Africa

Life in a Bangkok Prison

The King & I

By Harry Nicolaides

Compound One. For weeks I lay on my back, delirious with influenza. When I was able to stand, I shuffled around like a zombie, pushed here and there by the heaving population of sweaty, half-naked inmates, most of them Thai, Burmese or Cambodian.One night I was so overcome with anxiety that I started to hyperventilate. I begged the cell captain to open the cell door and allow me to walk the c

Life in a Bangkok Prison

The King & I [preview]

By Harry Nicolaides

‘Banjo’ Paterson & Rudyard Kipling

By Shane Maloney

In March 1900 in Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State, Andrew ‘Banjo' Paterson attended a dinner hosted by the commander of the British forces occupying the town. The 36-year-old Sydney solicitor and poet was in South Africa to cover Australia's contribution to the stoush against the upstart Boers and he found himself seated beside the greatest literary celebrity of the Empire, the laureate of imperialism himself, Rudyard Kipling.Ki

The Voyage of Globalisation’s Forefather

In the Wake of Magellan

By Simon Leys

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 brought the entire expedition to a premature end.Secondly, Magellan died halfway throu

Making Sense of the Flores Find

Lovely Bones

By Ashley Hay

This something took three days to extricate. It was a skeleton, so tantalisingly conserved that some of its sections were still joined, and so fragile that it had the consistency of wet blotting paper. The researchers thought it was a pre-modern child; they to

The Charm of a Charm

By Ashley Hay

Early one May morning, on the edge of Brisbane's Mt Coo-tha, a hundred people gather in a car park. The air is sharp, the light clear, and there are probably birds muttering in the trees overhead. Most of the people here would notice this. They're aviculturist

Denton Corker Marshall’s Manchester Civil Justice Centre

Northern Light

By Deyan Sudjic

The idea that courtrooms should have distinctive architecture has been remarkably persistent in almost every culture since at least the days of George Edmund Street's Gothic court complex in London. It is a way to celebrate the state, as Mussolini's architects did in Mi

Mane Attraction

By Ashley Hay

Under the spreading shade of a gum tree at the Mogo Zoo, just down from Batemans Bay, a furry cluster of lion cubs is at play: batting at a red ball hanging from the tree, swiping at each other's tails, worrying at their father's mane. They have handsome noses

At the Track with Brian Mayfield-Smith

The Way of Horse

By Craig Sherborne

Racing people are the nicest people in the world, say the richer racing folk. They say that because they are winning. Losing will lose them those nice people, those fair-weather friends. Own a champion racehorse and you own friends for as long as that champion's winning

JM Coetzee’s ‘Diary of a Bad Year’

A Masochistic Scalpel

By Barry Hill

The Bali Nine and the future of the death penalty

Australian Exceptionalism

By Daniel Hoare

Since 1973, when the death penalty was abolished in Australia, the nation has taken a reasonably consistent international stance against capital punishment. In 1990 Australia signed a UN protocol that called upon all signatories to abolish the death penalty in

Daisy Bates & Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant

By Shane Maloney

They were new chums, fresh off the boat. Daisy May O'Dwyer was 20, the porcelain-skinned daughter of a drunkard doctor from Cashel. Edwin Henry Murrant, a year younger, was English and claimed to be the illegitimate son of an Admiral. For each, Australia was a blank sla

Out of Africa

By Gideon Haigh

In the 1960s, one of the catchcries of the anti-apartheid movement seeking the exile of South African athletes was "no normal sport in an abnormal society". So judgemental. Surely that should have been "differently abled" society. And hey, what's normal sport anyway? Curling. Zorbing. Cheese Rolling. You can't tell me those are normal.Similar thinking seems

'Nobel Lectures: From the Literature Laureates, 1986 to 2005'

By Chris Middendorp

25 Years of HIV & AIDS

The Margins of Our Attention

By Dennis Altman

Joe Boyd’s 'White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s'

The 5000 Spirits or The Layers of the Onion

By Robert Forster

Sam I Am

By David Salter

“OK, Salter. Now, tell me again why the hell I’m doing this.”Sam Chisholm, perfectly presented in black trousers, crisp white shirt and azure silk tie, had finally descended from the first floor of his splendid St Ives home. It was 9.15 am; I’d arrived with the

Bogin, Hopit

By Shane Maloney

In late May wild poppies are brilliant splashes of red on the hillsides of Crete, and fallen mulberries stain the roadsides of the villages. The first of the season’s tourists have already started to crowd the coastal resorts and toast themselves on the beaches. At a small park in Rethymnon, on an everyday Friday morning, a group of elderly Australian men with medals on their chests draw themsel