THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

"Only one factor made the Bulletin model viable: Kerry Packer. His commitment never weakened, and even won him a certain admiration ... But week in, week out, the Bulletin was actually demonstrating that news, in commercial terms, was scarcely worth the trouble of breaking it. When Laurie Oakes divulged Gareth Evans' long-term affair with Cheryl Kernot in July 2002, for example, the Bulletin had no way of monopolising the story: such profit as accrued to anyone did so across all news outlets. Yet here was a proprietor who, albeit for reasons less to do with his munificence than with his own distaste for change, apparently subscribed to journalists' belief in the redemptive qualities of their craft."

In "Packed It In", journalist Gideon Haigh delves into the history of the Bulletin: its fabled past, its triumphs and troubles in the last two decades as it attempted renewal, and its sudden demise. This is the definitive behind-the-scenes story - told by a long-time Bulletin contributor - of the people who developed and ran the nation's oldest and most celebrated magazine, its culture, and how the mogul who loved it so much oversaw its decline.

"When Phil Scott came into Stockland House to announce that the new Bulletin editor-in-chief was John Lehmann, there was dead silence. ‘Nobody could look at Kathy Bail,' says one former executive. ‘Of course, she never lost her sangfroid. But people were shattered.' Others detected a latent misogyny at work. ‘It was horrible, just horrible,' says another former staff member. ‘And so disappointing, because she so deserved to do it ...' When Scott left, Tim Blair jumped up and started googling Lehmann's name. Who was this guy? He was little the wiser after the exercise ... Lehmann, it transpired, had come to John Alexander's attention while a media writer for the Australian. There he had become involved in PBL's interminable politicking, being leaked an exclusive story about Nine CEO Sam Chisholm's attempt to oust John Lyons as executive producer of Sunday, an attempt thwarted by Alexander. Shortly before Lehmann departed the Australian, he had come into possession of the fabled Llewellyn affidavit. But where Crikey published the document - deeply embarrassing to Alexander - Lehmann refrained. He left the paper with the curse of his editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, ringing in his ears: "I wouldn't want to be the last editor of the Bulletin ..."

*

"The speech Kevin Rudd delivered to the parliament on 13 February was, in my view and in the view of many others, one of the most important in the history of Australia. Our finest achievements as a nation were, for the greater part of our history, accompanied by the dark shadow of racism. Australians have found this dimension of their history exceptionally difficult to face. Over the past decade, the question of the Stolen Generations has become the main focus of this moral challenge - perhaps because it occurred so recently; perhaps because it involved a violation universally understood, the separation of mother and child. Rudd spoke about the ‘great stain' on the ‘nation's soul' that had to be removed. He rightly identified that resistance to this simple truth - the ‘stony silence' of the parliament; the bitterness of those who spoke of ‘black-armband history' and prosecuted the Culture War - had sullied the Howard years. Rudd understood the depth of the pain that the policy of child removal had delivered. He recognised that the infliction of this suffering was an assault on ‘our most elemental humanity'. He acknowledged that the pain had been inflicted by the policies of previous Australian parliaments and governments. The stories cried out for a national apology. Without this apology, the opening of a new chapter in the nation's history would not be possible."

In "Sorry Business", Robert Manne charts the long road - the Bringing Them Home report, culture warriors' campaigns against the report's findings; the rise and fall of the huge late-'90s movement for reconciliation, the Howard government's steadfast refusal to say sorry to those Aborigines taken from their families - to the recent parliamentary apology to the Stolen Generations.

*

"The pain felt at the sudden loss of a friend, a son, a lover, is understandable. What has been more surprising is the strength of the response of the world at large. Something heroic, playful and generous in Heath Ledger struck a chord with many people, and a collective sadness was experienced - for some, spontaneously and unexpectedly. It was not the salacious interest in the loss of a celebrity, not the desire of the great unwashed to align itself with a Hollywood god-figure by a kind of false grieving. Nor was it about a circus sideshow, though a media circus quickly set up acres of internet tents, with all sorts of bizarre acts. It seemed to be a simpler kind of sadness - at the loss of someone we enjoyed being in the presence of, someone whose transparent openness to his characters' emotions had made us feel, however briefly, more richly our own."

In "Heath Ledger, 1979-2008", the Monthly's film critic, Luke Davies, recalls his time with the actor and talks to the people Ledger worked and hung out with, offering a sensitive yet unsentimental portrait of a warm, generous talent.

"It was Ledger who [on the set of Candy] broke through my ridiculous self-obsession: in all the mad bustle just before we started shooting the takes, as I stood there in the glare of the lights practising my action and going over my line, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, very quietly, ‘Breathe, Lukey, breathe.' I managed, if not to breathe, then at least to smile ..."

THE NATION REVIEWED

"Now that the interminable election is long over, can we cast our gaze beyond the vision of Australia's conservatives - individual liberty, home ownership and material prosperity - and strike a genuinely new and more inclusive national settlement? Not a vision founded on political ideology or empty feel-good rhetoric, but one grounded in the difficult marriage of symbolism and substantive political, legal and social change, a vision that recognises the power of symbolic politics to act as a unifying force in the struggle to bring about practical change."

In the Monthly Comment, historian Mark McKenna wonders why an Australian republic is considered by Prime Minister Rudd to be a "second-order or non-issue". As a republic, McKenna contends, Australia would have the best possible chance to establish itself in the global community and to meet the challenges of reconciliation and social unity. He asks: Why hang onto traditions that no longer reflect the reality of our society?

"Australians do not believe that their head of state should only be a member of one particular faith, the Church of England. Australians do not believe that the family into which they are born should afford them automatic privilege - that birth should take precedence over merit, that men should take precedence over women in taking public office. If not, why put up with it any longer? Why should we continue to endorse discrimination on the basis of birth, gender and religion by failing to install a republican head of state? The amusement park of monarchical goings-on and celebrity gossip - the stock-in-trade of the tabloid press - will always survive, but why should the members of one dysfunctional aristocratic British family continue to be the only human beings who can aspire to be Australia's head of state?"

*

"On 8 January 2006, in the Sydney suburb of Mosman, a silver Lexus belonging to the retired Federal Court judge and Living National Treasure Marcus Einfeld was clocked above the speed limit. Einfeld, facing a fine of $77, denied that he was in the car at the time, claiming he had loaned it to an old friend, the visiting American professor Teresa Brennan. The only problem with this story was that Teresa Brennan was three years dead."

In "The Other Teresa Brennan", Amanda Lohrey profiles the Australian-born academic Teresa Brennan, best known here as the alleged driver of Marcus Einfeld's car when it was caught speeding (twice), and best known in America as the alleged lover of a long-serving US senator. As it turns out, despite her unfortunate infamy in both life and death, Brennan was a scholar and writer of significance ...

"Australia remains obsessed with Germaine Greer but as feminist warrior-queens go, Teresa Brennan was a more engaged activist and a more interesting thinker. Like Greer, she seems to have been personally and intellectually fearless. It's a pity, then, that she has become known here only through a tawdry legal fracas in which she has been summoned up as a kind of errant ghost."

*

Elsewhere in The Nation Reviewed, Craig Sherborne investigates the legal loophole known as adverse possession, which allows savvy (and patient) watchers of neighbourhood real estate to claim a free house; and Alice Pung rummages through the politics of the discount bin as she goes op-shopping with young and old.

ARTS & LETTERS

"We modern readers of novels have very large brains (some 2 million years ago, our earliest ancestor, Homo erectus, had a brain 50% larger than his predecessor, Homo habilis). We have, in the evolutionary scheme of things, weak jaws, small teeth and, compared to, say, a ruminant such as a cow, a tiny gut or digestive system. Compared to all other species, we spend a lot of time self-consciously thinking about food, but far less time making a meal of life."

In "Cooking Brains", Gay Bilson explores bio-archaeologist Martin Jones's Feast: Why Humans Share Food, a history of the meal across the ages, from early man's first gatherings around a hearth to the dinners-by-the-TV of today (a situation which Jones is "refreshingly non-judgemental" about). Though a scientist - albeit a "crazily imaginative" one - rather than a gastronomer, Jones reaches many of the same conclusions as the great thinkers on food regarding the importance of cooking in humans' development.

"Cooking prompts something else which is vital to our idea of ourselves: sharing and a sense of community, and sharing is pivotal to the development of language. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested that food is ‘good to think'. The literary and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin thought that sharing food is the expression of culture over nature, that ‘digestion and dialogue' have a primal connection."

*

"Any art form is an insiders' club, with its knowing winks and complicit smiles, but jazz seems even more so. It carries an extra freight of cool. There's that elusive concept of swing, which - like a private joke - you either get or you don't. From an outsider's perspective, it looks like a great club to belong to, and much more supportive than the classical-music world. It makes a fetish of mutual support, in all the gestures and nods and appreciative yeah mans that frame the music. I wonder: Could this be genuine?"

In "Improvisations", classical pianist Anna Goldsworthy spends time with jazz pianist Andrea Keller, one of Australia's leading contemporary performers and composers. Keller has found in jazz the ability to listen more deeply and break free of the precise formalities of classical music. At the same time, her training lends a distinctive structure to the improvisatory explorations of her quartet.

"Keller does not abandon the cultivated world altogether. Her arrangements are fresh and spontaneous, but they are also meticulously constructed. ‘My classical background is such a huge part of how I hear music,' she tells me. ‘Harmonically, texturally, the intricacy of form. But the way I hear and perceive music working always involves improvisation.'"

*

And in "Train I Ride", Delia Falconer hops aboard Don Watson's train trip across America, revealed in his long-awaited new travelogue.

"Watson makes his first journey to the devastated city of New Orleans in the weeks following the disaster. What was a tragedy for its citizens, particularly poor African-Americans, was a golden opportunity, he soon discovers, for the faith-based groups who have come to New Orleans to help. The evangelical fatalism he so frequently encounters sets him thinking about what will become the two major preoccupations of American Journeys: US democracy and the rise of public professions of faith."

*

There's also Robert Forster on the hits and misses of the Gold Coast leg of the 2008 Big Day Out; Rachel Hills on the sassy British TV show Skins, which purports to show British teenagers as they really are; Zora Simic on the latest instalment from Sleepers, The Sleepers Almanac No. 4; and Shane Maloney on the time John Pilger met Martha Gellhorn.