May 2011

Archduke Franz Ferdinand & the Platypus

By Shane Maloney

On 17 May 1893, the newly launched SMS Kaiserin Elisabeth – a battle cruiser of the Austro-Hungarian Navy – steamed into Sydney Harbour. It bore a most distinguished passenger, no less a personage than the 29-year-old heir presumptive to the dual crown of Austria–Hungary, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. A 21-gun salute was fired, civic dignitaries went aboard to bow and scrape, and a larg

'Caleb’s Crossing' By Geraldine Brooks

By Kirsten Tranter

Caleb’s Crossing extends Geraldine Brooks’s interest in the early history of the United States, first explored in her Pulitzer Prize–winning March, which is set during the Civil War. Here, she writes about the seventeenth-century Puritan settlements in colonial Cambridge and on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where she now lives. The story was inspired, Brooks says, by her surprise i

'Mrs Carey’s Concert' by Bob Connolly and Sophie Raymond

By Anna Goldsworthy

Mrs Carey’s Concert, a new documentary by Bob Connolly (of Rats in the Ranks and Facing the Music) and Sophie Raymond, offers a familiar narrative archetype: it’ll be all right on the night. It is a type of triumph over adversity set on the concert stage, which informs Hungarian director István Szabó’s Meeting Venus (1991), as well as the lives of most musicians, some of the time. When we come across it at the movies, we know it

'Cloudstreet' By Matthew Saville

By MJ Hyland

Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet is a compassionate masterpiece, which is to Australians what George Orwell’s 1984 is to the English and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird is to Americans. But Matthew Saville’s six-hour miniseries doesn’t come close to conjuring the glorious guts of Winton’s epic. Only the final part of the series is artful and savvy. M

Helen Garner on Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown and Brendan Fletcher’s Mad Bastards

Broken Communities

By Helen Garner

In 1999, in the small South Australian township of Snowtown, police entered the vault of a disused bank and found a serial killer’s stash: dismembered corpses stored in barrels of acid. Director Justin Kurzel, in his first feature film Snowtown (to be releas

John Hirst on Mark McKenna’s 'An Eye for Eternity'

A Grand History

By John Hirst

Mark McKenna’s An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark (Miegunyah Press, 816pp; $54.99) is a challenging biography because it will not allow us to think that there is an easy way into the life of another person. In the second chapter, which by normal

Lindsay Tanner’s 'Sideshow'

Too Much Information

By Andrew Charlton

Recently I had dinner with a group of friends including a well-known political journalist. When I told him I was working my way through the proofs of Lindsay Tanner’s new book, his interest was piqued. He put down his fork, fixed me with his gaze and leaned forward to

Peter Robb on Shaun Gladwell

Lessons in Unlearning

By Peter Robb

When the Olympic Games came to Sydney in 2000 I decided to rent a TV and watch some. Tweaking the rabbit’s ears – no time for an antenna – I watched Cathy and Ian and the others going for gold in extreme blizzard conditions. Outside in the real, mild wor

Nicholas Shakespeare on Tasmania

The Quiet Peninsula

By Nicholas Shakespeare

Joan Masterman’s matchless four-day walk, the Freycinet Experience, turns 20 this year. For her traditional end-of-season party, she has invited the guides, lodge co-ordinators and office staff, plus Gil the bus driver and Shep the skipper, to fit into clothes they mi

Rodney Hall on Mali

To Timbuktu and Back

By Rodney Hall

The greatest ancient library in the world is being unearthed and reassembled at Timbuktu – an astonishing archeological discovery – so I set out to see for myself, travelling with my daughter Cressida. Mali is poor – very, very poor. Countless catastroph

Janette Turner Hospital on Central Park, New York

Wanted for Loitering

By Janette Turner Hospital

From the NASA space shuttle, Central Park is visible to the naked eye as a bright emerald bar on the fat knuckle of Manhattan – index finger of New York, principal of the five boroughs that make up the city, indisputably the dominant digit as it pokes the so

Letter to a Bulgarian Friend

By Alex Miller

Dear Boris, You tell me you are living in Chirpan again, the town where you were born. That you have returned there after 35 years away. I still see Chirpan, low to the horizon and far to the west across the plain as we drove on our roundabout route through Dimitrovgrad

Linda Jaivin on Harbin, China

Holiday on Ice

By Linda Jaivin

“Five bus tickets, one turkey and one lamb, please.” My friend then turns to the rest of us: “Karmically speaking, we’re going to hell.” That may well be so. In the short run, we are cramming into a small armoured bus along with a crowd of palpably excited Chinese tourists. We are about to have a close encounter with the largest cats on Earth. And

Drusilla Modjeska on Tufi, Papua New Guinea

In the Fjords

By Drusilla Modjeska

Back from Tufi for less than a month, I find myself thinking I should cancel this article, keep the place a secret and let those who think Papua New Guinea is a dangerous place of dark spirits continue in their ignorance. On the first morning of this most recent visit, I was looking out over the fjord from the terrace of the Tufi Dive Resort as the early sun struck the trees on the cliffs opposite

Robyn Davidson on Health Retreats

Tide of Improvement

By Robyn Davidson

Sometimes fortune gifts you things you did not know you needed. Tyringham Clinic was one of those. Out in the luminous green, motorway-laced flatlands behind Milton Keynes, England, it was a Palladian pile that had known better times. At the front was a gravel

Craig Sherborne on Hiking the Milford Track, New Zealand

The Sound of Silence

By Craig Sherborne

Bliss can never happen of its own accord. When it has been years-long away it needs some outside intervention. Narcotic versions were never for me – look at those grey-faced zombies stumbling down Fitzroy Street in Melbourne. That’s not bliss, that’s bla

Lian Hearn Reflects on Japan

The Work of Catfish

By Lian Hearn

The dark wave rises, and keeps on rising like the sea in a nightmare. Ships cascade over a wall built to protect the port town from typhoons and tsunami, and cars are swept away like plastic bottles. A flock of seagulls soars upwards. Out at sea, fishing boats rode over

The Foundering Miracle

By Hugh White

The figures moving among the wreckage conducted themselves with a quiet dignity that was not only moving and impressive, but also strangely familiar. The tsunami seemed to push parts of Japan back six decades, and we were reminded irresistibly of the stoicism and dignity with which the grandparents of this generation faced devastation and defeat after 1945. When the sea so roughly stripped away th