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February 2007

  • Comment
    Mungo MacCallum | The Nation Reviewed | February 2007 | Politics
    As federal parliament began its final session of 2006, John Howard must have been feeling a bit like his beloved Australian cricket team: all he had to do to win was turn up. The past three elections had proved conclusively that he was not only omnipotent but invincible, and...
  • Lenny Beadell, Road Artist The Online Monthly - subscriber only access
    John Harms | The Nation Reviewed | February 2007 | Society & Culture

    I am sitting in a 4WD, belting along the dirt road which heads west from Uluru. I am taking it all in: the remoteness, the redness, the harshness. I am excited, and apprehensive. The photographer Dave Callow drives. He has been to the desert country many times. In the back...

  • Many Me
    Kate Rossmanith | The Nation Reviewed | February 2007 | Society & Culture
    On the front desk at the head office of Sydney IVF, in Kent Street, rests a marble statue of three fused figures. Two adults and a child form a clenched posy of hands, knees and feet, and the stone is so dark and smooth it's impossible to tell where one limb ends and another...
  • What Lindy Did Next
    Ashley Hay | The Nation Reviewed | February 2007 | Society & Culture
    When Lindy Hume revealed the first program of her four-year tenure at the Perth International Arts Festival back in 2003, she was already thinking about her last, from 9 February to 4 March this year. Travelling through the themes of "Journey" (2004), "...
  • Writer Gets Leg Up
    Linda Jaivin | The Nation Reviewed | February 2007 | Society & Culture
    A slip, for once not of the tongue or pen but the foot. Then it was Christmas night in the emergency unit and Boxing Day in the operating theatre. Finally, a bed in a ward, a drip in the arm and a big hunk of plaster where 24 hours before had been a cute new leather-soled...
  • A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide
    Robert Manne | The Monthly Essays | February 2007 | Foreign Affairs | Politics
    During the exact time Australian troops spent in hell on Gallipoli, another event of world-historical importance was taking place on contiguous ground: the Armenian Genocide. Some contemporary scholars think that during this catastrophe, one million people were murdered. The...
  • Take Me to the River: Climate Change in the Mallee The Online Monthly - subscriber only access
    Chloe Hooper | The Monthly Essays | Environment | February 2007

    Then he must record the rainfall, or lack of it. The water gauge is a 30-centimetre aluminium tin set in the ground with a plastic beaker inside. As if in a Beckett sketch, Hill checks it each day, knowing there'll be no water. "It tried to rain last night," he explains, "but...

  • Corporatising Culture: Who Holds the Past in Common Trust?
    Malcolm Knox | The Monthly Essays | Business | February 2007

    Where exactly am I? It's not easy to answer. This is a place called Toyota Megaweb, situated on Odaiba, an island reclaimed from Tokyo Bay in the heady bubble days of 1988. Odaiba means "cannon emplacements", as this was the fort from which Japan intended to...

  • America's Australia: Instructions for a Generation
    John Button | The Monthly Essays | February 2007 | Foreign Affairs
    In November, Rupert Murdoch came on a special visit and gave us a lecture, in a well-publicised keynote address to an audience of Sydney's rich and famous. He said that he was worried about a "regrettable" anti-American sentiment in Australia. From his perspective...
  • A West Side Story: Casey Bennetto’s 'Keating!'
    Robert Forster | Theatre | February 2007
    So, what is this? Casey Bennetto, the author of Keating! and one of the lead actors in it, says that it was first written as a "performance piece". The production at the Belvoir St Theatre is longer, with new songs and characters, and is a "show"....