A year on from the Black Saturday fires, there’s a perverse beauty in the burnt forests, a striking interplay of black and green. The scorched eucalypts are fringed by halos of young leaves; epicormic growth, it is called – nature’s stopgap measure to revive stressed trees....
Society & Culture
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Arnold Zable
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The Nation Reviewed | Environment | March 2010 | Society & Culture
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Anna Funder
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The Nation Reviewed | March 2010 | Society & Culture
Not long ago I stood at the edge of my local pool in inner Sydney looking forward to getting a load off my feet – not that I had seen them for a while. I was in the last week of my third pregnancy, and my feet, along with quite a bit of the rest of me, had long since...
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Gail Bell
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The Nation Reviewed | March 2010 | Society & Culture
This time last year, I roamed through the over-furnished rooms of Katherine Mansfield’s birthplace house in Tinakori Road, Te Puakitanga, Wellington. Whenever I enter into one of these strange transactions I wonder what is missing in me, or perhaps slightly askew, that I must...
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Kate Rossmanith
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The Nation Reviewed | Environment | March 2010 | Society & Culture
One morning in 1683, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a merchant and amateur scientist in the Dutch city of Delft, set about the daily ritual of cleaning his teeth. Proud of his teeth, but perturbed by the solid white growth he could see between them, he scraped off some offending...
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Mandy Sayer
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The Monthly Essays | March 2010 | Society & Culture
Martin climbs off his bike and walks through the piles of rubbish towards the verandah. It’s then that he sniffs a deeper, ruder stench: his front door and its handle are smeared with shit. He lets himself into the house, grabs his shotgun and loads it.
Gun in hand, he...
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Louis Nowra
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The Monthly Essays | March 2010 | Society & Culture
I was the first person in my family to go to university. I had a chip on my shoulder about having been brought up on a Housing Commission estate while my fellow students belonged to the middle class. One day when I was loading trucks to earn money, I had to pick up goods from...
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Clare Press
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March 2010 | Society & Culture | Fashion
“Are not the colours exquisite? And see how intricate the patterns.” So said the two swindlers intent on convincing Hans Christian Andersen’s Emperor that his new clothes were indeed the proverbial bee’s knees. Alas, the Emperor’s subjects could see his knees and plenty more...
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Peter Conrad
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Theatre | March 2010 | Society & Culture
In 1987 on her British talk show, Dame Edna Everage abruptly asked Sir John Mills when he intended to retire – a tactless query, expressed with her usual indifference to the feelings of others. Mills, a spry little rooster then nearing his eightieth birthday, said he had no...
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Robert Forster
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Music | March 2010 | Society & Culture
When is Tasmania going to produce some great bands? It must be soon, if only through the converging of cultural forces, time and the fact that both Brisbane and Perth have had a fruitful past decade of breakthrough artists and bands and the frontier needs a new place to shift...
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Luke Davies
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Film | March 2010 | Society & Culture
“Life’s a bitch ’n’ then you die,” sings the rapper Nas on the soundtrack of Fish Tank (released nationally on 11 March), Andrea Arnold’s gritty and engaging British drama about a young girl growing up without anchor or compass on a drab Essex council estate. “That’s...
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