October 2009

Frank Sinatra & Bob Hawke

By Shane Maloney

“A funny thing happened in Australia,” Frank Sinatra told a New York audience. “I made a mistake and got off the plane.”The plane in question – the private jet of one of Sinatra’s Las Vegas casino connections – landed in Melbourne on 9 July 1974. Fresh out of self-imposed retirement, the 58-year-old Sinatra was visiting Australia for the first time in 15 years. His career was ba

Giramondo Publishing, 320pp; $27.95

"Barley Patch" by Gerald Murnane

By Louis Nowra

There are times at the end of an author’s career when a book review is almost a redundant exercise. This holds equally true for bestselling writers – like Bryce Courtenay – or coterie authors whose fans will buy anything they publish no matter what the quality. Like many a Nabokov aficionado, I will buy his unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, when it comes out at the end of the yea

Black Inc., 224 pp; $27.95

"Piano Lessons" by Anna Goldsworthy

By Zora Simic

At first glance, Anna Goldsworthy’s memoir, Piano Lessons, appears rather modest: she revisits her childhood and adolescence in comfortably suburban Adelaide, with the passing years marked by her development as a classical pianist under the tutelage of her piano teacher, Mrs Eleanora Sivan, a Russian émigré and one of a formidable line of teachers dating back to the nineteenth-century Hungarian composer Franz Liszt.Under Mrs Sivan�

Jonathan auf der Heide's 'Van Diemen's Land'

Tasmanian Devils

By Luke Davies

“There’s nothing to a piece of man,” intones the mellifluous voice-over (in Gaelic, with subtitles) late in Jonathan auf der Heide’s strange – and strangely compelling – Van Diemen’s Land. The voice-over runs sporadically yet hauntingly through the film and is at times reminiscent of that in Terrence Malick’s 2005 The New World (“What voice

The Poetry of David McComb

Beautiful Waste

By Robert Forster

David McComb, who passed away in 1999 at the age of 36, was the lead singer and songwriter of The Triffids. The band began their career in Perth in the late 1970s and broke up in 1989, and although McComb released a solo album, Love of Will, in 1994, and wrote

Arundhati Roy's "Listening to Grasshoppers"

Feral Howl

By Tim Soutphommasane

As a schoolboy in Sydney, I found that my summertime lessons would inevitably be drowned out by the clicking of cicadas. Many find the sound of cicadas somewhat soothing, but for me it was always an unbearable cacophony. Cicadas aren’t the same creatures, I

Jacqueline Kent's "The Making of Julia Gillard"

The Other Biography

By Christine Wallace

If attention from biographers augurs well for a politician’s career, then Julia Gillard looks good for the Lodge when Kevin Rudd’s day is done. Rudd was the subject of two biographies in the run-up to becoming prime minister in 2007. Now Gillard is on the verge of t

Edmund Capon's "I Blame Duchamp"

C'est la vie

By Sebastian Smee

No one ever seems surprised by Edmund Capon’s success, for he is charm incarnate. He has led one of Australia’s most visited art galleries, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, since 1978. You watch the way he floats, like pollen, from engagement to engagem

Joan Sutherland

Curtain Call

By Peter Conrad

With the connivance of an airline official, her husband Richard Bonynge had caught the first flight out to London; the diva was left behind with their impedimenta, the tiles and rugs they had bought as souvenirs, and also – as she told me on a later occasion – with

Gentlemen's Clubs

In Retreat

By Malcolm Knox

Invited to speak at The Australian Club in Sydney a couple of years ago, I felt reticent about telling, say, my wife where I was going. After all, being caught inside this type of gentlemen’s club may carry more shame than being spotted in the ones with pole

A Short History of the Media Future

Mash-up

By John Birmingham

The formal library, in contrast, has none of this. Occupying the centre of the original house, its one nod to modernity is a rather groovy white lampshade hanging in the centre of the room. The vast and intricate web of optical fibre and wiring, which forms a

Paul Kelly's "The March of Patriots"

The Insider

By Robert Manne

We have known for several years that Paul Kelly was preparing to publish the sequel to The End of Certainty. Last month it finally appeared. There can be no question that The March of Patriots is a brilliant, if deeply flawed, achievement and a work of first-rate signif

Bad Behaviour

By Gay Bilson

My daughter, who is in her thirties, was doing the dishes. I began to dry. You can’t have a conversation with a dishwashing machine. We were chatting amicably until she said, “Mum, I don’t want to upset you, but I’m not comfortable with taking the soup to your friends when you know there is chicken stock in it.”The day before, we’d received a pho

Death Notice

By Benjamin Law

The story goes like this: Ernest Hemingway, master of literary economy, is challenged to write a narrative in 10 words or less. Hemingway, of course, comes up with a heartbreaker in six. “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” It’s also been strongly rumoured, however, that Hemingway isn’t the author at all and that the story came from a theatre production about him instead. Whatever the case,

Dance With Me, Baby

By Clare Press

It’s a sparkling Sunday afternoon, and three grimacing youths are loitering in the bile-green doorway of Off Ya Tree, that marvellously monikered emporium at the city-end of Sydney’s Oxford Street. The sweaty-looking male members of this terrible trio are

Socratic Dialogues

By Alan Saunders

“My idea of heaven is sitting in my garden with the sun on my back, a cup of tea and someone I love,” says a woman at the back of the room. It’s a philosophical claim that, like so many, invites more questions than it resolves. Is she saying that heaven

Purgatory

By Leigh Sales

Nicola has the sunken face of a long-term junkie. She looks about 50 but is probably much younger. She is painfully skinny in tight jeans and her shoulder blades poke through her white cardigan. She wears thongs even though it’s winter.Nicola has just taken the stand

Comment

By Elliot Perlman

Dear Prime Minister,In the February Monthly you wrote that “the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed … and the free-market fundamentalism it has produced, has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy … With the demise of neo-liberalism the role of the state has once more been recognised as fundamental … in the design of a