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November 2009

  • The Brutal Truth: What Happened in the Gulf Country
    Tony Roberts | The Monthly Essays | November 2009 | Politics | Society & Culture

    In 1881, a massive pastoral boom commenced in the top half of the Northern Territory, administered by the colonial government in Adelaide.1 Elsey Station on the Roper River – romanticised in Jeannie Gunn’s We of the...

  • November 2009
    | November 2009
  • A Longer View
    | November 2009
  • Qualified Stupidity
    | November 2009
  • The Subject of Biography
    | November 2009
  • Comment: The New Republic
    Tim Soutphommasane | The Nation Reviewed | Foreign Affairs | November 2009 | Politics

    Many Australians will remember Jason Yat-sen Li from the 1999 referendum campaign, when he was a twenty-something lawyer and a leading advocate for the ‘yes’ camp.

    A Sydney-born Australian of Chinese heritage, the charismatic Li seemed to embody the cultural promise of...

  • Comment: Bill of Rights
    Geoffrey Robertson | The Nation Reviewed | Foreign Affairs | November 2009 | Politics

    The most remarkable feature of the National Human Rights Consultation Report, released last month, is its projection of the voices of ‘ordinary people’ (a condescending phrase used by lawyers to describe people who are not lawyers). These voices are alternatively laconic,...

  • Comment: The History Wars
    Robert Manne | The Nation Reviewed | November 2009 | Politics

    Paul Keating and John Howard were early players in what Australians have come to call the History Wars, whose main field of battle is the bitter and still unresolved cultural struggle over the nature of the Indigenous dispossession and the place it should assume in Australian...

  • Pirate Politics
    Charles Firth | The Nation Reviewed | November 2009 | Politics | Society & Culture

    By this time next year, Australia’s political system could be controlled by pirates. In June this year, Sweden’s Pirate Party secured 7.1% of the vote in the European elections. Then, in September, the Australian Pirate Party opened nominations for the election of its key...

  • A Necessary Idea The Online Monthly - subscriber only access
    Fiona Capp | The Nation Reviewed | November 2009 | Politics | Society & Culture

    After driving from one side of the island to the other, we arrive at a gate blocking the road. Lena Pasternak hops out to open it. Several hundred metres away, cows wade through the sea. Just before we reach the tip of this remote peninsula, Lena points in the direction of...