| The Monthly

Current Issue Vox

Death in Amsterdam

By Margaretta Pos

One spring day in Hobart, I was having dinner with my son and Goshwin, my Dutch half-brother, who was visiting us, when the telephone rang. My son answered it. “Grandpa!” he exclaimed, as he always did whenever my father called. Yes, we were together, and he passed the handset to Goshwin, who listened, then stiffened. “I’m coming back,” he said and gave me the ph

Current Issue Modern madness

DSM-5 and the mental illness make-over

By Nick Haslam

Over the past century psychiatry has described conditions that would have once been medicalised, moralised, criminalised or perhaps dismissed as harmless eccentricity. The concept of “mental disorder” now contains a centrifugal assortment of ills that number in the hundreds. This expansion has been accompanied by equally significant cultural change. Increasingly, we view suffering

Current Issue The Saboteur

Kevin Rudd’s unrelenting campaign to regain power

By Erik Jensen

Kevin Rudd began his second campaign for the leadership of the Labor Party by not standing. Just after 10 pm on 23 June 2010, on the so-called night of the long knives, he emerged from crisis meetings to announce that his deputy, Julia Gillard, had challenged him to a ballot. In his last hours as prime minister, Rudd learnt her numbers would crush him. Key unions had withdrawn their support. Powerbrokers inside the party had turned on h

Current Issue An anthropologist hits the skids in Cape York

The Aurukun blues of Peter Sutton

By Catherine Ford

In October 2012, Peter Sutton, the Adelaide anthropologist, linguist and author, flew into Cairns en route to Aurukun, Far North Queensland, as a guest of the Cape York Land Council. The following day, the Federal Court would sit in the small town to deliver its fifth and final native title determination to the Wik people of western Cape York, thus settling

Vox

‘Welcome to Your New Life’ book extract

By Anna Goldsworthy

When you are six weeks old, your grandmother Mariah offers to babysit, so that Nicholas and I can venture out to a restaurant. We discuss this for some days: it is a curiously threatening idea. “Perhaps we could catch up on some sleep instead,”

Adventures in Katterland

The Heart and Mind of Bob Katter

By Louis Nowra

One steamy Saturday morning in mid March, Bob Katter, dressed in jeans, a pale shirt and his trademark cream-coloured Akubra Arena, was pacing up and down outside a home in Emerald Creek, 15 minutes’ drive from the town of Mareeba, in Far North Queenslan

Party boys

The Rolling of NSW Labor

By Mark Latham

The NSW Labor Party has become a crime scene. Sussex Street has been cordoned off and forensic scientists sent in to gather evidence. On the other side of the thick yellow tape, a crowd of confused ALP branch members has gathered in search of answers. Some things are

Leaps and bounds

Paul Kelly’s wild years

By Richard Guilliatt

Pub rock reached its apex just as Paul Kelly arrived from Adelaide in 1977. A slew of new inner-city bands like Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons, the Sports, the Relaxed Mechanics and the Autodrifters were retooling American R’n’B into something sharper,

Bonfire of sole

By John Bryson

Reviled as a traitor for his leftist agitations, war correspondent Wilfred Burchett held the one dinner menu he would allow at our table in La Closerie des Lilas, Boulevard du Montparnasse, ready to order for the four of us, confident of his own fine judgement. He chose

How to corrupt a party

Mate of the Union

By Mark Aarons

I first met Ian Macdonald, the former senior government minister at the centre of the corruption allegations currently besetting the NSW Labor Party, in mid 1978, soon after he arrived in Sydney from Melbourne. I was then in my last months as a Communist Party

What can stop obesity?

Fat City

By Karen Hitchcock

In the late 1980s I spent a year in the US as an exchange student. The exchange organisation allocated me a local support person named Emily. Emily was white and loud and the fattest person I had ever seen outside a caravan park. She looked different from the

Australia’s shipwrecked refugee policy

Tragedy of Errors

By Robert Manne

Since 1976 fewer than 50,000 asylum seekers have reached Australia on boats. More than half have arrived since the election of the Rudd government; more than a third – over 17,000 – in the past 12 months. Until the Tampa incident in late August 2001, policy

An expatriate returns

By Sheila Fitzpatrick

According to the US Expatriation Act of 1868, to leave one’s country is “a natural and inherent right of all people, indispensable to the enjoyment of the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Who but Americans would have thought of putting that into law? Yet it’s certainly how I saw things 50 years ago, when I was 21. Leaving Austra

Show day

By Cate Kennedy

The chief judge in the wool-classing division at our local agricultural show hails us excitedly as we come through the main gates. “When you get a chance, get down and see the entries in the wool pavilion,” he says. “They’re just top quality ... some of those superfine fleeces score 93%!” The wool market is on the upswing, thanks to a resurgence of interest in the fibre in European mills

Death in Brunswick

By Helen Garner

The rooftop bar was buzzing, late on a warm Friday afternoon. My friend and I found a spot under an umbrella and ordered up. Each of us was secretly longing to talk about the fact that the cops had charged a man with the rape and murder of Jill Meagher, but be

Leaving 'Tracks' behind

By Robyn Davidson

The past caves away and dissolves behind us, leaving a few clues with which we try to reconstruct it. Hopeless task. History lives in the present. It is over 30 years since I walked across half of Australia with my dear camels and dog. If I concentrate, I can

Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott

By David Marr

I am not asking the Australian people to take me on trust but on the record of a lifetime and an instinct to serve ingrained long before I became opposition leader: as a student president, trainee priest, Rhodes Scholar, surf life-saver and volunteer fire-fighter, as we

The Work of Judges

By Kate Rossmanith

A couple of years ago, as I waited outside Courtroom 3 of the NSW Supreme Court in King Street, Sydney, I got chatting to an elderly man, a retiree, who told me he routinely visited the courts because he liked “seeing the justice system in action”. Along with 40 others, we were attending the sentencing of a 39-year-old woman who had been found guilty of murder. She had deliberately run over a