Globalisation

David Walsh and Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art

High Priest

By Amanda Lohrey

The Moorilla estate is set on a peninsula of sandstone cliffs that juts out into the Derwent estuary on Hobart’s northern fringe. Framed to the south-west by the looming grandeur of Mt Wellington and to the east by Mt Direction, the slopes of the peninsula are planted with grapevines, and a cluster of modern buildings perch atop the rise. It is here that the visionary project, the Museum of

Learning from America

Patriot Acts

By Waleed Aly

Hendi is the Muslim chaplain at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Despite the sober surrounds, he fizzes with energy and urgency. Certainly Hendi has his academic commitments - he teaches a class on inter-religious relations - but within him dwells the spirit of an activist. Which is why he's sending messages. And frankly, he has had a lot of them to send in recent years, for if there

Recent Books about the Future

Seers

By Bill Bowtell

Chris Patten, Jacques Attali and George Friedman are past masters of the politics of prediction. They are wily, skilful and powerful servants and shapers of state and international policy. They have stood at the very apex of power in their respective countries - Britain, France and the United States - and have influenced the course of events on behalf of the wider Western alliance as well. They are not, therefore, in any sense disintere

Built to Fail

Comment

By Satyajit Das

At the beginning of the global financial crisis, the destruction of storied financial institutions was an entertaining blood sport: there was a satisfying sense of schadenfreude as the Masters of the Universe received their comeuppance. But the crisis soon spread to the real economy - jobs, consumption, investment - and is now everybody's problem. In th

‘The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn: Colour Photographs from a Lost Age’ by David Okuefuna

By Alexandra Coghlan

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 mutin

The Australian Labor Party & the American Democrats

Getting Elected

By Michael Gawenda

When I arrived in Washington in November 2004, George W Bush had just been re-elected. The Republicans had held on to their majority in the Senate, and had actually picked up seats in the House of Representatives. If there was hubris in Canberra after the Coalition's el

Why we're still more English than American

British Rules

By Gideon Haigh

Writing ‘Ordinary People’s Politics’

The Contours of the Everyday

By Judith Brett

How John Howard has Changed Australia

Little America

By Robert Manne

The meaning of John Howard’s ten years as Prime Minister of Australia – how Australia has been changed, how the era will eventually be seen – can most easily be grasped if it is accepted that the period of his rule can be divided into two almost equal ha

Hip politics at the Sydney Museum of Contempory Art

John Howard in Toytown

By Justin Clemens

The last word on Mark Latham, the man everyone is hearing but no one is listening to

Biff goes Bang

By Robert Manne

Latham began to write his diary as a backbencher in 1994. His notes became interesting after he was given the shadow education portfolio by Paul Keating’s successor, Kim Beazley, following Labor’s landslide defeat of March 1996. Latham was at that time one of the pa

'The Grave at Thu Le' by Catherine Cole

A Sort of Homecoming. Familiar strands in an unfamiliar land

By Drusilla Modjeska

Still comfortable but relaxed no more in John Howard's Australia

So Happy We Could Scream

By John Birmingham

The feeling that it was a good town to leave was only confirmed when I returned a decade later to cover the freak show that the rest of the country knew as Pauline Hanson and One Nation. I can’t recall which magazine sent me up there, but I remember only too well picking up a copy of the local newspaper, The Queensland Times. Once a proud if occasionally eccentric journal, it had fallen on some

BookScan and the death of the Australian novelist

The ExFactor

By Malcolm Knox

Back when I was careless about what I wished for, someone asked a fanciful question, redolent of hope and innocence, about my up-coming first novel. “If you could choose, would you take critical approval or good sales?” If I could choose! That “if” wa