Censorship

Gough Whitlam at 95 Years

Comment

By Lindsay Tanner

Many books have been written about the political drama of the Whitlam years, particularly the government’s ultimate dismissal by Governor-General Sir John Kerr on 11 November 1975. Yet the actual content of the government’s initiatives also warrants serious analysis. There has been a great deal of subsequent commentary about specific issues, but few serious studies of the government itsel

Liu Xiaobo

A Nobel Affair

By Linda Jaivin

When I last checked, over 1 million readers had viewed this cryptic message. Among the more than 25,000 comments, the multiple effusions (“Love you!”) and myriad confusions (“Huh?”), was one that quoted from the first volume of Marx and Engels’ Collected Works: The government only listens to its own voice, and it knows it is only listening to its own voice, but it tricks itself

Gillian Armstrong’s 'Love, Lust & Lies' and Radu Mihaileanu’s 'The Concert'

The Music of Time

By Luke Davies

In 1975 Gillian Armstrong made the short film Smokes and Lollies, which followed the lives of three 14-year-old girls Armstrong had found hanging around an inner-city youth centre in Adelaide. The 25-minute documentary captures something of the universal bewilderment of adolescence, as well as its protagonists’ awkwardness and self-consciousness at being filmed. The girls are spontaneous and very rough-and-tumble, but the surprise in

John Waters

Divine Intervention

By Peter Conrad

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 of the prohibited books and films I intended to catch up with as soon as I got overseas. Nowadays c

Bill of Rights

Comment

By Geoffrey Robertson

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 altern

Only Itself to Blame: The Church of Scientology

By Malcolm Knox

The Surry Hills premises were Spartan and recently opened. Scientology’s central Sydney church, in Castlereagh St, is closed for the addition of two floors and a glass-fronted tower topped with the church’s radiant cross. The development application was ap

Judith Wright & Nugget Coombs

In the Garden

By Fiona Capp

When Coombs died he was farewelled with a state funeral. He had been an enormously influential figure in Australian political and cultural life since the 1940s, first as Director-General of Post-War Reconstruction and later as Governor of the Reserve Bank, adviser to su

Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre

Going Private

By Hazel Rowley

I loved writing Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2005). Never have I written a book with such white-heat intensity; never have I taken more pleasure in writing a book. The problems began when I finished it. The bo

Panic & Censor

By David Marr

I was putting on a bit of dog for the fresh envoy of a Great European Nation. This was deep in the Howard era, and we were drinking coffee in one of the sitting rooms the Sydney Morning Herald used to have for receiving notables. The new ambassador, a man of pugnacious

David Marr’s ‘The Henson Case’

Unsettled

By Sebastian Smee

Levelling with China

By Linda Jaivin

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 d

In the Age of Noise

Living

By Robyn Davidson

Opinions are antagonistic to wisdom, even when they're right, which they seldom are. People cling to their opinions until history proves those opinions catastrophically wrong, but isn't it amusing that even when their opinions have been proved wrong, time and time and t

The legal trade behind the manufacture of methamphetamines

Running Dogs

By Gail Bell

In my experience, most people needing sinus tablets take the identification requirement on the chin. It's an ID-dependent world now: you have to prove who you are at the video shop, the bank, the Medicare counter, and even at schools when you're the aunt collecting the child on the mother's behalf.Since drugs containing pseudoephedrine were rescheduled by th

25 Years of HIV & AIDS

The Margins of Our Attention

By Dennis Altman

Sex & power in the age of pornography

Love Me Tender?

By Anne Manne

Through an internet chat room, the girl agreed to meet two of the boys at the local shopping centre. There, she was surrounded, overpowered by up to 12 young men, and forced down to a nearby secluded riverbank. Her clothing was thrown in the mud; she was made