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August 2008

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  • Comment: Hotting Up
    Robert Manne | The Nation Reviewed | August 2008 | Environment

    During the past several weeks I have been reading, with a racing pulse, some recent literature on global warming while watching, with a sinking heart, the political skirmishes connected to the introduction of the Rudd government's emissions-trading scheme. The experience of...

  • Ponyboy at 55
    Robyn Annear | The Nation Reviewed | August 2008 | Society & Culture

    "When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home."

    How many times must I have read that opening line during my last year of primary school? Enough that, all these...

  • The Ring Cycle
    Craig Sherborne | The Nation Reviewed | August 2008 | Society & Culture

    "How do I look?" my mother asks.

    "You look beautiful," say the nurses. "Quite the stunner, young lady." She looks every day her 84: crumpled paper for skin, red blue eyes in a pucker. Dementia is never about telling the truth. It makes a...

  • On the Edge
    Kate Rossmanith | The Nation Reviewed | August 2008

    On a Friday afternoon in late spring last year, a young woman tumbled 15 metres off a cliff top at north Coogee, in Sydney. Within minutes a rescue helicopter had arrived and paramedics were running down the snaking path to the rocks below. Police cars pulled up on the grassy...

  • The Wanderer
    Robyn Davidson | The Nation Reviewed | August 2008 | Society & Culture

    "‘So what of this notion of exile?'

    ‘No,' he says, ‘exile is too pretty a word. Can you reframe that?'

    ‘Homelessness?'

    ‘No, that's wrong - because I have a home.'

    ‘Metaphorically speaking, I meant.'

    ‘No. It's...

  • Levelling with China
    Linda Jaivin | The Monthly Essays | August 2008 | Environment | Foreign Affairs

    It was my first visit to Beijing, some 28 years ago. Chairman Mao had died in 1976; two years later, the new Communist leadership under Deng Xiaoping declared itself in favour of economic reform and modernisation, an end to ideological extremism, and an open door to Western...

  • Sir Donald Bradman at 100: The Serious Australian
    Gideon Haigh | The Monthly Essays | August 2008 | Society & Culture

    Still the most compelling aspect of the legend is The Average. One hundred is not the maximum possible arithmetic mean score in cricket, but 99.94, with its tincture of human fallibility, its hint of Oulipian constraint, could not have been more exquisitely contrived. To a...

  • In the Wake of Magellan: The Voyage of Globalisation’s Forefather
    Simon Leys | The Monthly Essays | August 2008 | Media

    First, though Magellan was indeed Portuguese, he sailed for Spain - personally commissioned by Charles V. His foreign origin provoked suspicion and resentment among his Castilian officers; some of them detested him, and their hostility was to climax in a mutiny that nearly...