September 2009

Miles Franklin & Joseph Furphy

By Shane Maloney

In February 1904, Stella Miles Franklin – then aged 24 – received an admiring letter from a 60-year-old former bullock-driver named Joseph Furphy. He requested a photograph and proposed that they meet.My Brilliant Career, Franklin’s semi-autobiographical novel about a spirited teenager’s rebellion against stultifying convention, had appeared three years earlier. It was the only Austra

'The Bee Hut' by Dorothy Porter

By Lisa Gorton

Dorothy Porter’s poems often work like blues songs. Their progress depends not on structures of logic but on patterns of imagery and sound. This gives her poetry a directness of feeling rare in the Australian tradition and Porter combines the blues-style looseness with a tough-minded, conversational tone. The Bee Hut is the most formally beautiful of her collections; it is also the most per

'Inherent Vice' by Thomas Pynchon

By Justin Clemens

Thomas Pynchon is one of the most extraordinary novelists writing today. This isn’t due to his genius alone, though there’s no doubting his encyclopaedic knowledge, literary range and sheer inventiveness. It’s also due to sheer luck, to Pynchon ending up in 1960s California just as the state was going ballistic in every sense. Yet because of his constitutional hypersensitivity, Pynchon can’t help but suspect that there’s more

Richard Dawkins' 'The Greatest Show on Earth'

Unbelievers

By Ian Lowe

You wouldn’t believe me if I claimed that almost half the people in a rich, modern country still thought the earth was flat, or that the Roman Empire never existed. It would be a ridiculous assertion. Yet almost half of all adults in the United States believe that human beings did not evolve from other species, but were created by a divine being less than

J.M. Coetzee's 'Summertime'

A Federer Game

By Inga Clendinnen

JM Coetzee wrote Boyhood, his account from inside the mind (distanced third person, urgent present tense) of an unnamed South African boy heading into puberty when he was in his fifties. Surely he was young to be writing memoirs? Surely another novel would hav

Steven Soderbergh's 'The Girlfriend Experience'

Amoral Tale

By Luke Davies

In what passes for context-setting in a porn clip I found on the internet as research for this review, an off-screen cameraman asks porn star Sasha Grey to tell a little about herself. “When I’m not fucking,” she smiles, “I like seeing a good movie, or

Francis Deron's 'The Trial of the Khmer Rouge'

The Cambodian Genocide

By Simon Leys

One remembers the last lines of Kafka’s Trial: Josef K, an innocent citizen who fell into an incomprehensible and endless web of judicial proceedings for reasons that will never be revealed to him, is in the end taken by two official-looking gentlemen to a deserted qu

The Death of the Good Father

By Drusilla Modjeska

In Granta’s anthology called Fathers, published at the end of last year there’s a tough little story from New Zealand’s Kirsty Gunn. It’s called ‘The Father’. Actually, it’s about a grandfather who turns up when the children are on holiday. Fathe

Fashion's Coming of Age

This Year's Model

By Clare Press

Those with an appreciation of the firm and youthful female form may be interested to ogle Terry Richardson’s photographs of the latest crop of young ‘supermodels’ in this year’s ‘Pirelli calendar’.Richardson is best known for creating raunchy ads for the lik

Only Itself to Blame: The Church of Scientology

By Malcolm Knox

The Surry Hills premises were Spartan and recently opened. Scientology’s central Sydney church, in Castlereagh St, is closed for the addition of two floors and a glass-fronted tower topped with the church’s radiant cross. The development application was ap

Christmas Island

The Indian Ocean Solution

By David Marr

The Jaffaris are Hazaras from Afghanistan, a people long persecuted as Shia Muslims in a country overwhelmingly Sunni. Sharif was still a boy when he fled the country to grow up in the large Hazara community in Iran. At some point, he moved to Pakistan and rai

Ningaloo Sharks

By James Bradley

It takes little more than two hours for the spotter planes to locate the first whale shark of the day. Along with the two-dozen or so others who have paid several hundred dollars to spend a day diving with the sharks, I don my mask and flippers in readiness to swim. We

Small-Time Big Top

By Cate Kennedy

Perry Bros Circus has set up again at the showgrounds in town, its familiar red and yellow striped tent rising like a rare winter flower behind the Saturday footy match. Its two elephants, Minyak and Saigon, don’t perform anymore; they’re just for “display”, as the circus poster says. Behind the Big Top, where they’re tethered, local kids watch the

Sleepers, Awake

By Benjamin Law

Twenty years ago, just past midnight, the American tank ship Exxon Valdez was slicing through cold black water, cutting a course through the Gulf of Alaska. Anyone who was an adult in the ’80s knows what happened next: a misjudged turn, a grounding on the reef and 258,000 barrels of crude oil spilling into the ocean.The National Transportation Safety Board’s post-mortem on the incident makes f

Harvest

By Gay Bilson

The South Australian autumn had been wet, and in the early morning the soggy earth steamed, especially under the pines in the Adelaide hills. These are perfect conditions for mushrooms. They have had a bumper season, which is to say it has been a bumper season

Rudd and the Murdoch Press

Comment

By Mungo MacCallum

Political leaders find it particularly irksome. It was painful enough to be called into the media mogul’s Sydney headquarters, worse still to be invited to his rural estate – ‘Cavan’, near Canberra – to don gumboots and compliment him on his livestoc