Gender

Do Mandatory Gender Quotas Work?

Status Quota

By Cordelia Fine

Despite more than 25 years of anti-discrimination legislation, it remains the case that the higher up any organisational ladder you look, the fewer women you see. In Australia, for example, women made up just 8.4% of board directors and 8% of executive managers in 2010. This persistent ‘vertical sex segregation’ has, in some quarters, led to demands that it is time to actively shake up th

Women in the Military

The Lady Killers

By Anne Summers

A few years later, that soldier asked the other three officers who had assisted her maiden fast-rope that day to be bridesmaids at her wedding. Lieutenant Toni Wilson, who’d been on the bridge, was overseas and unable to be there but Lieutenant Commander Natalee Johnson, the chopper pilot, and Lieutenant Karly Pidgeon, the observer, were able to join Major Matina Jewell in northern New Sout

The Dehumanising Effects of Smut

The Porn Ultimatum

By Cordelia Fine

Professor Sedgwick would, I think, be surprised – possibly unpleasantly – by the contemporary world. I can think of few more satisfying things to say to him than, “Ah, Professor Sedgwick. Let me introduce you to our prime minister, Julia Gillard.” With just pride, we could invite him to marvel at the wonders of the twenty-first century. Look! Professors of biology just like you, but with vaginas! Bu

'Caleb’s Crossing' By Geraldine Brooks

By Kirsten Tranter

Caleb’s Crossing extends Geraldine Brooks’s interest in the early history of the United States, first explored in her Pulitzer Prize–winning March, which is set during the Civil War. Here, she writes about the seventeenth-century Puritan settlements in colonial Cambridge and on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where she now lives. The story was inspi

Susanne Bier’s 'In a Better World' and Denis Villeneuve’s 'Incendies'

Triumph of the Kill

By Luke Davies

In Susanne Bier’s In a Better World (in national release on 21 April) – this year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film – there’s a character called Big Man, a warlord terrorising local villagers near a Sudanese refugee camp. Big Man amuses h

Cronulla Five Years On

Comment

By Malcolm Knox

One such line was drawn in the infamous early summer of 2005, when Sydney seemed to fracture into racial violence. From Cronulla to Lakemba, two self-declared tribes took it upon themselves to settle their differences by violent means. An alarmed city, and cou

Not My Type

By Anna Funder

I once saw, on a wall at the Stasi Law School in Potsdam, this dissertation topic: ‘On the Probable Causes of the Psychological Pathology of the Desire to Commit Border Infractions’. Or, in plainspeak: ‘Why People Want to Get Over the Wall.’ At the time the Stas

David Grossman's 'To the End of the Land'

The Politics of Prose

By Inga Clendinnen

The Israeli novelist David Grossman leapt to international attention in the late ’80s with the release of his See Under: Love, translated into several European languages. Now comes To the End of the Land (Jonathan Cape, 592pp; $55.00). I used to think review

The Minogue Sisters

Sister Act

By Peter Conrad

At the Royal Albert Hall in 1996, Kylie Minogue had an awe-inducing glimpse of the vacuum that she exists to fill. Nick Cave, after clubbing her to death in the video for ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, one of his Murder Ballads, had enticed her into appearing at the P

Sonya's Hartnett's 'Midnight Zoo'

Strange Beasts

By Geordie Williamson

Two boys enter a small town under cover of darkness, one of them carrying a baby in swaddling. It is Europe in wartime; even so, the village is more ruined than most, and wholly bereft of human presence. But when the children take refuge in a moonlit garden th

Julia Gillard

Comment

By Julia Baird

When Julia Gillard was sworn in as Australia’s first female prime minister, the greatest plaudits and most excited commentary came from those who leapt upon her difference. She wasn’t just a woman, which, frankly, would have been enough: she was a left-lea

Tony Judt’s 'Ill Fares the Land'

State of Tomorrow

By Robert Manne

Tony Judt, the historian of the French intelligentsia and postwar Europe, has been suffering a ferociously debilitating motor neurone disease. During this time he has composed for the New York Review of Books a beautiful memoir-in-fragments and a stoical, un-self-pityin

Gendercide

By Anne Manne

The boy’s twin also sits on mother’s lap, but this baby is tiny, its emaciated form one-third the size of the thriving boy. The infant’s face is shrunken, skin stretched over a skull with every facial bone visible. Its limbs are stick thin, ribs prominent over a distended belly. The mother does not embrace this baby, but holds her hand away on her hip.

Christopher Hitchens’ 'Hitch-22'

Swinger

By Dennis Altman

At one point in Hitch-22: A Memoir (Atlantic Books, 352pp; $35.00) Christopher Hitchens writes: “As 1968 began to ebb into 1969 … people began to intone the words: ‘The personal is political’. At the instant I heard this deadly expression I knew … that it was – cliché is arguably forgivable here – very bad news.” But what is the point of writing memoirs if the personal is irreleva

Germaine Greer and 'The Female Eunuch'

The Better Self?

By Louis Nowra

It’s 40 years since Greer published her first book, The Female Eunuch, and became famous. I first read the book when it came out in paperback. By that stage, I had already read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. I was brought up in a world of women and

Frederick Seidel's 'Ooga-Booga and Poems: 1959-2009'

Easy Rider

By Kate Jennings

For your consideration: “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare.” Now there’s a rip-snorting line of poetry if there ever was one. Frederick Seidel, who is not afraid to repeat himself, offers the line not once but three times in Ooga-Booga (Farr

Stieg Larsson's 'Millennium' Trilogy

Stockholm Syndrome

By Kirsten Tranter

It’s hard to escape Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo these days in bookshops: the eponymous heroine’s gorgeously rendered face glaresout from posters and book covers, from independents to Dymocks. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (Quercus, 60

In Retreat

By Malcolm Knox

Invited to speak at The Australian Club in Sydney a couple of years ago, I felt reticent about telling, say, my wife where I was going. After all, being caught inside this type of gentlemen’s club may carry more shame than being spotted in the ones with poles and mirrors. Even more shameful for me was that when I addressed the luncheon of about three dozen men – most, but not all, retired and