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July 2009

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  • Comment: The Corporate Fallacy
    Noel Pearson | July 2009 | The Nation Reviewed | Business

    In the same month, Macfarlane told an international conference of banking supervisors in Sydney that it was “simplistic to insist on the totally free movement of capital in all countries and in all circumstances” and said, “We need to devise a system for...

  • Comment: Democracy in Indonesia
    Greg Barton | July 2009 | The Nation Reviewed | Foreign Affairs

    This year’s parliamentary election was a rather boring affair. Australian journalists and academics found little to get excited about, but this was a good thing: no news really was good news. In Australia we fall, perhaps too readily, into the cynical habit of seeing...

  • Botanical Curiosities The Online Monthly - subscriber only access
    Gay Bilson | July 2009 | The Nation Reviewed | Society & Culture

    The most enchanting display in the original and permanent collection of the recently re-opened Museum of Economic Botany in the Botanic Gardens of Adelaide consists of about 350 apples, pears and plums, a few peaches and figs, and one forlorn, damaged pomegranate. These are...

  • Soiled Goods
    John Birmingham | July 2009 | The Nation Reviewed | Society & Culture

    The dimpled orange, bursting with sweetness, that you cut for your breakfast this morning had been dying from the moment it was plucked from its twig. Human hands might have grabbed it from the branch, or perhaps a giant mechanical harvester shook the whole tree like a small...

  • A Gay Old Time
    Benjamin Law | July 2009 | The Nation Reviewed | Society & Culture

    If the huddled group of males gathered outside on the kerbside were teenagers, you’d say they were loitering: hanging out after dark; warming their hands in a circle; talking in low, conspiratorial murmurs. But as it happens, all of the men are in their late fifties and...

  • Why We Weren’t Warned: The Victorian bushfires and the royal commission
    Robert Manne | July 2009 | The Monthly Essays | Society & Culture

    Shortly after midday we learned that a fire had broken out in Kilmore, some 50 kilometres to the north-west. From now on we were alert, glued to ABC local radio and the Country Fire Authority website. It soon became obvious that this was a serious fire. Wallan received threat...

  • Home Truths: Revisiting 'Wake in Fright'
    Kate Jennings | July 2009 | The Monthly Essays | Society & Culture

    The plot of Wake in Fright is as old as an outcropping west of Menindee. As old as Virgil:

    The way downward is easy from Avernus.

    Black Dis’s door stands open night and day.

    But to retrace your steps to heaven’s air,

    ...
  • A Matter of Taste: The 53rd Venice Biennale
    Sebastian Smee | July 2009 | Arts & Letters | Art | Society & Culture

    Art that indulges anarchic impulses – even if the results are a little fatuous – is almost always preferable to art that signals its conformity to good taste. And yet making art is one thing. Choosing art is another. Directing a show as big and unwieldy as the...

  • Chinese Whispers: Zachary Mexico’s ‘China Underground’ The Online Monthly - subscriber only access
    Alice Pung | July 2009 | Arts & Letters | Books | Foreign Affairs

    Zachary Mexico can tell a really good yarn. He will sit you in the swankiest bar in Beijing’s Houhai district or a cheap polluted noodle cafe in Linfen and regale you with stories of China’s sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll scene. The man knows what he’s talking about – he’s a...