July 2009
SOCIETY
Home Truths: Revisiting 'Wake in Fright'
Kate Jennings
The plot of Wake in Fright is as old as an outcropping west of Menindee. As old as Virgil:The way downward is easy from Avernus.Black Dis’s...
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SOCIETY
Faith Bandler & Paul Robeson
Money was tight when Faith Bandler was growing up in Murwillumbah in the early 1930s, but her two older brothers managed to save a portion...
More ...CULTURE
‘Figurehead’ by Patrick Allington
Alexandra Coghlan
“I was beside myself that he’d thanked me for saving his life. Not with rage exactly. Not guilt … grief maybe. It was as...
More ...‘This Is How’ by MJ Hyland
Michael Williams
Dread is, perhaps, too strong a word, but from the first page of MJ Hyland’s new novel, This Is How, it is hard to resist a mounting...
More ...SOCIETY
Dirty Work: Luke Davies on Christine Jeffs’ ‘Sunshine Cleaning’
Luke Davies
Television’s police-procedural dramas have suffered for some time now from a disease for which there is as yet no apparent cure. It...
More ...SOCIETY
The Pretendies: The art of the spoken interlude
Paul Kelly
The spoken interlude has a long history in popular song. And takes a fair bit of nerve to pull off. The singer must step out from behind...
More ...SOCIETY
Tudor Style: Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’
Peter Craven
It must be an abyss to contemplate the historical novel set in Tudor times. It’s not so much that the job has been done with such...
More ...Brought to Booker: Man Booker International
Delia Falconer
“I’ve been lucky to be considered a major writer by writing short stories,” Alice Munro told the Observer in 2005. And,...
More ...POLITICS
Revolving Doors: Robert G Kaiser’s ‘So Damn Much Money’
Guy Pearse
Robert Kaiser’s exposé of lobbying in Washington, DC helps to explain why Barack Obama has declared “war on lobbyists...
More ...WORLD
Chinese Whispers: Zachary Mexico’s ‘China Underground’
Alice Pung
Zachary Mexico can tell a really good yarn. He will sit you in the swankiest bar in Beijing’s Houhai district or a cheap polluted noodle...
More ...SOCIETY
A Matter of Taste: The 53rd Venice Biennale
Sebastian Smee
Art that indulges anarchic impulses – even if the results are a little fatuous – is almost always preferable to art that...
More ...SOCIETY
Why We Weren’t Warned: The Victorian bushfires and the royal commission
Robert Manne
Shortly after midday we learned that a fire had broken out in Kilmore, some 50 kilometres to the north-west. From now on we were alert,...
More ...A Gay Old Time
Benjamin Law
If the huddled group of males gathered outside on the kerbside were teenagers, you’d say they were loitering: hanging out after dark;...
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SOCIETY
Soiled Goods
John Birmingham
The dimpled orange, bursting with sweetness, that you cut for your breakfast this morning had been dying from the moment it was plucked...
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SOCIETY
Botanical Curiosities
Gay Bilson
The most enchanting display in the original and permanent collection of the recently re-opened Museum of Economic Botany in the Botanic...
More ...Comment: The Corporate Fallacy
Noel Pearson
In the same month, Macfarlane told an international conference of banking supervisors in Sydney that it was “simplistic to insist on the...
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WORLD
Comment: Democracy in Indonesia
Greg Barton
This year’s parliamentary election was a rather boring affair. Australian journalists and academics found little to get excited about, but...
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