June 2011
Home Improvement: Indigenous Housing
Victoria Laurie
On the left of the page, Pholeros draws a broken-down house and underneath, a checklist of things that need fixing – broken window, leaking...
More ...
MEDIA
Sex Before Soccer: SBS
Margaret Simons
“This mean-spirited, greedy little television station,” fulminated the Australian’s media critic Errol Simper recently. “A tasteless,...
More ...
POLITICS
Barry Jones & Arthur Koestler
Among the handful of authors who shaped his young mind, Barry Jones told his television audience in September 1968, Arthur Koestler ranked...
More ...
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
'The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution' By Francis Fukuyama
Tim Soutphommasane
Most scholars have in them at best one major work. Had Francis Fukuyama ceased writing after The End of History and the Last Man, his...
More ...
CULTURE
'Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial' By Janet Malcolm
Michelle de Kretser
Courtrooms, like theatres, draw on claustrophobia to compel. The closed-door atmosphere, sealed off from the quotidian, lends contrived...
More ...
CULTURE
Shipped Down Under: Jim Loach’s 'Oranges and Sunshine' and Mark Lewis’ 'Cane Toads: The Conquest'
MJ Hyland
In the late 1980s, Nottingham social worker Margaret Humphreys investigated the postwar deportation of care-home children from England to...
More ...
CULTURE
Last Words: Mick Harvey’s ‘Sketches from the Book of the Dead’
Robert Forster
Imagine this: Mick Harvey is a 52-year-old new artist and Sketches from the Book of the Dead is his debut album. He hasn’t been in bands or...
More ...
WORLD
Art of Dissent: Ai Weiwei
Terry Smith
Among the many symbolic resonances attending Ai Weiwei’s disappearance on 3 April into the custodianship of the Chinese authorities is the...
More ...SOCIETY
Ever Unforgiven: Craig Sherborne’s 'The Amateur Science of Love'
Drusilla Modjeska
In 2008 Craig Sherborne wrote an essay for the Monthly on the death of his first wife from breast cancer. The title was ‘Unforgiven’. In it...
More ...
WORLD
Under Surveillance: Meeting Benedict Andrews
Peter Robb
For the set of Chekhov’s The Seagull, playing at Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney (4 June – 17 July), designer Ralph Myers has made an...
More ...
SOCIETY
Through the Cracks: Suresh Nair
Tanveer Ahmed
Lonergan, who had appointed Nair three years earlier, had only a vague idea that he might suffer from a mental illness. Nair was also...
More ...
ECONOMICS
The Sun King: Shi Zhengrong
Eric Knight
Shi took six months to make his decision. He had arrived in Australia the year before the Tiananmen Square protests had engulfed his...
More ...Bitter Fruits: China’s Twelfth Five-Year Plan
Andrew Charlton
Wo Ju depicts a generation trapped between hope and despair. The series was wildly popular because it captured the human dimension of China...
More ...
WORLD
The Silk Road: Silk Farming
Adrienne Ferreira
An hour out of Melbourne on the South Gippsland Highway, the land is flat and loamy. Here, tucked among alpaca paddocks and vineyards,...
More ...
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Where the Heart Is: The Home Hospice
Helen Garner
When they told our sister Marie that her untreatable lung cancer would kill her in less than a year, she said she wanted to die at home....
More ...
MEDIA
Expert Appetite: The Plight of the Connoisseur
Robert Dessaix
I am in Soups and Tinned Veg at my local Coles supermarket, immobilised by an attack of anomie. Why am I feeling like this? I stare...
More ...
WORLD
Comment: Hazara Asylum Seekers
Sally Neighbour
Yusuf Hamid was a shoemaker in the village of Kharaba in Ghazni Province, eastern Afghanistan. It was the time of the Taliban, as Afghans...
More ...
ENVIRONMENT
Comment: Dick Smith’s Population Crisis
Guy Pearse
With the coverage Smith’s means and profile afford, he’s said population is “the biggest issue facing our country”. He’s choked back tears...
More ...
Twitter
@THEMONTHLY @SLOWTV
