THE NATION REVIEWED

“While [Barry] O’Farrell has not set voter’s imaginations alight with his charisma, he is viewed as a moderate, decent man. Like most incoming premiers, though, he will be hampered by a very thin front bench; beyond a handful of solid performers … there is precious little talent.”

In the Monthly Comment, Mark Aarons assesses the impending defeat of the NSW Labor Party in the lead-up to 26 March. Recent polls indicate NSW Labor will face the worst defeat since 1940. Aarons looks at where Labor leaders have gone wrong since the Carr government, and outlines the nation-wide dilemma of the politics of the centre Left.

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Plus, in “The Devil Within”, Jack Marx chats with Christian Democratic Party member Peter J Madden; in “Taste-Making”, Anna Krien meets the scientists who manufacture flavours; and in “Cannibal Cookery”, Gay Bilson puts the heat under Channel 7’s new cooking show, My Kitchen Rules.

THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

“If there is a book whose feeling captures me it is First Circle by Solzhenitsyn. To feel that home is the comraderie [sic] of persecuted, and in fact, prosecuted, polymaths in a Stalinist camp! How close to my own adventures!”

–Julian Assange, 17 July 2006

In “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary”, Robert Manne uncovers the true story of Australia’s most infamous international figure. Tracing Julian Assange’s nomadic youth and foray into computer hacking while still an adolescent, Manne maps out Assange’s political development as a global activist. Through telling blogs and other personal accounts, Manne discovers a fabulist, a genius, an ideologue and a revolutionary. Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, is a “true Enlightenment Man”.

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“More than any conservative pundit, [Glenn] Beck had delved deep into the reservoirs of paranoid American right-wing politics, coming up with interlocking networks of enemies of society – from National Public Radio to the United Nations – to explain the malaise and disappointment of much of his audience.”

In “The Fox News Show”, Guy Rundle takes the opportunity of Rupert Murdoch’s eightieth birthday to review the magnate's most populist creation, Fox News. Rundle explores how frontrunner Glenn Beck, the “sub-hysterical” host of a week-nightly show, has become a cultural hero to sections of conservative America, as well as how Sarah Palin, who joined Fox News in 2010, controversially promotes her own "ra-ra" politics in her role as an apparent impartial political commentator.

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“Beazley Anderson and his wife Barbara give me a tour of the scumhole house they’ve occupied for 15 years. There is an exposed light fitting that zaps random live electricity. The toilet is cracked and leaking. The shower leaks. The walls are filthy. The fridge? ‘Fridge is f***ed,’ says Beazley. The stove? ‘Stove is f***ed.’” 

In “Hard Times”, Paul Toohey travels to Ali Curung and Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory to see how Indigenous communities are faring post intervention. Toohey talks to locals about the alcoholism and teenage pregnancy that are pervading the town camps, as well as the failures of government housing and education in the region, and reveals the legacy of the intervention for a new generation.

ARTS & LETTERS

“One night toward the end, at the time of the V-2s in 1945, she was dancing in the Lyric, Hammersmith, when there was an almighty explosion. The theatre shook and filled with a dense cloud of dust. The music stopped, the dancers stopped. There was a calm silence among the audience. Then, softly, the pianist began to play.”

In “Maggie’s War”, Peter Robb presents a chapter in the life of an Australian ballet great, Margaret Scott. Joining the innovative Ballet Rambert company before the outbreak of World War II, Scott toured England performing for troops. At the war’s end, she travelled Europe’s ravaged countryside with the ballet, eventually performing in decimated Berlin.

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“Why did China slip so far behind the West [after 1411] over the following 400 years? And why did the Islamic world – pre-eminent in science and scholarship in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries – lapse into a reactionary, anti-scientific torpor from which to this day it is still struggling to emerge?”

In “Cry Freedom”, Malcolm Turnbull reviews Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest, a study of the rise and fall of empires across the globe. Turnbull considers the six key reasons Ferguson gives for the West’s dominance over Asia, the Americas and Africa – and ponders what went wrong for some of the world’s most powerful empires over the course of the last millennium.

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Plus, in “Balancing Acts”, Hugh White looks at the lives of two significant Australian prime ministers, Stanley Melbourne Bruce and Joseph Lyons; and in “Economies of Scale”, Helen Garner reflects on the ambitious new film by Peter Weir, The Way Back, and Leon Ford’s Griff the Invisible.