July 2011

Howard Florey & Alexander Fleming

By Shane Maloney

On 2 September 1940, as the Battle of Britain raged, a short, grey-headed man with a dapper bow tie presented himself at the pathology laboratory at Oxford University. “Hullo,” he said to the grouchy, work-absorbed Australian in charge. “I hear you’ve been doing things with my old penicillin. I’d be interested to look around.” Thus Alexander Fleming met Howard Florey. As a battlef

'Nagasaki: The Massacre of the Innocent and Unknowing' By Craig Collie

By Lian Hearn

Nagasaki stands at the head of a deep-water harbour on the western coast of Kyushu. It was where foreign traders came to Japan, each leaving a distinct legacy. The Chinese brought their red temples and their cuisine; the Portuguese left behind a faith and liturgy preserved for hundreds of years by the ‘hidden Christians’; the Dutch contributed western medicine, science and political ideas

'The Hall of Uselessness' By Simon Leys

By Linda Jaivin

The Hall of Uselessness, a compendium of Simon Leys’s cultural and political commentary, is an elegant mansion of many rooms, connected by ingenious pathways, carpeted with wit and perfumed with what the Chinese call shuxiang – the scent of learning. From the antechamber of Quixotism we wander into the bowers of literature, China, the sea and university, before looking around Leys’s pantry of marginalia. Along the way, our host in

The 54th Venice Biennale

Vanity Case

By Sebastian Smee

Who would have thought that the first major movement of the twenty-first century would be a revival of trompe l’oeil? I admit, it’s unexpected. But it’s difficult not to notice at this year’s Venice Biennale that – after more than a century of scepticism directed at the business – painstaking, eye-fooling reproductions of reality are sneaking bac

David Lumsdaine’s 'White Dawn' and 'Big Meeting'

Sound Harvest

By Andrew Ford

Whenever the old conversation is had about what constitutes the authentic Australian sound in classical music – and fortunately it is had less and less – Peter Sculthorpe tops the list of composers. Anne Boyd’s name usually crops up, too. This is hardly

'In Treatment: Season Three'

Couch Habit

By Robyn Davidson

If, like Frederick Crews of the ‘Freud wars’, you think Freud was a crank, and his legacy a “spurious, ineffective pseudoscience”; or if, like Nabokov, you “detest” Freud (“I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elde

Terrence Malick’s 'The Tree of Life' and Julia Leigh’s 'Sleeping Beauty'

Like the Day and Night

By Helen Garner

Terrence Malick’s new movie The Tree of Life (in national release), recently garlanded with the Palme d’Or at Cannes, comes muscled up with star power. You want men? You want family? How about Brad Pitt and Sean Penn as father and son? Jessica Chastain as wife and m

James Boyce’s '1835: The Founding of Melbourne & the Conquest of Australia'

Beneath the Boulevards

By Malcolm Turnbull

The beauty of Melbourne’s wide boulevards, its opulent architecture and magnificent parks remind us of the extraordinary wealth and confidence of nineteenth-century Victoria. Melbourne’s edifices are bigger and grander than their counterparts in Sydney, re

Robert Hughes’s 'Rome'

Empire of the Mind

By Peter Conrad

In 1966 Robert Hughes concluded his first book, The Art of Australia, with a sardonic farewell to a country he had already quit. The final paragraph quotes an anonymous painter who told Hughes, “you can’t begin to grow up until you’ve left the place”, after whic

Stardust Memories: In Search of Real Italian Food

By Peter Robb

Tony Bilson has done incomparable good for eating in Sydney over a long time. The gold-coated egg yolk was a Melbourne boy’s astute pitch at Sydney’s easily bored diners – he talked of “keeping them interested”. Yet you wondered whether Bilson, who h

The Struggle for Liberation in the Middle East

After Spring

By Waleed Aly

“What happens if you vote no?” I ask. “Nothing. There is no one else.” So, na’m, urged the billboard: yes! This had nothing to do with winning votes, which, after all, are delivered by the forfeiture of democracy. It was an exercise in the most trans

Chris Bowen and the Malaysian Solution

The Hot Seat

By Jana Wendt

The Malaysian Solution, a project he claims largely as his own (“Courageous, minister”, I hear Sir Humphrey Appleby snorting), holds out one of the few prospects of redemption in the government’s valley of tears. With unshakeable faith, Bowen believes the scheme w

Choosing the Right Path for Adolescent Mental Health

Minds at Risk

By Lisa Pryor

This included $419.7 million over five years for the expansion of two services for young people championed by Melbourne psychiatrist Professor Patrick McGorry. The number of Headspace centres is set to triple to 90. These centres focus on young people aged 12 to 25 with a range of mild to moderate mental health concerns. The rest of the money will go towards

Mark Scott Embarks on Another Five-Year Term

Second Life

By Margaret Simons

Shortly after his appointment to the top job in mid 2006, it seemed as though the 3-D virtual world Second Life was the new thing – a place where Australians might spend large amounts of their time. No field is changing faster than media, and Scott believes that where the audience goes the ABC should follow. So Scott created an avatar and went to try it out. History does not record, and he does

Reflections on the Breeding House

In the Rat Room

By Gail Bell

In many ways it was the perfect job for a young recovering panic merchant. Geographical isolation, hours alone with non-speaking mammals, a heavy door between me and the other primates, and a routine to learn and master at my own speed. Nominally, I was a labo

Child Beauty Pageants in Australia

Sparkle and Shine

By Julia Baird

“I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.” –Elizabeth Cady Stanton, c.1870 There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the adjectives used to describe the winners of child beauty pageants: pretty, beautiful, lovely. They c

John Safran’s new ABC TV project

The Quest for Muslim Jedis

By Craig Sherborne

The world is up this way, just over here. Follow me. Mind your head, you are entering human nature. There are narrow tunnels of religion. There is politics and bad blood. It’s a maze of superstitions and fears. Writers bother with this sort of thing but so does a thin

Comment

By Nick Dyrenfurth

It was a sublime moment of coincidence. In the midst of reading The Finkler Question, English novelist Howard Jacobson’s comic meditation on contemporary Jewish identity, a message flashed across my phone’s screen: the darling of the radical Left, American Jewish intellectual Noam Chomsky, had won the 2011 Sydney Peace Prize. The eponymous academic philosopher cum media tart Sam Finkler