David Marr

November 2012

Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott

By Judith Brett

Correspondence to David Marr’s Quarterly Essay Political AnimalIn Political Animal, David Marr gives us two Abbotts: Politics Abbott and Values Abbott. The first is the man of driving ambition who competes hard for the prizes of political office; the second the man who is a self-conscious conservative, defender of the monarchy, the faith and the family, and motivated by his deep religious b

The pursuit of character over substance

Junk politics

By Mungo MacCallum

Does it really matter whether Tony Abbott, some 35 years ago, punched a wall on either side of the head of Barbara Ramjan? Well, yes, it must, because Tony Abbott himself has told us so. In any sane and rational world such hi-jinks, however sexist and offensive they may appear now, would be dismissed as the excesses of youth, to be forgiven and forgotten by all but the obsessed. But it was Ab

Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott

By David Marr

I am not asking the Australian people to take me on trust but on the record of a lifetime and an instinct to serve ingrained long before I became opposition leader: as a student president, trainee priest, Rhodes Scholar, surf life-saver and volunteer fire-fighter, as well as a member of parliament and as a minister in a government. —Tony Abbott, to the Federal Council of the Liberal Party, 30 June 2012 PRINCE HAL Austral

Manoly Lascaris and Patrick White’s ghost

No One Comes To See Me Now

By Debra Adelaide

Three days a week, in the winter of 1993, I would drive the children to day care and continue to 20 Martin Road, Centennial Park. The house was dark most of the time, with the trees surrounding it tall and dense. One morning I arrived to see a team of plumbers digging up the long front garden that sloped to the street. Roots from the enormous eucalypts had b

Meeting Neil Armfield

The Diary of a Maestro

By Jana Wendt

We are approximately an hour into Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure – first performed in 1604 – when a phone rings on stage. The appliance is lying on the bedside table of a starkly lit Novotel-like hotel room, glass-walled bathroom and toilet included.

December 2009 - January 2010 in brief

By kieronb

THE MONTHLY ESSAYS“Never before have I found myself so immersed in an art form that made me question just what it is to be Australian, prompting me to ask of these films – do they really reflect our culture? While watching practically every movie, I found

Forty-three Years at the ABC

Hidden Treasure

By Chris Masters

Despite that dismal episode, I still see the ABC as a national treasure. It can be snobbishly self-important and oafishly bureaucratic. There are a lot of cardigans in those corridors. Managers come and go with the barest understanding of broadcasting, the central purpo

David Marr’s ‘The Henson Case’

Unsettled

By Sebastian Smee

Following Menzies

By John Hirst

What should the Liberal Party do when Labor governments favour private enterprise, contracting out and selling off? Join in, of course. In August, Barry O'Farrell, the leader of the New South Wales Liberals, refused to join in when Morris Iemma's Labor government tried

2020 Hindsight

Comment

By Robert Manne

When my university offered to nominate me to attend the 2020 Summit, I accepted at once. Given that I had recently edited a book of ideas for a better Australia, it seemed churlish not to agree. But there was more to it than that. For the past decade the Right

The final chapter

Patrick White

By David Marr

We climbed down and after some hesitation found a spot where waves were washing through a rock pool. A couple of fishermen had lines in the surf not far off. One of the young friends wanted to read a love poem by Cavafy and said a few words about Manoly meetin

Reinvigorating the National Broadcaster

New Teeth for Aunty

By Robert Manne

This outline of my daily routine should at least make one thing clear: the ABC plays a very important part in my life. As it does for very many Australians. There is almost no institution in Australia that is more generally trusted, valued and loved than the ABC, as sur

Why We Need a Change of Government

Comment

By Robert Manne

In the October issue of the Australian Literary Review, Australia's most influential political journalist, Paul Kelly, published an article attacking Australia's intellectuals. Kelly sought to turn Donald Horne on his head. Horne had famously described Australia as a "lucky country run mainly by second-rate people". According to Kelly, the truth was rather d

What Happened to Community?

A Husk of Meaning

By Drusilla Modjeska

Thirty years ago or so, the word packed a punch. It's hard to imagine now. In London during the '70s, I fell in with a rather wonderful group of women who were working at community centres and community presses, and elbowing their way out of the strictures of our mothers' generation by living collectively. I was only there for a year, but I remember it, and the memory is both exhilarating and trou

Sydney's talkback titan and his mythical power

Who's for Breakfast, Mr Jones?

By David Salter

That tone. Nagging. Insistent. Unrelenting. Even on the brink of verbal derailment he keeps signalling to his audience: ‘What I’m telling you is urgent. These words are important. You need to know this.’It’s a voice that speaks to a dominant share of t

Waking Up with Mr Jones

By Kathy Marks

It is 7.17 a.m. in the Sydney studio of Channel Nine’s Today show, and Tracy Grimshaw and Karl Stefanovic are preparing to quiz a British scientist who uses pickled gherkins to explain the Big Bang theory. Later in the program, entertainment reporter Richard