February 2011

The New Castrati

Too Much Heaven on their Minds

By Paul Kelly

Ever since the world began, I suspect, men have been showing off to women and to other men by singing high. Sure, the manly stuff – hunting animals, smashing enemies, guarding the fort, singing baritone – has always played well, identifying a fella, in the words of John Lee Hooker, as a “solid sender”. But, so often, when a guy’s up against the odds and needs a miracle, it’s upwar

The Plight of the Windsors

Falling Stars

By Peter Conrad

I, too, once saw her passing by, for a few seconds in 1954, on a scrubby hill in Hobart during her first Commonwealth tour. She passed by in an open car as we all flapped our patriotic pennants; in return she signalled her lukewarm enthusiasm with the slow-motion wave of a gloved hand. I had never seen anyone so white and unweathered, and when I heard her voice on the radio later that day I m

The Destruction of Burrup Rock Art

Into the Beehive

By Robyn Davidson

We all know what justifications, arguments and perspectives are likely to be heard from the competing interests (competing visions of value). But what, ultimately, is being argued for? And is there ground for fair negotiation or is negotiation really just defeat in sheep’s clothing?An exemplary version of this story is being played out on the Burrup Peninsula (or Murujuga, its Aboriginal name, meaning ‘hip bone sticking out’), in

Lice Infestations in Australia

Lousy Science

By Christine Kenneally

In a laboratory in the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Melbourne, Vern Bowles slides a Petri dish into a microscope and centres it on two coffee-brown lice eggs: one is full and opaque, the other empty and almost entirely translucent. Suspended to their right, like a distorted astrological sign, is a big, fat louse. The microscope illumina

Fasting at a ‘Fat Farm’

Life Juices

By Helen Garner

At 5 pm on Boxing Day we sweep up the drive of the establishment my sister refers to as “the fat farm”. Its modest buildings are set in an old, deep garden: lawns, curved hedges, huge native trees. Our rooms give on to bushland that chinks all day with bel

Renewable Energy

Comment

By Guy Pearse

Every year the sunburnt country receives enough solar energy from above to meet its current annual energy consumption for 10,000 years. From below, there’s enough geothermal energy for 2.6 million years. An endless and impatient queue of ‘roaring 40s’ we

Comment: The Queensland Floods

By Alex Miller

When I first arrived in the central Queensland town of Springsure on the train the previous year the roads were impassable and I was stuck in town and unable to get out to the station. I had no money but the hotel down by the railway – it is still there – took me in

The Collapse of Storm Financial

In the Eye of the Storm

By Paul Barry

Yet these financial collapses happened at almost exactly the same time: Bernie Madoff was led away in handcuffs in December 2008, just as Storm’s banks pulled the plug on the big Townsville-based financial planner and its unfortunate clients. There are, of c

Olivier Assayas’ 'Carlos' and Terrorists in Film

Paths of Glory

By Kate Jennings

Every road leads to a reckoning. In Olivier Assayas’ movie Carlos, the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez – AKA Carlos the Jackal – meets his reckoning not when he is finally kidnapped in Khartoum in 1994 and taken back to France to be imprisoned for kil

Mark Twain and his Autobiography: Volume 1

Parallel Lives

By Peter Robb

A big book by Mark Twain became a bestseller in the US following its publication last November, a hundred years after its author’s death. It was Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1 (University of California Press, 76

'Franklin & Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage' By Hazel Rowley

By Carmen Callil

It is always a pleasure to read a biography by Hazel Rowley. She is an enthusiastic chronicler of the lives she chooses to present to us, and has considerable narrative and research talents. Her biography of Christina Stead remains her best. Always she chooses

'How the West was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices Ahead' By Dambisa Moyo

By John Edwards

Dambisa Moyo’s 2009 bestselling attack on development assistance to poor countries, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa, was sufficiently successful to win her a spot among TIME magazine’s “100 most influential people in the w

John Peter Russell & Vincent van Gogh

By Shane Maloney

Early in November 1886, when the overcast sky was struggling to light his Montparnasse studio, a 28-year-old painter from Sydney took up his brush and began work on a portrait. His sitter was a fellow hopeful in the febrile Impressionist-dominated Parisian artistic milieu – a gloomy, carrot-haired Dutchman. Nobody had ever asked to paint Vincent van Gogh b

Mahmoud Saikal and Kabul’s ‘New City’ Proposal

A Tale of Two Cities

By Christopher Kremmer

How like an architect to see the problems of one city as a reason for building another. It wasn’t his idea but Mahmoud Saikal – architect, refugee, ambassador and long-time resident of Walter Burley Griffin’s Canberra – understandably embraced it. The problem city was his birthplace, Kabul, the historic and once bucolic Afghan capital that was partially destroyed by civil war in the 1990s

The Future of Fairfax

Crises of Faith

By Margaret Simons

Perhaps the worst journalists are believers too – so convinced about the importance of their mission, their own special place as communicators of the Word, that they do awful things in their arrogance. Journalists can lack respect for the laity, otherwise kn