June 2012

Peter Norman, Tommie Smith & John Carlos

By Shane Maloney

When he first saw Peter Norman, John Carlos said, “Who’s this little white guy?” Up until then – the semi-final of the 200 metres – the phys ed teacher, “seventh-generation Salvo” and sometime butcher from Melbourne’s northern suburbs hadn’t really registered on the radar of the American runner or his Harlem-born teammate, Tommie Smith, the favourite for the gold. But before

'Canada' by Richard Ford

By Christine Kenneally

I don’t think there’s a single moment of happiness in Richard Ford’s latest novel, Canada. Or joy, mischief or warmth. The word ‘love’ appears a lot in the first of the saga’s three parts, but it doesn’t generate much heat. And why should it? Not all lives are happy, and lots of people talk of love when they don’t know what it means. Dell Parsons, the novel’s young narrator,

'The Watch Tower' by Elizabeth Harrower

By Michelle de Kretser

Elizabeth Harrower’s fiction obsessively circles the workings of power within the domestic sphere. Watchfulness, cruelty and the suffering of the innocent feed her work, as her titles hint: The Long Prospect, The Catherine Wheel. Harrower’s characteristic themes find their fullest expression in The Watch Tower, a superb psychological novel that will creep into your bones. First published in 1966 and now reissued by Text, The Watch T

'HHhH' by Laurent Binet

By Catherine Ford

Not too many first novels come at you like this one. Laurent Binet’s debut, based on the true story of the British and Czech mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Nazi secret services, in Prague in 1942, is virtuosic, combative and impatient with fiction’s usual terms and conditions. It won France’s Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman in 20

'Downton Abbey'

It’s Complicated

By Anna Goldsworthy

There comes a time when a television series is no longer a simple pleasure but a type of illness: when you cast a sheepish glance at your partner at midnight and he responds with a brusque, shamefaced nod before pressing play for the fifth time; when the theme

The troubadour glut

Sensitive Souls

By Richard Guilliatt

Keaton Henson is a 24-year-old British singer–songwriter who resembles a yeoman minstrel – full beard, Jesus hair, waif-thin frame enveloped in jumbo-knit pullovers. His debut album Dear … consists of ten mournful laments about his ex-girlfriend sung in

The Warmun art movement

Knock ’em down rain

By Sophie Cunningham

Earlier this year, I was being shown around Darwin by Robert Mills, a Larrakia community leader, and I asked him about the weather. “Is it true that the wet is coming later? And that when it hits the rain is heavier?” Mills and I were spending the day together so he

Winning Enemies

By John Birmingham

The humiliating retreat from the southern Iraqi city of Basra, into cantonment at the airport, is widely regarded as the modern nadir of the British military. On 2 September 2007, a bugle sounded ‘Advance’ to signal the withdrawal, and a convoy carrying th

Australia’s budding graphic novel scene

Memory Palaces

By Luke Davies

The recent, beautiful graphic novel Mister Wonderful, by the American cartoonist Daniel Clowes, tells the story of Marshall, a man who frets – greatly, incessantly, neurotically – both in the lead-up to and all the way through his first blind date in years. The hila

The curious case of Cate Blanchett

She’s not there

By Peter Conrad

Sometimes she, too, has her doubts. This April on his BBC talk show, the cheeky Graham Norton asked about the double whose rear end deputised for hers in Elizabeth. “I don’t know whether it was my bottom or her bottom in the end,” she giggled. “I didn�

How a new show is creating drama

The Shire versus Australia

By Nick Bryant

From the lounge room of her luxury waterfront home, Mayor Carol Provan looks out through her bi-fold doors on to one of the prettiest views suburban Australia has to offer. On the horizon are the paperbarks and eucalypts of Royal National Park – the world’

Nicola Roxon

The Protector

By Anne Summers

The last thing Nicola Roxon expected when she agreed to address the Commonwealth Regional Law conference on 20 April was a confrontation with Julian Assange’s lawyer. But Jennifer Robinson had arrived in Sydney that morning after initially being denied permission to b

Rupert is finally reaping what he sowed

Murdoch & Company

By Robert Manne

For very many years Fleet Street newspapers employed private detective agencies in their search for ever more salacious stories. They provided them with valuable information obtained through bribing public officials including police, conducting surveillance, and hacking into computers and mobile phones. Many London papers were involved in these activities. H

The Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show

A Case of Rust

By Karen Hitchcock

The Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show packed the Royal Exhibition Building and its gardens this autumn. If you tried to ride your bike along the shared walkway beside the park, you could smell the lilies as you ploughed through busloads of retirees waiting to re-board the coaches home. The traffic around the park was in gridlock day and night. Winnebagos clogged the side streets. I

The transit of Venus

Veni, Vidi, Venus

By Ashley Hay

On 6 June, for six and a half hours, a dark speck will blemish the clear, bright surface of the Sun. It will be Venus, Earth’s nearest neighbour, making one of its infrequent passages across the face of our star. Such crossings occur in a tricky pattern alon

PNG Elections

Big Man Politics

By Johnny Langenheim

Papua New Guinea’s Minister for Environment and Conservation is on the campaign trail, sitting on a litter of jungle roots and leaves. His retinue includes a troupe of young boys caked in green mud, the tops of their heads shorn and the hair re-attached as b

Queen Elizabeth’s Melbourne Visit

A Royal Pilgrimage

By Robyn Annear

At 5.06 pm on the last Wednesday in February 1954, the appearance of a black car at the city end of Melbourne’s Government House Drive tripped a switch in the 100,000-strong crowd waiting to see the Queen. Right and left, people – 416 by official tally – collapsed

The Fat Man in History

By Nick Dyrenfurth

Any day now billionaire Clive Palmer, the Queensland mining magnate, will appear clad in spats and a morning coat, adorned with a top hat, chomping on a garishly elongated cigar. One minute our plutocratic whirling dervish is duelling with federal Treasurer Wayne Swan, the next he is claiming that the CIA is working in cahoots with the Greens in order to cripple Australia’s coal industry. His pa