twitter sound like fatuously chirping budgies. But Rupert Murdoch’s fluffy plumage moulted long ago, and the tweets he has been posting since 31

Forgotten People, Elites and Class Warfare

Once Were Warriors

By Nick Dyrenfurth

On 18 January 1886, a remarkable letter to the editor appeared in the pages of the conservative Argus newspaper as a bitter wharfies’ strike brought ‘marvellous Melbourne’ to a near standstill. Its author, Bruce Smith, variously president of the Victorian Shipowne

Comment: Blessed are the Wealth-makers

By Don Watson

In 1848 a drover named O’Shaughnessy, the son of a convict, came across a man living in a gunyah in the reed beds of the Lachlan River with a few cows. O’Shaughnessy faded quickly from history, but the man in the reeds, also the son of a convict, was James Tyson and before his life was over he had millions of cattle and sheep grazing on holdings that stretched from Gippsland to the Gulf of Car