Eugene Kamenka, supervisor of my doctorate at ANU, expert on Marxian thought and a man who would never have thought his name would appear in an article about the twenty-fifth anniversary of Neighbours, once, in his youth, found himself giving a lecture (probably on...
Arts & Letters
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Alan Saunders
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The Nation Reviewed | Television | March 2010
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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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Tim Soutphommasane
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Books | March 2010 | Politics
Malcolm Fraser tells a story about his time as army minister in the 1960s administering conscription during the Vietnam War. In a hotel bar in his electorate of Wannon, in Victoria's Western District, Fraser was confronted by a constituent whose son’s number had come up in...
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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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Sebastian Smee
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Books | March 2010 | Noted
The title of Don DeLillo’s new novel reverses a concept known as the Omega Point, which was coined by the renegade Catholic thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard believed the universe was evolving towards a supreme level of complexity and consciousness. DeLillo’s...
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Michelle de Kretser
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Books | March 2010 | Noted
In Thomas Hardy’s elegiac poem ‘During Wind and Rain’ there are “Clocks and carpets and chairs / On the lawn all day”. As any trawler of flea markets can attest, a terrible vulnerability attaches to private belongings exposed to public view. The pathos is heightened in Hardy’...
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Shane Maloney
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Environment | March 2010 | Encounters
Rabbits are poor conservers of energy. They can’t adapt to drought. Their diet is not diverse. All in all, they are not well suited to the Australian environment. But when it comes to reproduction they can’t be bettered. Mating takes 30 seconds, courtship included. In a...
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Peter Conrad
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Arts & Letters | February 2010 | Society & Culture
Australia’s girdling oceans used to serve as a prophylactic, our defence against the infectious depravity of the northern hemisphere. The Customs Act 1901 fiercely preserved our innocence; during my adolescence in the late 1960s I made an impatient inventory...
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