September 2009
SOCIETY
Miles Franklin & Joseph Furphy
In February 1904, Stella Miles Franklin – then aged 24 – received an admiring letter from a 60-year-old former bullock-driver named Joseph...
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'The Bee Hut' by Dorothy Porter
Lisa Gorton
Dorothy Porter’s poems often work like blues songs. Their progress depends not on structures of logic but on patterns of imagery and sound...
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'Inherent Vice' by Thomas Pynchon
Justin Clemens
Thomas Pynchon is one of the most extraordinary novelists writing today. This isn’t due to his genius alone, though there’s no doubting his...
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Unbelievers: Richard Dawkins' 'The Greatest Show on Earth'
Ian Lowe
You wouldn’t believe me if I claimed that almost half the people in a rich, modern country still thought the earth was flat, or that the...
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A Federer Game: J.M. Coetzee's 'Summertime'
Inga Clendinnen
JM Coetzee wrote Boyhood, his account from inside the mind (distanced third person, urgent present tense) of an unnamed South African boy...
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Amoral Tale: Steven Soderbergh's 'The Girlfriend Experience'
Luke Davies
In what passes for context-setting in a porn clip I found on the internet as research for this review, an off-screen cameraman asks porn...
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The Cambodian Genocide: Francis Deron's 'The Trial of the Khmer Rouge'
Simon Leys
One remembers the last lines of Kafka’s Trial: Josef K, an innocent citizen who fell into an incomprehensible and endless web of judicial...
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The Death of the Good Father
Drusilla Modjeska
In Granta’s anthology called Fathers, published at the end of last year there’s a tough little story from New Zealand’s Kirsty Gunn. It’s...
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This Year's Model: Fashion's Coming of Age
Clare Press
Those with an appreciation of the firm and youthful female form may be interested to ogle Terry Richardson’s photographs of the latest crop...
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SOCIETY
Only Itself to Blame: The Church of Scientology
Malcolm Knox
The Surry Hills premises were Spartan and recently opened. Scientology’s central Sydney church, in Castlereagh St, is closed for the...
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The Indian Ocean Solution: Christmas Island
David Marr
The Jaffaris are Hazaras from Afghanistan, a people long persecuted as Shia Muslims in a country overwhelmingly Sunni. Sharif was still a...
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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Ningaloo Sharks
James Bradley
It takes little more than two hours for the spotter planes to locate the first whale shark of the day. Along with the two-dozen or so...
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SOCIETY
Small-Time Big Top
Cate Kennedy
Perry Bros Circus has set up again at the showgrounds in town, its familiar red and yellow striped tent rising like a rare winter flower...
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SOCIETY
Sleepers, Awake
Benjamin Law
Twenty years ago, just past midnight, the American tank ship Exxon Valdez was slicing through cold black water, cutting a course through...
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SOCIETY
Harvest
Gay Bilson
The South Australian autumn had been wet, and in the early morning the soggy earth steamed, especially under the pines in the Adelaide...
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POLITICS
Comment: Rudd and the Murdoch Press
Mungo MacCallum
Political leaders find it particularly irksome. It was painful enough to be called into the media mogul’s Sydney headquarters, worse still...
More ...Prepared: The ANAM Piano Festival
Anna Goldsworthy
Last year, when Peter Garrett announced the withdrawal of funding from the Australian National Academy of Music, he must have been startled...
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The Shortlist Daily
8 February 2012
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