March 2012

Us and Them: On the Importance of Animals

By Anna Krien

It was around midnight when I got off the tram at the last stop in Melbourne’s north. As the doors locked behind me, two men, one bare-chested, ran across the street, traffic swerving, and stood in front of the tram, arms crossed. Their eyes were opaque, faces shiny with sweat. “Take us to the city,” one yelled, while the other went around to the driver’s window and started bangi

George Lazenby & Cubby Broccoli

By Shane Maloney

The railway worker’s son from Goulburn had done pretty well for himself since arriving in London in 1964. Within three years, the knockabout car salesman, mechanic and ski instructor was one of the most expensive male models in the world. European Marlboro Man, no less. Life as a clothes peg was swinging. But at 28, George Lazenby had just one burning desire. He wanted to be James Bond. The

'The Clock' by Christian Marclay

By Luke Davies

The Clock’s joys are as delightful as they are improbable. Though it’s usually described as a video installation, I prefer to think of it as a majestic, circular film (it is exactly 24 hours long). It demands of its viewers their stamina, repaying them with a singularly interesting experience. Christian Marclay, who surely harnessed some rather obsessive–compulsive tendencies in constructing this remarkable piece, did the hard wor

'Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend of the World’s Most Famous Dog' by Susan Orlean

By Michelle de Kretser

In World War I, trained ‘mercy dogs’ roamed among the wounded on the battlefields of France. A soldier could call one over and hold it for comfort while he died. It’s one of the affecting factoids that stray through Rin Tin Tin, New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean’s exhaustive study of the most famous German shepherd in history. Rin Tin Tin was a pupp

David Cronenberg’s 'A Dangerous Method' and Roman Polanski’s 'Carnage'

Cinema and its Discontents

By Peter Conrad

If psychoanalysis is the talking cure, perhaps the cinema is the viewing cure. In one case we gain control of the demons in our head by describing their riots to a detached interpreter; in the other we sit mutely in the darkness and watch their projected revel

The Dirty Three’s 'Toward the Low Sun'

Thirty Words

By Robert Forster

Occasionally, just by looking at the song titles on a record sleeve, you can tell an album is going to be great. There is a rightness to their form and meaning that, when linked to the artist’s or band’s history, alerts you to a quality album in the offing

Three Portraits of Antarctica

Ice Works

By David Day

Antarctica is a mirror on which centuries of human hopes, fears and desires have been projected. Early European maps imagined the continent as a marvellous place occupying much of the southern hemisphere; but when Captain Cook went searching in the Resolution in 1773, h

Elisabeth Badinter’s 'The Conflict: Woman and Mother'

Children’s Lib

By Anne Manne

The sixteenth-century essayist, Michel de Montaigne, was sent away at birth from his aristocratic father’s house to a poor peasant wet nurse in the French countryside. In the custom of that time he was brought back into the household at about three years of

A 1952 Murder Mystery in Broken Hill

After the Dance

By Jack Marx

A man I cannot name shows me the very spot where it happened on a Monday morning 60 years ago. He remembers it well – he was only a boy and lived just down the street. “I saw a crowd of people standing around, so I went up to have a look. I saw in the distance the p

Do Mandatory Gender Quotas Work?

Status Quota

By Cordelia Fine

Despite more than 25 years of anti-discrimination legislation, it remains the case that the higher up any organisational ladder you look, the fewer women you see. In Australia, for example, women made up just 8.4% of board directors and 8% of executive manager

Kevin Rudd

A Coup By Any Other Name

By Rhys Muldoon

They’re putting you through the fire,” I remarked to the prime minister on the first day of winter, 2010. “Is my arse alight?” he replied. It turns out it was. A sitting prime minister was about to be thrown out of office. Not by the public, but by his

Lachlan Murdoch and News Corp

The Reluctant Son

By Paola Totaro

Seven years ago in New York, the heir apparent to one of the world’s most powerful media conglomerates walked out on the family business. Lachlan Keith Murdoch, eldest son of Rupert, and already the deputy chief operating officer of News Corporation, was fed up with h

The 0.01 Per Cent: The Rising Influence of Vested Interests in Australia

By Wayne Swan

A decade ago, as I waited for my order outside a Maroochydore fish and chip shop, a tall, barefoot young man strolled past wearing a T-shirt that read: ‘Greed is good. Trample the weak. Hurdle the dead.’ Those brutal lines seemed to encapsulate what was then a growing sense of unease in Australia. The world of my Queensland childhood, governed by its imp

Andrew McMillan

One Last Deadline

By Chips Mackinolty

At around 6 am, on the morning after his fifty-fourth birthday and the day before New Year’s Eve, the Darwin writer Andrew McMillan typed on his laptop: Now that the album’s almost out of the way I’ve started work on a new project as of last night: Andrew McMillan’s Last Ball Advantage: An Anthology. Short stories, poems, lyrics, extracts from Death in Dili, three old RAM stories, t

Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard in Retirement

Love thy Leader

By George Megalogenis

A curious feature of our political debate is the way it compels former prime ministers to lose their dignity in the endless feedback loop of the legacy war. The Americans, despite their more openly hostile political culture, treat their ex-leaders with suffici

Chunky Move’s Anouk van Dijk

Rejecting the Centre

By Christine Kenneally

On a cool January day at Melbourne’s Southbank, the line of dancers for Chunky Move’s morning class is twice as long as usual. A handful of disappointed latecomers is turned away but the rest file in to learn from the Dutch choreographer Anouk van Dijk. Th

Sydney’s Champion Gay Rugby Team

Same-sex Union

By Benjamin Law

Seven pm and the Bondi sun is still caressing surfers, bikini girls and topless males pulling up from their cliff-top runs. Near the lifeguard tower, 30 men have gathered for their twice-weekly rugby training. The men have nicknames suited to the game, or prison – Jay

Flag of Convenience

By Alice Pung

On the morning of Australia Day, the people of Pyalong notice their flag is missing. Pyalong is in central Victoria, loosely suspended between Tooborac and Tallarook. Usually the flag is kept in a cupboard in Neighbourhood House, right next to the police station, but before Christmas there was a robbery. Thieves stole almost everything, including the mop and bucket, though they left the children�